Camping at Golden Gate Canyon State Park

Well hello there! For my inaugural post to this blog, I submit this past weekend's trip to Golden Gate Canyon State Park, which is just over 2 hours northwest of Colorado Springs.

The views were breathtaking!

• Best part: Black Bear Hiking Trail
• Worst part: My ludicrous fear of killer mountain lions
• Lesson learned? If you're going to arrive after 6 pm, bring lots of $1 bills
• Rating? 4 stars! (outta 5)

The trip turned out to be a roaring success, after a moderately rocky start. My stuff hasn't arrived yet, so we had to rent a tent that isn't very hiking friendly. Then we discovered that we missed the boat on reserving a site at the two campgrounds in the park. We decided to go for it anyway, stopping a few times (a stove, then beer, then Starbucks at my insistence...)

When we finally arrived at the Park at 6:20 pm, we discovered it was all closed up. We found an envelope for a vehicle permit, but we couldn't find anything to self-register for a campsite! After a little panicking, we found a Park Ranger who was in the midst of some sort of allergic reaction (possible wrong line of work?) but who was nevertheless kind enough to find us the very official clipboard of registration for the backcountry sites.

How was our site? (Deer Creek #19, if you're curious) It was great! Garbage-free, had a flat tent-sized pad and was nestled into a forest.

The best part of the excursion however, was the hiking the next day. On the recommendation of the Park volunteer who we paid our outstanding $3 to, we started with the Black Bear trail and came back down on the horseshoe trail. In theory this was only 4.6 miles (how many km is that? Ah... 7.4) but it was pretty exhausting! We had lunch at the top of the trail, which was the best sandwich in the world, found at this lady's blog. After finishing up with that, we tackled our second hike the Raccoon trail, but it wasn't very challenging and the best views of the mountains were from the trailhead!

All in all, a very nice first weekend in Colorado!