Our big adventure this summer was our trip to Rocky Mountain National Park with our kids ages six and four! We stayed in Granby, Colorado for six full days of hiking. (Fancy hand drawn map of our hikes below.)
It was nearly a two week road trip from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Granby, Colorado. We drove from Milwaukee to Kansas City the first day, and Kansas City to Denver the second day, and from Denver to Granby the afternoon of the third day. We were able to stay overnight with college friends for the whole road trip. Our first night in Kansas City we stayed at our friends’ house while they were traveling, but we were able to spend a few days with them on our return trip when they came back from California. We really loved our time in Denver, although we were too busy talking and eating the most amazing dinner our friends’ cooked us to take pictures. On the third day, we spent the morning at the Denver Botanical Gardens with friends and then we stocked up at Costco and Wholefoods and Trader Joes in Denver and drove into the mountains to the west side of the park to a town called Granby just outside the park.
We stayed at the WorldMark Granby, a timeshare that my parents are a part of–it had a kitchen and two bedrooms and two bathrooms, and was easily bigger than our actual (very small one bath) house. Honestly, having two bathrooms was the height of luxury. This was our morning view:
Hike on Day One: Adams Falls
Our first day we did a gentle and beautiful hike to Adams Falls. We weren’t sure how everyone was going to do with the altitude, so we wanted to ease in. Fortunately no one seemed to have much altitude sickness.
On the way in, we saw some mule deer crossing the road and a fox in the parking lot. (Neither of which I have pictures of. We did get to see some wildlife on the trip, but I pretty much only got some blurry pictures of a squirrel eating a pinecone seed and some moths and butterflies.)
In general, we saw most of our wildlife on the drive to the hikes and the first hour of the hike since we tended to get started hiking around 8:00. We are naturally early risers, but also timed entrance passes started at 9, so that was good motivation to get out and get into the park early to avoid that step. (We bought our $35 weeklong pass online before we came.)
About 20 minutes into the hike we came to the beautiful waterfall.
The guide books emphasized how the rocks near the falls can be wet and dangerous, so we didn’t get too close. But it was a pretty spectacular way to start our trip. Also, there were so many wildflowers along the trail. I was totally charmed by the wild mountain roses.
We hiked a few miles past the falls to the beautiful overlook, where people sometimes see moose. We didn’t see a moose until the very end of our trip, but it was still a beautiful view.
A few minutes after we left the falls, someone on the trail ahead of us did say that a bear had just walked into the woods to our left! But we didn’t see any bears the whole time, a slight disappointment to the kids and not one to the parents.
And some passing hikers offered to take our picture as we rested at the overlook. It’s our only non-selfie family picture; I’m so glad that they offered. Lily obviously was not as pleased about it as the rest of us.
We were back at the hotel in time for lunch. And the kids enjoyed the game room with Evan learning how to play foosball and ping pong and pool (minus the pool sticks). The kids napped. Jackson had gotten a cold the last day of our drive out so he needed extra rest, and after the trip Lily dropped her afternoon nap. So we enjoyed the peaceful hour of children sleeping and drank ice coffee and ate Trader Joes chocolates.
Hike on Day Two: Lulu City
The next day we nearly hiked the whole way to the ruins of the old mining town Lulu City from the Colorado River Trailhead.
We intended to just walk about half way there, but it turns out that the landmarks and our ability to gauge mileage was lacking and we just kept on walking.
We probably would have gotten all the way there if the bugs hadn’t gotten bad as we were trying to get the map out at the end. But since that was pretty much the one and only time there were bugs on the whole trip (something I still cannot believe, but dry mountain air!) it wasn’t too bad.
The hike to Lulu City followed the beginnings of the Colorado River, and had a totally different feel from the waterfall hike the day before. We were mostly in a valley the whole time. Jackson said he thought this was his favorite hike.
Before the trip Evan found an early reader for Jackson to read about Rocky Mountain National Park (Rocky Mountain National Park: Peril on Longs Peak by Mike Graf) and then we had a bit of family book club reading it.
The main take away from the book was: afternoon thunderstorms! And it was really true for our trip as well. The morning would be nearly cloudless and by the time we got back to our car between 11 and 12, the clouds were forming. Some days that just meant great pictures, some days it meant we got rained on a bit, and some days it meant we were completely enveloped in clouds, like for our next day’s hike.
The next day we went for a completely different experience: walking the ridgeline at the very top of a mountain.
Hike on Day Three: Ute Trail Crossing
The Timberline Pass: Ute Trail Crossing was our highest hike at over 11,500 feet. We drove into the park and took Highway 43, Trail Ridge Road, up. (It goes all the way to 12,183 feet above sea level and is the highest continuously paved road in North America.) Just the drive is incredible (and a little intense, I wish I could have been munching on some ginger because it gave me a touch of car sickness.) There are some great overlooks, and chances to get out of the car and take in the various mountain ranges. (Below Evan and the kids are looking at the Never Summer Mountains.)
For when we weren’t at an overlook with helpful signs to tell us what mountain we were looking at, we got an inexpensive app called “Peak Finder” that helped us identify peaks. It was fun and a lot easier to use than a paper map, although to actually find great hikes for our family we enjoyed using the book Best Easy Day Hikes Rocky Mountain National Park by Kent Dannen.
The Ute Trail Crossing is a trail that has been in use for hundreds of years as a mountain pass for the Arapaho and Ute Indians on their way between winter and summer hunting grounds on the Great Plains, and a sign near the beginning of the hike said it was also sometimes called the Child’s Trail, because that’s the way the children would come as well. In some ways, it is not a difficult trail, but in others (the high altitude, the rocky path, and the unpredictable mountain weather) it was one of our more challenging hikes.
We did keep this hike short and turned around before going two miles, but between the time to drive up there and the slowness of picking our way through the trail, by the time we turned around and were going back to the car, it was late enough that we were completely enveloped in clouds.
The clouds would just roll on in; it was crazy.
At first only for a minute, and then for longer and longer we’d be in fog, and then the clouds would clear and there would be an amazing new view.
The mountains and the valleys from this hike were definitely the most amazing. But ironically, the teen- tiny tundra flowers were amazing as well. The trail is beyond the tree line, so nothing big can grow there. Only small plants can get enough warmth and sunlight to survive. But there are a remarkable number of flowers. Also, I definitely felt the altitude even just squatting down to take a picture of a flower and then standing up again. I’d get pretty light-headed for a couple seconds.
But it’s pretty wild to go from looking at teeny tiny flowers one second to huge majestic mountains and valleys the next.
We packed a lunch, but there wasn’t really a spot to eat it up high, especially with the storms. So we drove down the mountain and stopped to have a picnic near Lake Irene. It started raining when we got there, so we just opened up the back of our car and sat in the back of our Yukon Denali and had a picnic out of the rain. It cleared up almost immediately after we started eating so we could go down to see Lake Irene. On the way to the lake, some middle schoolers were playing in a very small dirty pile of snow, and Lake Irene, while lovely and peaceful, was smaller than some unnamed ponds I’ve seen in Wisconsin. We were a little underwhelmed by dirty snow and the pond; not everything at Rocky Mountain National Park is oversized.
Hike on Day Four: Cascade Falls
The next day, for our 4th hike, we went to see another waterfall. Although unlike Adams Falls, Cascade Falls was much further, 3.5 miles in from the parking lot along the North Inlet Trail. And what we didn’t know until we got there was that almost all of that was going to be through a burned out forest.
The North Inlet Trail to Cascade Falls was affected by the duel forest fires, the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome Fires, which were some of the state’s largest recorded forest fires in the Fall of 2020. A year and half later the wild flowers are back, vivid in the contrast to the charred trunks of the pines that stand above them.
It was a quiet walk. We saw very few people on the way in, and had a fairly unhampered view of the rocky formations that normally trees obscure.
The dirt was a darker and a finer powder here from all the ash. The kids loved kicking it up and it left their legs and socks filthy.
We did see a yellow bellied marmot (it was very noisy as we approached its rocky home) and some mule deer.
I had the lyrics from the 2010 Page CXVI song running through my head for much of the walk “I was a burned out forest, and no one could do anything for me.” Although of course when we actually got to the Falls, which was this thin strip of a green oasis, the rest of the song seemed especially true “But you put food in my body, water in my dry bed, and to my blackened branches, you brought the spring-time green of new life.”
It was such a welcome green!
And we saw our first blue Columbine flower. They are showy and amazing. I loved them.
We had a snack and took a bunch of pictures by the falls.
There were parts of the hikes, especially the skinny pine trees, boulders, and water, that reminded me a lot of growing up going to Ontario, Canada.
Everyone was happy to be there.
Then we missed the loop back to the main trail and instead went on along the river for another 20 minutes or so before we decided to turn around. Everyone’s spirits were still high, but we knew that a 4 year old doing an 8 mile hike was going to be tough.
I carried her for maybe two minutes, but the rest of the way home we told stories. First, I told them the story from our recent read aloud The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander.
And then Evan told the kids the story of the The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. I think that is one of my favorite memories of the trip. Walking with the kids back to the car through the burned out forest, the sky getting ominously dark, Evan retelling The Hobbit to the kids.
Lily actually did really great on the hike, and was happy in the car ride home eating snacks. (We kept big costco containers of pistachios and dried mango in the car.) But she had a complete and utter melt down before lunch with a really intense tantrum back at the hotel when we tried to wash off the ashy dirt. So I would not recommend taking a four year old on an 8 mile hike. It’s too much; you’ll pay for it one way or another.
Hike on Day Five: Coyote Valley & Continental Divide Trail
The next day we took it easy and went on two smaller hikes. The first was along the Coyote Valley so we could be close to the ranger station when it was open and the kids could get their “passport” stamp.
It was the chilliest it had been that morning. For the whole trip, we pretty much all lived in the same outfit: minimalist shoes, socks, baseball hat, khaki pants (athletic leggings for me), a T shirt, and a button up flannel shirt (a long sweater with pockets for me). Fortunately we had a washing machine in our timeshare. The drive to and from Rocky Mountain National Park was very hot, and we wore shorts and t-shirts for that. The morning of the cool hike, we wore fleeces for about 20 minutes, and probably could have managed fine without them.
As we were walking along one of the widest and flattest little trails (it’s one of the only handicap accessible ones), people coming toward us asked if we had seen the moose across the meadow.
We hadn’t. It was just a dark speck moving across the very edge of the far tree line. We pointed it out to the kids, and Lily saw where we were pointing, but Jackson didn’t. He started crying, because his one deep desire for the trip had been to see the moose. We start digging through the back pack to get the binoculars out, trying to calm him down. But by the time the binoculars were out, the moose was gone, and Jackson was a puddle: everyone else got to see the moooooooose!
Honestly, the rest of the hike was then the kids fighting over the binoculars and Jackson dwelling on the unfairness of everyone else getting to see the moose. It was a pretty short-lived hike. So we did a reset with a snack and trip to the The Kawuneeche Visitor Center. We bought some magnets and a little set of mountain animal figures for the kids to play with. (There was a moose in there!)
On the way back, we stopped for a second small hike outside the park near Lake Grand and the Continental Divide Trail. The warning about mountain lions made me kind of jumpy (Evan told me he had seen that same warning the day before. I do better if I’m not thinking about the possibility of bears and moutain lions.)
But the trail was fun and the kids had revived.
Lake Grand really does live up to it’s name. It’s very big and impressive.
We saw more columbines! They are just so big and beautiful.
Hike on Day Six: Monarch Loop Trail
The last day of hiking we went outside of the park to the Monarch Loop Trail. It’s part of the Arapaho National Recreation Area (ANRA) and is a section of National Forest on the Sulphur Ranger District and had a $5 One-Day pass that we bought on the way into the park. It was fairly close to our hotel as the crow flies, but driving around the mountains and on the unpaved roads took a while. It was a pretty drive though.
But about five minutes before we got to the parking lot, our prayers for our sad little boy were answered. We saw a moose! At first, I thought it was a horse crossing the road ahead of us. I yelled out “a moose” but of course it was already off the road into the righthand side of the forest. But we pulled up to where it went in and stopped. Jackson was on the right side of the car, and he got to see the moose! I tried to take pictures of it, but it’s hard to tell that the shadow is a moose.
When we first got to the lake it was really calm and the reflection of the mountains was so beautiful.
Jackson and Lily are still game for hugging pictures. I know that’s not going to last forever, so I am enjoying every sweet photo.
(I think they get along pretty well, most of the time…although not all the time, by any means.)
This trail had a place to sign in and a somewhat confusing notice about a bridge being fixed (and then a hand written note that it was out again). So after we signed in (and of course used the pit toilets) we decided to try the loop anyway, even if we only had to get to the bridge and turn around.
The path was wooded and had lots of little streams (a few not so little streams) coming into the lake.
It seemed if we stopped for long the bugs would find us.
We did see an old, rusty iron engine that was used to do some sort of pumping.
The kids were fascinated by it, and had many more questions about it than we had answers.
It turned out that the bridge was and was not out. Or more the bridge itself was fine, it’s just that it stopped about 200 yards before the end of the water. Maybe the water pattern had changed recently.
There were logs to scramble over, and no one got very wet. Later, Lily declared that crossing the logs was her favorite part.
At about the half-way mark, we crossed the semi-out bridge and then spent the rest of the time describing to people who were coming up on the trail from the opposite side of the loop than we started about the bridge.
Guide books are great, but you can’t beat someone’s experience who was there 30 minutes ago, and people along the trails, especially the less popular ones, are usually happy to describe what you are about to go through.
Now that we are a few months out from the trip, it seems even more special than it did while we were there. On the way home we stayed in Kansas City for four days and saw three sets of college and DC friends and their children, went to a petting zoo, an art museum, and an arboretum. (We took very few pictures because we were too busy talking!)
Looking back, all the packing and cooking and driving seems completely worth it for the memories of mountains and all the amazing conversations we had along the way. We’re hoping that this was the first summer of “bigger” kids and bigger National Park adventures!
Below is a list of the gear we brought and a few more pictures!
If you are interested in planning your own trip with kids, here are the names of the hikes again: #1. Adams Falls // #2 Colorado River Trail to Lulu City // #3 Ute Trail Crossing // #4 North Inlet Trail to Cascade Falls // # 5 Coyote Valley, The Kawuneeche Visitor Center, & Continental Divide Trail // #6 Monarch Loop Trail. We found nearly all of them in Best Easy Day Hikes Rocky Mountain National Park by Kent Dannen. The app for identifying mountain peaks is called “Peak Finder“)
We traveled pretty light. Here’s the basic gear brought:
Backpack: Maelstrom Hiking Backpack, Camping Backpack, 40L. Evan was the only person to carry a backpack. I had just a tiny purse with my phone and keys and my big camera. If our kids were bigger, they would probably carry their own backpacks with water and snacks. But since our kids were little it was nice to just be able to grab their water bottles from exterior pockets without having to stop and get them out of backpacks. It saved a lot of time. Evan also could drink without taking his pack off. He used a camelback like hydration reservoir (KUREIDA Hydration Bladder 2 Liter) that was held in place in the backpack with a velcro strap internally and with a long flexible straw and bit valve that came out of a special opening on the side of the backpack.)
Water bottles: Hydro Flask Kids 12oz Wide Mouth Straw Lid and Boot & Nalgene Wide Mouth Water Bottle (Pro Tip: We have a very fancy water filter system at home, which has spoiled me. For vacation, Evan suggested that we packed a Britta water filter and a new filter. It made the hotel water taste a lot better, and I told him at least a dozen times that it was a really smart thing to do.)
Skin Care: CETAPHIL Daily Facial Moisturizer SPF 15, Buzz Away DEET-free Insect Repellent, First Aid Kit, Trader Joe’s Organic Virtuoso Spearmint Lip Balm SPF 15, After Bite Treatment-Kids, Hydrocortisone Cream 1% w/ Aloe. (Sunscreen is probably the most important thing because it’s easier to get burned up high. We hiked early, wore hats, sunglasses, and long sleeves and put our sunscreen on around 9:45. We do well with the ease of a chemical spf 15, but other people might want a stronger mineral SPF option. And again we didn’t really have any issues with bugs!)
Trail Snacks: Lara Bars. The kids loved the chocolate ones which can get a bit melty and messy; we often go with blueberry which is good and less of a mess. We had snacks in the car to eat on the 20 to 45 minute home drive, which allowed us to need to carry fewer snacks. We also had some reusable snack bags in the backpack with basic trail mix (cashews and raisins). We eat a big enough breakfast that no one really needs a snack, but our kids love a snack and it was a great motivator to get to a certain point and then have a snack.
Below are a few more pictures from our trip.
Have you been to Rocky Mountain National Park? Have you begun National Park adventures with children? What were some amazing hikes you did?
I’ve hiked to Lulu City! When I was in high school, my family stayed at a cabin to celebrate my grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary. Lulu was one of our adventures.
Now I wished that we had made it all the way! One of the kids’ grandma’s Grandma-Name is Lulu, so they were so excited to tell her that they made it to her city!