Camping at Chambers Lake-July 19th and 20th

We took off to the hills for the weekend to escape triple digit heat in Windsor. Without reservations we arrived near Chambers Lake. We managed to get a walk-in campsite which was one of two available for the night. Views of the lake and a large mountain made the campsite well worth the short shlepp of our equipment into the site. Seen here are Lindsey and Tucker preparing dinner and protecting a most important supply, Windsor Canadian.


We set up camp and headed out for some site seeing. We took Long Draw Road off Hwy 14 up to a trail Brian had picked out on a map. It was Tucker's first hike in Colorado so we wanted to take it easy, especially being at 10,000ft or so. So we followed a creek flowing through a large meadow.After a mile or two of seeing many elk/moose tracks int he mud we spotted a cow moose with a calf on the other side of the meadow, roughly 200 yards away. Kinda cool, but now we were looking for the big bull moose. We kept going and realized the meadow didn't really lead to any where super cool, plus it was getting a little late in the day so we turned around. On the way back we came out of a patch of aspen trees into the meadow when the Tucker froze. He had spotted "we think" the same cow moose about 40 yards away. We stopped looked, got a few pictures while the moose looked at us and kept eating. Thinking back at the event it is lucky Tucker was on his leash because that was an animal that wouldn't have just run away from Tucker. Instead Tucker, god bless him, didn't disturb the moose by barking. We decided to keep moving and within a few feet could see the young moose. At this point the cow moose wasn't in between us and the young moose so she took a few aggressive steps to separate us from her young one. Brian told Lindsey we needed to keep moving so we did. Tucker though was quite intrigued by this large animal and had to be dragged along the trail in order to allevaite any danger from the moose.

The hike was 6 miles, not very aggressive, and took around 2.5 hours.

The evening of camping was very pleasant. Temperatures were in the 60's and dropped into the low 50's. We had a nice dinner, a few cocktails, and a nice fire fueled by Fall Creek pine.

In the morning it was a little foggy and cool. We had debated on staying two total nights, but we thought it would be nice to sleep in our own bed. So we had some breakfast and broke camp.

The hike for the day was on the Blue Lake Trail off Hwy 14 again. We arrived around 9:30am, got our gear together. We were surprised to see the sign said Blue Lake was 5.5 miles one way. We set off anyway not knowing how far we would get. The trail was fairly uneventful as it meandered through ponderosa pines and followed a creek most of the way up. Tucker was almost immediately hot as the sun was out and the temperature was much hotter than the day before. So every chance we got Tucker got to cool off in the creek. We hiked, hiked some more, and actually thought about turning around, however; we perserveered long enough to break treeline and see Blue Lake, pictured here.
Brian and Tucker mosied down to the lake, mostly so Tucker could cool off. He played with a dog named Arthur and shook water all over a person relaxing with a book-good dog! They hiked the 400 ft or so back up to meet Lindsey who was just enjoying the view. Lindsey and Tucker decided to start their way back to the car, while Brian decided to head the rest of the way up to to the pass, about a mile and 700 ft.
The hike up to the pass was grueling, a constant elevation gain. At the top you can see into another valley and looking back towards Blue Lake you could see peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park, about 30 miles away as the crow flies. It was windy up there and there was time to be made up to catch Lindsey and Tucker so down he went.
The hike down was fast paced as the trail was fairly flat and devoid of many rocks. Brian caught Lindsey and Tucker with about 2.5 miles left to the car. It was hot! The car said only about 85 degrees, but the sun was very warm. We made it back to the car around 4pm and made our way down the Poudre Canyon to civilization. One the way it rained bringing the temperature down to 60 degrees, but when we hit the plain the temperature was around 100 degrees.

Total for the day: 12 miles, 1000ft elevation gain, about 5 hours

The best part about the hike that day was getting potato olei's from Taco John's in Windsor. Yummmy. It could only get better by getting six pack and a pound.