White River National Forest, Deer Creek Rd #5
With beautiful cooler weather across Colorado this week we heard adventure calling!!! This time we brought a couple friends and some fresh gear to review! So bright an early on Saturday morning, sleep still in my dogs eyes we loaded up the car and set out for Deer Creek. The short trip took us over Loveland Pass, a high mountain pass at an elevation of 11,990ft (3.655m) above the sea level with a steep, steady 6.7% grade, hairpin turns and dangerous drop-offs.
Say and I personally found ourselves stuck in the snow on this road in a snowstorm with zero visibility, and that's why we have a shovel mounted to the cargo basket now but I digress. Loveland Pass was the easy road getting out to this spot with the county road maintenance ending this road gets a little...bumpy.
We settled on a spot with an existing fire ring that had a decent amount of shade and was within earshot of the creek. The previous tenants were some a-holes and had broken glass all over the place in and around the fire pit so that was rather unfortunate but there was a fire ordinance in place so we wouldn't be lighting a fire anyway. The mountains were right in front of us and provided a beautiful backdrop.
After we got settled in we headed out on a hike to explore the area a bit and see what we could see. There is a lot of ORV traffic through here during the day and a handful of hikers. We did see one small RV out there although I have no idea how they got it out there and wouldn't recommend attempting to get one out here. The road is washed out and if you really want to be able to take advantage of this spot I would recommend a 4x4 although my KIA did fine if we hadn't found the spot where we did I wouldn't have been able to continue much further down the road, it gets way to rocky and uneven.
While we were out hiking we came across several other camping spots with fire rings that would have been inaccessible by car but would make for great hike-in camping. After we thoroughly wore the dogs out we headed back to camp. While it was chilly in the afternoon the temperature dropped into the 30s overnight. With the full harvest moon, the night before the amount of light from the moon prohibited nighttime photography but made for a gorgeous spectacle. We didn't encounter any animals but did see some tracks and our bear vault was undisturbed in the morning when we went to retrieve it. After a slow easy morning and a hearty meal of biscuits and gravy, we packed up the car and headed home. I really enjoyed this spot, and will certainly be back to visit in the future.
This information is a screenshot from the RV PARKY app
We settled on a spot with an existing fire ring that had a decent amount of shade and was within earshot of the creek. The previous tenants were some a-holes and had broken glass all over the place in and around the fire pit so that was rather unfortunate but there was a fire ordinance in place so we wouldn't be lighting a fire anyway. The mountains were right in front of us and provided a beautiful backdrop.
After we got settled in we headed out on a hike to explore the area a bit and see what we could see. There is a lot of ORV traffic through here during the day and a handful of hikers. We did see one small RV out there although I have no idea how they got it out there and wouldn't recommend attempting to get one out here. The road is washed out and if you really want to be able to take advantage of this spot I would recommend a 4x4 although my KIA did fine if we hadn't found the spot where we did I wouldn't have been able to continue much further down the road, it gets way to rocky and uneven.
While we were out hiking we came across several other camping spots with fire rings that would have been inaccessible by car but would make for great hike-in camping. After we thoroughly wore the dogs out we headed back to camp. While it was chilly in the afternoon the temperature dropped into the 30s overnight. With the full harvest moon, the night before the amount of light from the moon prohibited nighttime photography but made for a gorgeous spectacle. We didn't encounter any animals but did see some tracks and our bear vault was undisturbed in the morning when we went to retrieve it. After a slow easy morning and a hearty meal of biscuits and gravy, we packed up the car and headed home. I really enjoyed this spot, and will certainly be back to visit in the future.
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