This past weekend, we went camping at Wellington Lake, which is a private lake (with private campsites) down in the Pike's Peak National forest. The reason we did a private campground is that I could not find any public campgrounds anywhere close to us that were not full of reservations for the weekend. One problem we have is that we do not plan far enough in advance to get reservations in. I do not know what weekends will be open until a week or before the weekend.
Anyway, on Thursday, the boys and I drove South 285, took a left at Pine Junction, traveled to FR550 and followed it to Wellington Lake. This gave Tracy a chick-flick night, and let us get an early pick (or so we thought) of the campsites.
The office at Wellington Lake was the most disorganized business setting I have ever seen. There was one lady checking people in where clearly, she needed one or two people helping out. She asked me if we wanted something by the lake (but without trees) or a mountain campsite (with trees but away from the lake). I decided to try a lake-side campsite, and she told me what campsites were available (or what campsites she
thought were available) and had me go look at them to pick ours out. She gave me a choice of 5, but as it turned out, only two of them were actually available. Apparently, it she was so overwhelmed that she was unable to cross sites off in her little book as people claimed them.
Anyway, eventually, we claimed our site. The fee structure was sort of interesting to me. Rather than charge for the campsite, we paid per person per day. Apparently, you pay the same to go into the Wellington Lake area whether or not you camp there.
Thursday night, I was certain we had made the wrong decision (by the lake or in the mountains) because the wind by the lake was horrible from about 10pm until early in the morning.
But the next day, we ate our oatmeal, and got ourselves back in the minivan to go pick up Tracy. We got back to Wellington Lake around lunch time, so we ate lunch. The weather was rainy and windy and we spent time in the tent reading or playing games or whatever, but eventually all of a sudden, the sun came out BIG TIME. Very hot in the tent, so we went back to the office to rent a canoe. Yes, we (Tyler) fished, and no we did not catch anything. Connor was very nervous about sitting in the canoe. He was pretty convinced that we would tip over.
Luckily, Friday night was not windy, and Saturday was just gorgeous.
We went on a hike named "Waterfall Trail". It turned out to be a perfect length for Connor. Nice, since we had no idea going in. There were a lot of huge rocks and cave-like formations on the hike which was really cool. The waterfall was pretty neat too (we did not get a good picture actually by the waterfall, but the picture above is by the river as it goes down).
Our neighbors left during the day and left us some extra firewood, so we had a really good camp fire that night.
The picture above is our campsite on Sunday after we packed up. It is a really pretty spot, isn't it?
Tyler goes back to school next week. I do not know where the summer has gone. I am sort of hoping for a long Indian Summer so that we can get one or two more camping trips in this year. Next year I have to do a better job planning in advance.
