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Monday: Golden Gate Canyon State Park
Jul. 13th, 2023 10:07 pmSo one of the cool things that Colorado has done is roll out an option during vehicle registration that allows you to pay an extra fee that purchases you a Colorado State Parks pass. It's less expensive than the regular annual pass, and you just show your registration when you enter the park. (My mom was kind enough to pay the fee for us as a gift, which was very sweet of her.)
We had to pick up our vehicle registration from her anyway, so on Sunday evening we stopped by... and decided to IMMEDIATELY put the pass to use on Monday, ha.
Our first park excursion was to Golden Gate Canyon State Park, which is a park we had not been to yet. It's up in the mountains, overlooks part of the Continental Divide, and sounded quite pretty.
We... maybe should have picked a slightly easier one to start with, ha. None of the trails within the park are rated lower than "moderate", which is typically within my tolerance level, but I am woefully out of shape. Still! It was a good time. We brought Bella along (though a real hike is beyond Cy's ability any more.) Bella did great!
When we came into the park, we went to the visitor center to check in. There's not always any super exciting info, but I always like to check in if I can and find out if there've been any interesting animal sightings or if there's trail info we should have, or things like that.
Nothing major this time, though there'd been a moose sighting the night before. (Though no mooses for us.)
A view of the continental divide. :)
A really beautiful columbine. Our state flower!
( More below the cut: )
And then when we got home, Bella wanted to sniff a crumpled up leaf on the ground out in front of the building. Alex was pulling her away so she wouldn't eat it when...
That's no leaf! It's a really neat sphinx moth!
I don't know why the poor thing was in the very middle of the sidewalk! It looked pretty "fresh", so hopefully it was just waiting to dry so it could fly off. I moved it to the planter as a hopefully safer spot.
We had to pick up our vehicle registration from her anyway, so on Sunday evening we stopped by... and decided to IMMEDIATELY put the pass to use on Monday, ha.
Our first park excursion was to Golden Gate Canyon State Park, which is a park we had not been to yet. It's up in the mountains, overlooks part of the Continental Divide, and sounded quite pretty.
We... maybe should have picked a slightly easier one to start with, ha. None of the trails within the park are rated lower than "moderate", which is typically within my tolerance level, but I am woefully out of shape. Still! It was a good time. We brought Bella along (though a real hike is beyond Cy's ability any more.) Bella did great!
When we came into the park, we went to the visitor center to check in. There's not always any super exciting info, but I always like to check in if I can and find out if there've been any interesting animal sightings or if there's trail info we should have, or things like that.
Nothing major this time, though there'd been a moose sighting the night before. (Though no mooses for us.)
A view of the continental divide. :)
A really beautiful columbine. Our state flower!
( More below the cut: )
And then when we got home, Bella wanted to sniff a crumpled up leaf on the ground out in front of the building. Alex was pulling her away so she wouldn't eat it when...
That's no leaf! It's a really neat sphinx moth!
I don't know why the poor thing was in the very middle of the sidewalk! It looked pretty "fresh", so hopefully it was just waiting to dry so it could fly off. I moved it to the planter as a hopefully safer spot.
