Day 10 – Driving and Rocky Mountain National Park

After we left Salt Lake City, we drove to Junction City on Highway 80 and spent the night at Wal-Mart.  It was a little town next to Park City and was really cute.  We then headed toward home, taking Highway 40 toward Colorado. The road was one of the scenic highways, much like all the others we had been on.  ;)

   

We sure did this a lot, filling up with gas.  Most of the time we had to do 2 fill ups, because the pumps would stop at $100. 

Here are all the bugs that were on the front of the camper from our trip to Antelope Island.  They were a mess!    

We stopped at Dinosaur National Monument, there is one park on the Utah side and one on the Colorado side.  We stopped at both of them.  The only dinosaur bones were on the Utah side in a quarry, but they had the quarry closed, so we didn’t get to see anything.

These petroglyphics were on the walls of a rock in the park.  We told Kasey these were aliens. 

 

There was a lot of flooding in the area.

This is Steamboat Springs.

We then drove through Rabbit Ears Pass.  There was a lot of snow on the ground.

This is the rabbit ears, up on the top of the mountain.  Sorry the picture isn’t very good.

The other side of the pass was really pretty, the grass was green, no snow, lots of water.

This is Grand Lake in Colorado.

We headed into Rocky Mountain National Park, I really didn’t want to go, I figured it was going to be like all the other National Parks we had been to, more of the same, lots of mountains.  But it was quite an adventure, we saw probably 6 moose including a mother and baby.  We saw lots of elk.  But the big thing was heading up toward the top of the peak, it started snowing, there was tons of snow all over.  It really snowed hard, the roads weren’t really slick, but they were narrow with really steep hills on the sides.  We weren’t really sure we were going to make it out of there.  The high point was 12,000 feet high.  We crossed the continental divide.  As we were leaving the park, the park ranger was closing the road going up to the mountain.  I’ll have to look up how much snow they ended up getting.

To say the least, it was quite an adventure, we started in about 6:30 and made it out by 9:00.  It was a pretty fun adventure, after we got through it! 

 

These pictures didn’t really turn out well, but notice all the snow on the windshield! 

After we left the park, we went to Estes Park to spend the night, couldn’t find a campground or a Wal-mart, so we spent the night at the local hospital parking lot.  No one bothered us. 

I had a great time on vacation but will be really happy to get home.  I got to see a lot of things, not sure what I liked the best.  The drive through Rocky Mountain was pretty cool and Salt Lake City was neat.