Labor Day weekend took us to Crested Butte for a few days. We, as always, had a great time hanging out with some friends in a condo for the weekend while attempting to mountain bike.
Crested Butte is one of those places where the scenery doesn’t look real in person, much less in photos.
Riding 401 trail
Dog walk at the Copper Creek trail.
We left the Butte and headed South to Medano Pass, which is a 4 wheel drive “primitive road” that winds up in the Great Sand Dunes National Monument… eventually. Road definitely had some interesting spots but the truck did great (thank you Slee Off-road, Toyota and Fred’s skills). We grabbed a good first camp site since it was getting to be late afternoon and we were getting close to the park.
I think we saw one other vehicle that drove by and that was it. We were on our own. Yup, that is a bear box in the last picture. Loved the spot but the 2am bathroom break was a little intimidating surrounded by all those bushes and trees. So… we moved 1/10 mile down the road to another campsite that was more open and a little further off the road.
That was better. We saw a few more vehicles go by including a couple that started down our “driveway” but turned around once they saw us. Still a pretty quiet spot.
From there it was on to the park!
The dunes are up to 850′ tall.
View from Molas pass trail.
The best view is from the Visitor Center.
Off to Zapata Falls Campground. This was a great campground with amazing views of the San Luis Valley with the San Juans in the distance.
We could have stayed there another night. Especially if we attempted to hike to the falls. But, we decided to break up the drive home and headed to Buena Vista.
The drive down from the campground had some pretty nice views of the dunes.
We wound up at Cottonwood Lake Campground… which really is more lake “adjacent” than on the lake. This is a nice campground with lovely views and good sites. Our site had some privacy with the table and fire ring down a few stairs. Unfortunately, the old camper further down the hill from us had a super loud generator which the owners ran basically all day. After all the quiet and solitude we had just had, that was tough to take. Note that further down the forest road past the campground there are dispersed sites available.
Fly fishing class we guessed. Pretty funny to see this line of identically geared people walking through the middle of the lake.
