Short Hikes at Colorado National Monument
Colorado Travelog #10
Colorado National Monument, CO - Sunday, 3 Jul 2022, 3:30pm
We're visiting Colorado National Monument this afternoon. It's a relatively compact park, and it's possible to see most of the highlights from the main road that runs about 25 miles through the park. We're not ones to simply car-tour a park, though. We've hopped out to hike several times!
That said, just car touring is nice... because even the road is amazing. The photo above shows a bird's eye view of the road climbing up through a canyon at the north entrance. And this was our fourth hop-out stop to walk a bit and take pictures.
Next we stopped at the Visitors Center. Even though we'd chosen and mapped out a few easy-to-moderate trails to hike (two or three at 1/2 mile to 1 mile each, and one at about 2 miles) in advance we always like stopping by the Visitors Center to check conditions, grab a printed map and any printed trail descriptions they have, and... shop. We call it "liberating birds". If they have any hawk toys we don't already own a copy of (or have already chosen not to buy) we buy one. This time, as is usually the case, there were no compelling stuffed hawks we don't already own. But there was a sheep. A bighorn ram. And not a stuffed sheep- actually, there were a bunch of stuffed sheep, but of two models we already own examples of- but a Lego sheep.
We decided, "Enh, we don't need a Lego bighorn ram."
I think we're going to regret that when we never see it again.
Anyway, back to hiking....
There's plenty for low-effort tourists to see here. But with even a little effort put into hiking there's so much more.
There were so many fun places to hop out and hike a short distance to see amazing views. We ended up going off our original plan with more stops and more hikes than anticipated. But hey, no problem; we can call an audible on this one easily. We'll put off the longer, moderately strenuous hike until tomorrow morning. We planned a bit of flexibility in our schedule exactly for situations such as this.
Colorado National Monument, CO - Sunday, 3 Jul 2022, 3:30pm
We're visiting Colorado National Monument this afternoon. It's a relatively compact park, and it's possible to see most of the highlights from the main road that runs about 25 miles through the park. We're not ones to simply car-tour a park, though. We've hopped out to hike several times!
That said, just car touring is nice... because even the road is amazing. The photo above shows a bird's eye view of the road climbing up through a canyon at the north entrance. And this was our fourth hop-out stop to walk a bit and take pictures.
Next we stopped at the Visitors Center. Even though we'd chosen and mapped out a few easy-to-moderate trails to hike (two or three at 1/2 mile to 1 mile each, and one at about 2 miles) in advance we always like stopping by the Visitors Center to check conditions, grab a printed map and any printed trail descriptions they have, and... shop. We call it "liberating birds". If they have any hawk toys we don't already own a copy of (or have already chosen not to buy) we buy one. This time, as is usually the case, there were no compelling stuffed hawks we don't already own. But there was a sheep. A bighorn ram. And not a stuffed sheep- actually, there were a bunch of stuffed sheep, but of two models we already own examples of- but a Lego sheep.
We decided, "Enh, we don't need a Lego bighorn ram."
I think we're going to regret that when we never see it again.
Anyway, back to hiking....
There's plenty for low-effort tourists to see here. But with even a little effort put into hiking there's so much more.
There were so many fun places to hop out and hike a short distance to see amazing views. We ended up going off our original plan with more stops and more hikes than anticipated. But hey, no problem; we can call an audible on this one easily. We'll put off the longer, moderately strenuous hike until tomorrow morning. We planned a bit of flexibility in our schedule exactly for situations such as this.