Summer Road Trip! NC to CO

Try to avoid caffeinated drinks as you will have to stop more to use the bathroom. A designated pee bottle can be used while on the road if really want to make good time. 5 hour energy drinks work pretty good w/o the caffeine. As far as the mental attitude during a long road trip, try to relax as best as possible and realize that you are not going to get to the final destination anytime soon. Also plan on lots of construction along the way that time of year.
I've done the trip at least 8-10 times from GA, mostly solo, even straight through solo( which I don't recommend) in my old fj60 land cruisers and once in my vw vanagon neither with a/c(aargh!)Southern route is more scenic but through Kansas is the fastest. Sit back and enjoy the trip.

 

If you've settled on the southern route, one option is stay on I-40 about 35 miles west of Amarillo, take the Vega exit (37) north on US Hwy 385 to Hartley where it joins US Hwy 87 just before Dalhart. While it is 2 lane and about 25 miles further, you avoid Amarillo city traffic and Dumas. There is virtually no traffic. Also, fill up in Amarillo, not a whole lot of choices until you get to Raton,NM. BTW what you and I know as regular grade gas (87 octane) is 85 octane in Colorado, because of the altitude. Never had any problem with it pinging, but not a bad idea coming home to fill up as soon as you can with 87 when you get back down to lower altitude.

 

Leaving this Tuesday morning! I think I've got all my gear packed. Buying and prepping food tomorrow, then hopefully all that will be left is to get in the truck and drive.

Current plans have us getting to great sand dunes about mid day on day two, exploring and then camping there that night. Then heading to crestone to do either humboldt, crestone, kit Carson, or challenger point. Then heading to co springs for garden of the gods and pikes peak. Over night 30 miler on the maroon lake four pass loop. Then mt Elbert. After all that we'll be on the Arkansas for five days, then getting back in the truck and driving home.

We've decided on the southern route, probably follow the directions from @edm3rd, Google says about 26 hrs of driving, of course not counting fuel stops.

I'll get some pictures tomorrow of prep work if I can remember.

 

Wish you a safe and enjoyable trip. While I can't fault Google's mileage, driving time (and stops) are much more driver-dependent.

Keep us informed, or provide a post-trip summary (and to avoid others requests, pictures would be nice).
Have always enjoyed my trips to Colorado, hope your experience is similar.

 

Love your plan, except for the Colorado Springs part. The Garden of the Gods is very beautiful, but you've got such a cool rural CO trip going. Pikes Peak is definitely NOT worth getting into the city. Jet down to the Cumbres Pass area at the NM border (north of Chama, NM) when you're done in Crestone. Or go to Gunnison/CB via Creede and Lake City. (I assume you're doing the four pass from the south, not from Aspen)

Have a great trip regardless of what you decide.

 

^^^ This guy knows what he is doing. I live in springs and love the Garden/Pikes Peak, but if you are trying to get out in nature, all of the places he suggested are beautiful and more remote (most of the stuff in his posts are favorites, or on the bucket list). The Garden should be seen at least once. It's that unique, but it is a swarming with tourists. The Pikes Peak is cool, but also very touristy as it is also right next to town.

 

@ColoradoTom we will certainly look into those places, we'll let you know where we end up going.

Prep work!

I think food is all prepped, and for the most part divided up by meal
Took the back seats out to make more room for junk, which will be the cooler, so we can make sandwiches while driving.

Added lockable storage for this trip, so we don't have to soley rely on the cab for keeping things locked down. And because I over prepare we're taking a second full size spare, even though I carry a patch kit and compressor. Hopefully it's just overkill.

Cleaned up, and ready to be covered in bugs and dirt!

 

Don't know if you're a railroad fan at all, but echo ColoradoTom on the Chama area, actually Antonito CO to Chama NM - route of the Cumbres and Toltec steam railroad. Some excellent basic camping in between, mostly forest service, usually no more than a couple of miles off of the highway. Trains leave from both Antonito and Chama around 10:00am and there are several places you can photograph from the highway, high point is Cumbres Pass, just after you drive up LaMagna Pass. One caveat in both NM and CO, don't be surprised if you run into a cattle or sheep drive using the highway in the middle of nowhere, I think it happens when they're being moved to or from high elevation pasture.

Going thru Chama is also a great route to both Pagosa Springs and Durango.

 

About a hundred miles to get to Memphis, making tracks!

 

We got back from our trip last night, around 2300. 4200 miles were added to the truck during this whole ordeal. I'll get on later and outline the trip we ended up doing, definitely glad to have followed some of the advice handed out by y'all. It was a pretty amazing trip though, Colorado is definitely a different world than the east coast.

Overall, we did two 14ers, one two day backpacking trip, five days on the Arkansas river, one day in the sand dunes, zero nights in hotels, and almost two weeks without a shower!

I'll try to find time tomorrow to run through our whole trip, and get some good pictures

 

Guess 5 days on the Arkansas would qualify as bathing.

Glad you had a good trip.

 

Alright, trip report time, I've tried to include some of the better pictures, but there are a lot more that I didn't include. I'll try to break it down by day, that may be the easiest way.

Day 1: Left NC a little after 0900 EST, and since I had just gotten home from work my brother took the first shift. We made it to the other side of Asheville before I cracked an eyelid, then we settled into a routine of swapping drivers about every half tank of gas. That worked out pretty well until we got into the night time hours, which also happened to coincide with Oklahoma/Texas(the most boring part of the drive), so driver swaps took place more often during the night time. We made it to Alamosa, CO around 10 or 1100 MST with a little over 1600 miles on the trip odo, so I guess this technically should be on day two.

Day 2: We drove past the sand dunes, in an effort to go straight to the shop and rent our sand boards for the day. We got a snowboard type and a sled type, and scooted back to the dunes. This place is pretty weird to be in, because it feels so out of place. Anyways, gorgeous none the less, we got our permit to camp on the dunes that night and headed to the sand. After we fought our way through the mosquitoes we got to a secluded steep section of sand. We could already feel the altitude hitting us, walking up the sand took our breath. Anyways, the boards on the sand was certainly fun, but we ended up with sand EVERYWHERE. So after returning the boards, we did drove up and looked at a waterfall up the neighboring mtn, then we made supper on the tailgate(burritos), and headed into the dunes. Let me say that the stars in this place are insane, seriously the best I have ever seen in my life, I don't know that I'd go back to see the dunes again, but I'd go back just to sit and stare at the stars. We were able to avoid most of the crowds with where we camped, but there was certainly a lot of people.



Day 3: Left Alamosa and headed to Colorado Springs to explore the garden of the gods. As soon as we got close to the park we were definitely glad we listened to my "internet friends" and scratched pikes peak off the list. We parked, and then walked around the perimeter of the park, again this place is beautiful. Made it through the hoards of people to look at pretty rocks. Very cool place, we then left CO springs and headed towards BV. We decided to do Mt Columbia instead of Pikes Peak, so we set up camp about 1/4mile below the parking area, and again had supper on the tailgate(pork chops). You definitely don't realize how gigantic these mountains are until you are right there looking up at them.



Day 4: Following advice on here we got a relatively early start, on the trail by 0615, and up we went. This was a little over 4k ft of climbing from parking to the peak, and about 11 miles or so. We could both feel the altitude on this one, I was especially winded way before my legs were feeling the burn. Got to the base of the real climbing and realized that there is not really a designated trail most of the way up, mostly just rock scrambling with an end point in sight. Going up was hard, but we got there, had a beautiful view, seriously amazing. We saw what looked like our groundhogs, we were told it was a marmot, at the peak which was weird to both of us, then really weird when it tried to walk away with my hiking pole. On the way back down we missed our trail cut off, so we walked further down the ridge than we should have and ended up going straight down through a ton of loose rocks, this part was really not any fun. Finally got through that, and hit a trail that got us back to where we started, but I was exhausted by the end of this ordeal, and it took us longer than expected. So we ended up being on the trail for about 8 hrs that day, then got back to the truck and headed over to aspen through independence pass. This is a really amazing drive, by the way, breathtaking views the entire time. We were coming into aspen around 18 or 1900, and since it was getting late I figured it would be easier to get food somewhere instead of cooking in the dark. So we looked for a mexican place in town, and got there to find a beautiful restaurant with the price tags to go along with it, not really what I expected with a local mexican place. But the food was pretty good, we felt very out of place, aspen is a place to wear your arc teryx to the coffee shop and never get it dirty; we got looked at weird rolling into town dirty and smelly...oh well. Even though it seems quite ritzy, it is a very cool town. Anyways, headed up to maroon bells to set up camp, and found that we couldn't camp beside the parking lot, you either had to hike in or use a designated camp site, which were all full. Decided to go try another camp site up 82, which also ended up being full...awesome. Ended up going back to maroon bells, and hiking about three hundred yards into the trail and camping right there, should have done this from the get go, but whatever. Got tents set up and laid down around 2230, yay.



Day 5: Now, maroon bells is an amazing place, it might have had the best views we saw in CO crammed into one space. The original goal was to do the four pass loop, in two days. As we later learned, a colorado 26 miles is VERY different than an east coast 26 miles. We made it about five miles in, one mile or so short of our first pass(west maroon pass), and I was toast, there was no way I could do this loop in the time we had allotted. We ended up hiking up the pass, which was really beautiful, like everything else we'd seen so far here. Then we headed back, and figured we'd try to find a spot to camp on the way back and then we would have a short day the next day. We ended up camping right above crater lake, which is a pretty awesome place to sit around and look at mountains.



Day 6: Got a pretty early start, and were back to the truck by around 0800, cleaned up a little and had breakfast then headed back down into aspen to explore some more. We explored the city, went in a few shops, realized by and large this place is out of our tax bracket and we were out by lunch. Drove back through independence pass and went to check out leadville. It is a very neat little town, we just parked and walked up and down the street going in whatever shop we thought looked interesting. Then we headed back down 24 a little ways and found the parking area for Mt Elbert, and again set up camp a little ways down the road.

Day 7: Actually got a pretty early start this time, on the trail by 0515. Mt elbert was different than columbia, still a bunch of climbing, but it's pretty good trails all the way up to the top. Once we broke the tree line we could see a lot, but it wasn't horribly impressive compared to what we had seen so far, kind of bummed us out but we kept climbing. Made it to the peak by 0830 or so, it was quite cold and windy, but the view once we got to the top was definitely worth it. It was a beautiful view, amazing. Sometime about 9 or 10 we started running into the hoards of people carrying their gas station water bottles up, so we were happy that we got started so early, we were the 3rd and 4th on the peak that morning by our estimation. When I come back this way, I will be climbing mt Elbert again, I can't say the same thing about columbia. After we got back down, we loaded up and headed back to BV, planning to camp around the base of columbia before we left for rafting in the morning. Spent the afternoon walking around downtown BV, super cool town.


Day 8-12: Arkansas river, we started right below the numbers section and then did the royal gorge on our last day. The forest fire south of salida had started a few days previous, so we were rafting right towards the smoke most of our trip. Very impressive to see the results of such a huge fire, I believe when we got off the river it was up to an estimated 16,000 acres with just shy of 800 firefighters working on it with still 0% contained, crazy. Had a great time on the river though, we had some fantastic guides that made the days very fun.


We got back to BV around 1700 on our last day, packed up, stopped by a local beer store to get some local brews to take home, and hit the road around 1745. It made the drive a lot easier doing the night shift right off the bat, got back home at 2300 EST, 4200 total miles on the clock. It was an awesome trip, we would have done a few things differently if we were to do it again, but it was an awesome trip. Also, it's taking me a while to get used to sweating again, I don't think the humidity got above 15% while we were out there, so we sweated more unloading the truck than we did the whole time we were hiking.

Thank you again everyone for the tips, tricks, and suggestions given about the trip!

 

Sounds like a great trip. We drove to the sand dunes on one trip when the kids were young but ran into a thunderstorm just about the time we got there. It was a side trip on the way back home so we didn't see much. One of the places I want to go back to if I get a chance. Pikes Peak is worth the hassle to me. But the views on the other climbs you did are certainly as impressive and a lot less crowded. There is still a lot to see in Colorado. You'll be back.

My wife, sister-in-law and I did a road trip in May to the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Bryce Canyon. I did a trip report here.

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/southwest-roadtrip-report.433611/

The highlight of our trip was hiking Angels Landings trail in Zion. We walked the 1st 2 miles, but chickened out of the last 1/2 mile. I never thought I was afraid of heights before, but a narrow knife edge trail with 1500' drops on both sides convinced me I was. I have photos of Zion, but mine don't do it justice. Here is a link with better photos and a youtube video of Angels landing.

You may decide on Utah for the next road trip after looking at these.

http://www.lovethesepics.com/2012/0...els-landing-the-subway-cliff-canyons-45-pics/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CIN-N5cNwk

 

One of the things that's helpful about having knowledge of the where's in CO is this. Aspen is beautiful, yes. But I don't go there to vacation. No place to camp, everything too expensive; it doesn't really belong to Colorado any more. The beautiful people own it now and it's run by their rules. Same with Telluride and a few other places.

Also regarding 14ers. There are hard ones and there are (relatively) easy ones. Elbert is the highest of the CO summits, but one of the easiest climbs. I've heard Columbia is a tough one. Congrats on summiting. That air gets thin once you get much over 12K.

One of the things Coloradans know (those of us who've been here a while) is that on any 14er, you're likely to have company unless it's February. But there are hundreds of summits above 13K that are just as amazing, sometimes more so, and rarely any other people at all.

I think you guys did a pretty good job. Spent more time on the river than I would, and you sadly ignored my advice to ignore Colorado Springs, but that's OK. I'll get over it

 

Yeah, we did ignore the CO springs advice(although, Columbia was the substitute for pikes peak), even though garden of the gods was pretty neat to look at and was just covered in tourists, I'm still glad we did it. It made us appreciate the rest of the trip even more, if that makes any sense. But yeah, probably wouldn't do it again.

 

Looks like an awesome trip. You managed to work in a lot of my favorites in CO. And don't listen to all the folks about Colorado Springs, it gets a bad rap, but its a wonderful place....

 

Colorado Springs is fine, I don't have anything specifically negative to say about it; I lived there for four years at the end of the 90s. But it's part of the Front Range and therefore urban. For this guy's planning, I felt like it was a shame to sully a mountain trip with an excursion to the city. Like I said, Garden of the Gods is really pretty, but as the OP mentioned, it was crawling with people. It always is. Which is fine, but compared to climbing Mt Columbia?

That's all. Not slamming CS, just questioned it as part of this trip. And the OP rated it "probably wouldn't do it again".

 

Sounds like a great trip, you saw some great parts of our state. I have fished and floated the Ark, but not to that extent and length, sounds awesome.

 

As far as Co Spgs is concerned, enjoyed Garden of the Gods, probably wouldn't consider a second visit. Really enjoyed Manitou Springs, and cog railway to Pike's Peak. There is too much else to see and do in the state to spend much time in an urban environment.

 

Agreed, it's a long way to drive to see office parks and walmarts, which is why when I return I don't know that co springs will be on the list. I'm sure it's a great place, just not the version of Colorado we wanted to see.

It really was a great time though. Tom, salida looked really incredible floating through on water, we both agreed it looked like it would've been a neat town to walk around in. We did however see a kayaker go kamikaze in front of our gear boat going through one of the play Rapids in town, so there's that.