UP UP and UP

July 12 2021 Elevation 6790

We moved all of 33 miles today, we couldn’t check in until after 1:00 so we just hung out and read until about 12:30 before we got ready to move.

I’m not sure how we managed it and I’m not complaining. When we called to make reservations, for 3 nights,  we were told we would need to move spots from a water and electric only to a full hookup site, because moving in the middle of the day would interfere with sightseeing, we asked if we could stay an extra night. We got here and something changed, again I’m not complaining, we’re in a full hookup spot and directly out the door, if you could see it, it’s hazy, is Pikes Peak in the distance.

It’s warm and hazy so we probably won’t spend a lot time sitting in the attrondak chairs watching the mountains but that’s an option.

July 13 2921

Mary was ready to go before I even finished my COFFEE, I had to take it with me, so around 6:15AM we took off. Pikes Peak was first on the agenda, they open the park at 7:30. We knew there was still construction left over from last year at the summit. An internet search said the shuttle wouldn’t be running, so we could drive to the summit today, we already knew parking would be very limited.  We wanted to get there early so we could get a place to park at the top………. The internet lied, shuttles were running, we could only drive to mile marker 16 where we had to park and take the last few miles by bus. The driver said that yesterday morning the bighorn sheep were out today the only thing we saw was a marmot from the jeep. We didn’t make any real stops up or down, there was to much smoke/haze in the air to see anything very clearly and the pictures had even less detail.

It was cool to cold and windy on the top and like I said you couldn’t see much so we didn’t hang out to long, they also requested that you limit your stay to around 30 minutes. As early as we were it was not crowded we were on the first shuttle with 6-8 people on the bus, the shuttles are school buses.

The drive up was pretty steep a lot of the time the road was NARROW with no guard rails, it didn’t bother me any especially the bus ride with the drivers talking away, watching the mirrors and not paying any attention to the road.

Since we didn’t have any breakfast we had an early lunch on about halfway off the mountain.

They had signs out about Bigfoot, we kept our eyes pealed for him but didn’t see hide nor hair of him or another creatures.

More below

Then we went to Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument and the Hornbek House Homestead. With a storm rolling in we didn’t hangout to long, Apparently there are a lot of fossils around but what they had on display were large Petrified Redwood trees. The metal bands around the stumps, you may or may not see in the pictures, are probably because of the way they were excavated back in the 20’s they used dynamite, probably not a good idea to use that on fragile fossils.

The walk around the Petrified tree stumps was about a mile.

On the drive home we stopped, a couple of times, to let a hail storm pass, while most of the hail was not very big it was hard and bounced and piled up in spots.

The end