Summer in Colorado! Mountains, Cute Towns, Hikes and Rain

We have spent all of August in Colorado and it really is a beautiful place. We started out in Grand Junction, not so beautiful but the Colorado National Monument and some of the canyon hiking was spectacular. We moved on quickly from the surburban sprawl of that area and headed into the mountains. We spent the next 3 to 4 weeks at altitude in amazing scenery but mostly crappy weather.


The scenery was beautiful, we took some amazing hikes, paddled in awesome lakes and visited some really neat towns. Our favorites mountain towns were Ouray and Crested Butte. Ouray is amazing with it's steep canyon walls cradling the cute historic town. It's the perfect antidote to the urban sprawl of Fruita and Grand Junction that we had recently left behind. How can you possibly sprawl when there are huge mountains stopping you. Crested Butte was just plain cute;  a lovely little downtown with a cool vibe and a gorgeous setting. Other notable mountain towns we visited were Ridgway and Frisco and their ritzier neighbors Telluride and Breckenridge.  All in all we loved the time we spent in the mountains.

The beautiful town of Ouray

Downtown Ouray

But a word about the weather. We are not mountain novices, we were expecting sunshine during the day and storms to roll in later in the day. That's what we experienced in Montana and Wyoming last summer, but unfortunately the weather wasn't so kind to us this time. We did get some sunny days but we had more bad weather than good. I think it is hilarious that people told us that it was the "monsoon season". That implies dramatic storms and epic weather systems, instead it was mostly just constant drizzly, cold rain and gray skies. We are familiar with this from the UK, so now I am going to tell people back in Britain that what they are experiencing is just the monsoon season - it typically runs from January to December.

Making the most of some sunshine. Hiking at over 10,000 feet in Crested Butte

Scenic Boondocking in Crested Butte

We eventually came out of the mountains to stay on the Front Range just south of Fort Collins which may actually be vying for our favorite Colorado town so far. Our next post will describe our stay. We were glad to get some summer weather and break out the shorts and flip flops again. We had been planning to head back into the mountains again but we are waiting for new counter-tops (more on our summer remodel in a future post) and honestly are just happy to be back in better weather.

We are really enjoying our time in Colorado and we are looking forward to seeing out the rest of September in the state. We are not quite done with all the beautiful mountain scenery. Once the counter-tops are in, we will be heading back into the mountains as we head south as our fall plans develop. Looking forward to more vistas, cute towns and hopefully a little bit of sunshine.