First days on the road

We left Boulder on Thursday morning heading to Glennwood Springs, about 150 miles to the West, in the Rocky Mountains. The highway goes through some passes that are over 3’000  meters high. We camped in Glennwood Springs, in a camp ground a little outside town, with electricity and hot showers. We are a bit off-season, so we were almost alone in the camping ground, very nice! We hooked our camper to the electricity plug and got electricity and heating all night without exhausting our battery. We are almost mid April but there is still snow high in the mountains and nights can be a little cold, so heating is definitely not a luxury. The next day we headed to Salida, 150 miles to the South where we met again with Jessica and Walter. We stayed at Walter’s sister, Debbie and her husband Jerry. They have a very nice house surrounded by plenty of land and with a gorgeous view on the Rocky Mountains, at 2’300 meters high. On Saturday we did some sightseeing, visited a very charming village called Twin Lakes and soaked in Mount Princeton hot springs, in a creek. There are about 56 peaks over 4’000 meters in the Rocky Mountains and some towns are well above 3’000 meters. The tree line is also above 3’000 meters, much higher than in the Alps, this explains why some towns are so high up. These towns were created in the late 19th century a the time of the gold and silver rush and have this peculiar look of pioneer towns, like in the cartoons, very atmospheric, very Far West kind of. We are now heading to Mesa Verde National Park and Monument Valley.