Prior to this trip, we took a day trip to search for places to camp. We were initially looking into camping at paid site but once we found the camping locations in the Pike's National Forest, we decided that that's the place for us. It's free to camp and had some great views. The only draw back was that it didn't have any restrooms so we were roughing it!!!
Here are some of the highlights of our first day. We took a lot of pictures so I'm dividing our trip share into two days of posts. Make sure you check out tomorrow's post for more from this trip.
One of the beauty of living in Colorado is being so close to the mountains. Before, it would take us four hours to drive to our favorite camping place in the Mojave desert but now, it only took us about one hour to get to our campsite location.
While exploring through the forest, Maddie spotted a couple of deers. I rushed to take a photo of the wildlife but the deer were still so far that even with my 200mm lens, he was still very far. This is the best we got.
After driving around to explore, we stopped by a creek to have lunch. What's on the menu? MRE's (meals ready to eat). Everyone got to choose which one they wanted and I got stuck with the vegetarian meal. It wasn't that bad!
Here's our view while eating our lunch by the creek. Marcus even found a fish floating in the water. It's really a neat place.
When we finally settled into our campsite, we pitched our tents and walked around to gather some wood for our fire tonight. The family were competing who got the most and best woods. Where we were located was a great spot because the area around our campsite were littered with sticks and branches all around the ground.
After our wood gathering activity, we got our hiking sticks, dressed up warm (it was a bit chilly with the wind blowing on us) and hiked around our area.
We didn't know where we were going, we were just following the trail and at the end of the trail, we found this really neat rock formation.
we hiked down a bit further towards the road and it's interesting how there's still snow on the ground even when it's already late March.
here's the kiddos enjoying our hike. :)
While going up back on the trail, I mentioned how cute those little pine trees are and Maddie said...why don't you take a picture of it? So I took the photo with her. :)
On the way up, I found this broken branch to hang up my camera and set it for a 10 second timer and posed to get a family pic.
Once we got back, our family scout master taught our cubscout how to start a fire.
Here are the family roasting some marshmallows. Who can resist some smores?!
Here are the kids excited to "sleep on the ground". It was very cold tonight, hence Maddie wearing her thick jacket. I had forgotten that each sleeping bag has a different temperature they can go down to and the kids' bags can only go down to 42 degrees so Mitch brought two old fashioned bags that we sandwiched their sleeping bag in between.
After settling inside our tent, we played a round of the card game Pictureka. I won the round. :)
We will learn that tonight would be a tough one with the cold and hard ground. It was a bit miserable but we are "tough" and we survived the night!
Check back tomorrow for more. :)
Till next time,
Grace
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