State Park Trio – Dan Leeth

Sylvan Lake State Park

It’s mid-August and we’re off to explore a trio of Colorado State Park campgrounds. Our first stop will be Sylvan Lake State Park south of Eagle.

From Fruita, we shot down I-70 toward Eagle with our Nissan GPS navigator (Tighty) pointing out the route. After exiting the Interstate and circling through what seemed like an endless string of roundabouts, we finally got onto Brush Creek Road and headed south toward the Sylvan Lake State Park Visitors Center.

We stopped at the VC, checked in for our campsite and bought a couple of maps of the area. I had to tell my lovely wife “NO” to her buying anymore state park t-shirts. (Or maybe that’s what she said to me.)

Five miles farther down a graded dirt road, we arrived at our lakeside campground.

The Sylvan Lake Campground offers no hookups. We would need to fill our freshwater tank from spigots and charge our batteries with solar. We stopped near one at the day-use parking area and filled up with fresh spring water. At least that’s what the sign said it was.

Our campsite was a pull-through site with a picnic table and campfire ring, which could not be used because of fire restrictions. A small, camper services building with flush toilets and coin-op showers stood a short walk away.

The next morning, we strapped on daypacks and headed up the Sneve Gulch Trail, named for one of the early inhabitants of the area. The route involved a steady uphill grunt through the forest…

…with spots along the way providing stunning views of the 42-acre reservoir below.

Back in camp that afternoon, I got some shots of some of the local wildlife a few hundred yards from our trailer. We made sure we put everything away that night and kept the bear spray handy.

The next day, Dianne stayed in camp while I went to work, exploring and photographing the area for one of my upcoming Colorado Life Magazine camping columns. [Yes, this will be a tax-deductible trip.]

The Brush Creek Valley was homesteaded back in the 1800s, and a few of their old structures still grace the area.

I love old buildings and relish the opportunity to silently search out the stories they could tell.

The road beside the campground continues south, crossing over Crooked Creek Pass before dropping into the Ruedi Creek drainage.

Ahead towered peaks of the Saguache Range.

I thought about driving down into the valley below, but it was getting late so I just turned round and headed back to camp. After all, I had work to do.

I had taken around 450 shots, all of which needed to be keyworded. In olden days before the invention of digits, I could simply number the rolls of exposed film and with the help of scribbled notes, identify what each image depicted when I got home. Now, a victim of the 21st century, I would need to upload the digital shots to my laptop and with a glass of wine in hand, spend the evening identifying subjects and typing keyword/captions.

On our third full day in camp, we hiked the 1½ mile trail around Sylvan Lake where the only motors allowed on the water are battery-operated trolling motors.

Anglers fished from shore…

and from rafts in the water.

We watched folks kayak and SUP (Stand-Up Paddleboard) across the lake’s calm surface, including a pair of young girls, about the size of third-graders out paddling a kayak on their own.

Many folks had a dog (or two) onboard.

“We should bring our grandchildren out here!” I suggested to my lovely wife.

She reminded me that we don’t have any known grandchildren.

“Maybe we could rent some?” I offered.

Our time at Sylvan expiring, the next morning we hooked up the trailer, dumped wastewater at the park’s dump station and opened the fresh water drain plug. Leaving a thin trail of dampness along the pavement, we set off for the next of this trip’s three state park campgrounds.

Steamboat Lake State Park

It was a relatively easy drive from Sylvan Lake up to Steamboat Lake. When we arrived, we found a line of RVs at the dump station. Some may have been dumping, but most of us were there to fill our fresh water tanks. After filling ours, we proceeded to our pull-through campsite on the Wheeler Loop.

After setting up, we took a short stroll to check out the nearby campsite cabins.

We passed the camper services (shower house) building and continued on to the marina.

They rent pontoon boats here, some of which have propane grills on the back. It would be fun to rent a one for an on-the-water picnic, but at $600+ for half a day, it was a bit out of our price range. We need to come here with like-minded friends who would be willing to split the cost.

Monday was a lazy day around camp. On Tuesday, we drove out down Seedhouse Road for a hike to Three Island Lake in the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness Area. We had picked up a handout sheet listing 25 hikes in the area, and Three Island sounded like a good option. It would have been had we made it the entire distance. Instead, we petered out before actually reaching the lake. Maybe next time.

Dianne and I spent most of Wednesday making money. While she remained in camp working on her LifeVantage business, I drove around the park taking photographs for an upcoming Colorado Life camping column.

After circling the lake and shooting 400+ photos, I went back to camp, scooped up the wife and we headed into downtown Hahn’s Peak Village for a late lunch-early dinner at the Hahn’s Peak Cafe.

There, I enjoyed a couple of Jamaican Red Stripe brews with a delicious green chili burger.

From there, we went on to Steamboat Lake’s sister park, Pearl Lake State Park. They have yurts here…

…and a hillside campground of sites with neither hookups nor dump station.

Back at Steamboat Lake, we drove to Rainbow Ridge and shot photos of sunset clouds over the lake while listening to sandhill cranes whooping in the distance.

Thursday was chores day. Dianne did laundry at the park’s laundry facility while I filled up fresh water and got down Bob, our sewer wagon, to drain our gray- and black-water tanks.

Friday was go into town day. We drove into Steamboat Springs, had lunch at Del Mezcal Mexican restaurant downtown, bought a replacement folding chair for me at Wally’s Mart and stocked up on groceries at City Market. After topping up the tank with City Market gas, we headed back to camp.

Our big hike came on Saturday when we scaled Hahn’s Peak. It’s only a two-mile slog up from the trailhead parking lot, with the final third of a mile up 300 vertical-feet of loose talus.

State Park rangers told us that on April Fool’s Day a few years back, the local paper wrote that they had just opened a Starbucks atop this 10,839-foot peak. Baristas, they wrote, were lowered into work by helicopter. What we found up there was nothing but a retired forest fire lookout with nary a caramel macchiato to be seen.

That night, we topped up our wine glasses, sat outside the trailer and watched another glorious Colorado sunset. I was so inspired by the sight, I posted the following to one of our trailer camper sites group on Facebook:

The first thing we did when we bought our current trailer was to remove the built-in TV.

Rather than sitting inside watching the Kardashians, we sit outside, glass of wine in hand, and enjoy sights like this.

Needless to say, I got lots of negative responses to the posting. I guess trailer campers must really like the Kardashians.

Sunday was getaway day. We loaded up, hooked up and headed up to the dump station. There, a line of motorhomes and trailers waited for their turn at the one sewer drain that wasn’t stopped up. Having dumped on Thursday, our black and gray tanks weren’t that full. We decided we’d just carry it to our next campsite and dump there.

Goodbye Steamboat Lake. We’ll be back, maybe next time with our non-camping friends who can bunk in non-camping comfort at one of the cabins while we stay in the nearby campground.

State Forest State Park

From Steamboat Lake, we dragged the trailer down to Steamboat Springs, up over Bunny Ears Pass, down to Walden and across to State Forest State Park. To find our campground, which was not on our 2017 park map and absent from any roadside signs, we drove to the Moose Visitor Center. There we were given up-to-date maps showing the proper turnoff.

We’re in what is now called the North Park Campground. Until a few years ago, it was a commercial KOA Kampground. According to the lady at the Visitor Center, when the husband of the couple who owned it died, the wife decided to sell the property. Ultimately, the state bought it and turned it into a public campground.

The old A-frame KOA check-in building still stands in a vacant, somewhat dilapidated condition.

The old KOA cabins remain and are apparently still rented out by the park.

The bathhouse appears to be brand new and is beautiful.

We have a nice site with full hookups. It must have been a handicapped site at one time with a cement pad under the picnic table and a cement sidewalk leading to the bathhouse. It must not be considered handicapped now or I would have reserved something else.

I’m convinced that campgrounds are universally designed by folks who have never camped. Here, for example, our sewer connection is on the opposite side of the sidewalk from where the trailer is parked. Thus, our sewer line must cross the sidewalk. Since the sidewalk only leads to our picnic table, our backyard neighbor suggested we just back the trailer to the sidewalk and run our hose across.

Our first full day here, we drove around part of the park. Friends from Grand Junction were also camping somewhere out here. We had their campsite number but not the name of the campground they were in. They’re anglers, so we first looked for them up the road around North Michigan Reservoir. They were not there.

Next, we headed down the highway to the Ranger Lakes area, where they were parked. We camped in this campground 12 years ago with our old A-frame trailer – the fourth trip we ever made in that trailer.

Having had enough of this sitting around, we went out for a hike on Tuesday. I chose a six-mile loop trail that would lead from the Visitor Center to Ranger Lakes and back. The writeup promised this was prime moose country, and I wanted a photo of a moose for my Colorado Life feature. We kept looking out to meadows and marsh lands, but nary a moose appeared. Bullwinkle must be taking the day off.

The weather here has been overcast and rainy since we arrived. The skies graciously remained dry until we got to Ranger Lakes. When the sprinkles started, we knocked on our friends’ trailer door and sat inside. The rain stopped and we hit the trail again. Finding the second half of the loop proved to be a bit of a challenge, but we managed to find the correct path back. Still no Bullwinkle.

So far, the only moose we’ve spotted have been the stuffed moose inside the Visitor Center…

…a statue of a moose made of barbed wire outside the Visitor Center…

…and, of course, the trophy moose head we have mounted in our trailer.

Wednesday was to be photo day for my upcoming Colorado Life story. Unfortunately, the day dawned with battleship gray skies. No, today would be a sit in the trailer and read day. With only one tiny bar of Verizon cell coverage, we couldn’t even hit the internet for Facebook posts.

In the afternoon, we fought off boredom by getting in the truck and driving down the road, first to the Cameron Pass area. We followed that with a jaunt up toward North Michigan Reservoir to visit the yurt we bunked in on our first few trips to State Forest State Park.

It now has hard siding on the outside. It looked different back when the sides were fabric.

Our last day at State Forest dawned slightly more clear. Hoping to photograph an unstuffed moose, we drove up to the Crags off Cameron Pass.

Finding no moose along the highway there, we returned to the North Michigan Reservoir area where we discovered an Escape trailer parked in a really nice, get away from it all campsite at the north end of the pond.

Our park map showed a viewpoint called “Moose Overlook” up the road. Hoping it wasn’t a case of false advertising, we drove to it.

The map didn’t lie. This Moose Overlook was so named because it was built by a Moose Lodge from Fort Collins.

It began to look like the only moose we were going to see was a moooooose grazing beside the road.

Fortunately, my eagle-eyed wife did spot a pair of real moose foraging along a hillside a good quarter mile (or more) away. Even with my best telephoto lens, the animals were tiny brown spots in a big green landscape.

It was still better than this Canadian moose photo I took a few years ago in Newfoundland with the same lens.

(A better telephoto lens is now on order.)

Today was our 44th anniversary. Back in camp, Dianne grilled a fine bison steak dinner, which we enjoyed with a bottle of Bookcliff Vineyards’ best.

The next morning, we drained sewage, unhooked water and power…

…hooked up the trailer and hit the road for home…

…with, of course, a quick burrito stop along the way.