Father's Day Weekend

Apparently some fathers spend Fathers' Day away from (as a break from) their kids. This seems like a really weird concept to me. My fathers' days are always full of activities with the kids.

This year, the boys decided they wanted to take me camping for fathers' day weekend.

At first, Mommy was going to be in charge of reserving the campsite, but would not be coming along. At some point the boys decided she should come with us so she could be in charge of getting us to the actual Fathers' Day activity.

I am glad they decided to bring her along. Fathers' Day would have been too much work without her.

The campsite that Mommy reserved was in the Kenosha Pass campground, which is at 10,000 feet is about an hour and a half drive from our house. Tracy was a bit concerned as we were driving there Friday night that it would be too cold up that high. I, of course, scoffed at such an idea.

The campground itself has undergone tree-clearing recently. A bunch of the pine trees were victims of the dreaded pine beetle epidemic. The nice thing about the tree-clearing effort is that it resulted in a bunch of free firewood, so we were able to have bigger, longer lasting campfires than we usually allow ourselves. This area happens to have lots of aspen trees, so the cleared out trees didn't necessarily make the area look as bare as an it could have. 

Saturday morning after cleaning up from breakfast, we packed up a lunch and started hiking the Colorado Trail. For those of you who don't know, the Colorado Trail runs about 500 miles from Waterton Canyon South of Denver to Durango. The trail passes over Kenosha Pass, and practically goes through the campground.

Before we could start our hike, we (of course) had to climb some of the rocks by the campground. Dad told the kids there would be plenty of rocks to climb on the hike.

Turns out that Dad lied. There were no good climbing rocks along the portion of the trail on which we hiked.

We did come across a couple of shelters built out of sticks along the trail. The most impressive one is the one to the right here. Someone obviously spent a bunch of time building this shelter.

We saw some mountain bikers and backpackers along the trail. Both the boys tell me they want to go backpacking soon. I am glad to hear that, but I am a bit skeptical that they will actually enjoy backpacking once they are actually doing it.

They insist they want to, though, so I will try to accommodate the request.

It was a nice sunny day. It also wasn't overly hot. The perfect day for a hike. The views were very nice too.

We had a nice picnic lunch along the trail.

Then, we headed back to the campsite to relax for awhile in the afternoon until supper time. Mommy even played her guitar for a bit.

We had another great big campfire at night with the free firewood lying around.

Usually on Fathers' Day, I get breakfast in bed. This is impractical in the tent, but my wife did make us pancakes and sausage.

I did have to help pack up the camp on my "special" day, but at least I didn't have to do dishes.

After packing up the camp, for my official Fathers' Day activity, we headed over to Fairplay Colorado to go to South Park City.

South Park City is basically a restored 1880's mining town. Its buildings were relocated from various ghost towns all over Colorado.

We went on the self-guided tour through the town and its buildings. It was very interesting and we all had a good time.

There was a recreation of a mine.

There was a train. The kids had fun climbing on the locomotive and the caboose.

The school house was a hit.

We got to go into an old-town bank that had been relocated from Alma, Colorado.

The whole camping trip and ghost town tour made for a great Fathers' Day weekend. The boys and their Mom did a great job setting everything up, and I had a wonderful time.

I guess I am under some pressure to help the boys come up with what to do next Mothers' Day.