Leadville Road Trip: Day 1 through 3
I sit writing this blog post on a rock, overlooking a fast flowing, glacier run-off river. Adam and I traveled to Colorado over a three day road trip. On Saturday we “race” (in my case attempt to complete) the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Trail Race. For the moment, though, we are on vacation, and it’s pretty glorious.
Leadville Bound
The drive here was long, we drove nine hours on Friday from Syracuse, New York to Michigan City, Indiana then spent the night at a small campground (really a field). This was the least interesting drive for us, we’ve done it before and will need to do it again soon. That said this campground was quaint, and incredibly relaxed (“camp where you want”). It was the ideal point to break our journey and spent the night before moving closer to our intended destination, Colorado.
Night 1: Indiana
On Saturday morning we packed up, admittedly later than planned (story of our life) and traveled across the rural America to Grand Island, Nebraska. I’ll admit that when I planned this trip, I picked this very small town only because of the name (Grand Island, NY is the home of my US based people). Anyway that was something, so incredibly flat and miles and miles of corn fields. The campground was about a minute off the main road that we were traversing to Colorado so I imagine people only ever use it as a place to break their journey. There is nothing else there.
Quick evening ride in Nebraska
On Sunday morning we set off (late again, but it’s vacation and I banned alarms). This time heading to Rocky Mountain State Park. My hope was that this drive would be a little more visually stimulating and for the last hour of the 7 hour drive, it certainly was. The Rocky Mountains in Colorado are utterly breathtaking, and I’ve seen some badass mountain ranges. The sheer rock faces, with pine trees clutching onto any ledge they can find is an amazing sight. The elevation changes quick, as we approached the feet of the Rockies our altimeter read 4000 ft, within 40 miles it read 8500ft. Our campground is close to the town of Estes Lake and is lovely. Before we’d pitched our tent a deer had made its way over to our site and was eating grass and casually watching us work. We stay here for three nights before moving onto Leadville and I hope to be able to soak up as much of this beautiful part of the world as possible.
Camp at Estes Park, Colorado