Memorial Day Weekend, pt. 1
May 25-28
Moraine Park Campground in RMNP
Site: 065
Amenities: restrooms, water, firepits, tent pads, food lockers, firewood for sale
Logan and I have camped in Rocky Mountain every year since we moved to Colorado...it’s become somewhat of a tradition. We have a favorite site in Moraine Park that we try to always stay in, and this year was no different. Except for the fact that when I went to book our site (the day reservations opened), it was taken for the whole weekend except for Friday night. After a lot of frustration and research and more frustration, we decided to just book the site for Friday and stay in a different campground Saturday and Sunday nights. Once we made that decision I went from being bummed to feeling super excited - I now had a reason to try a different campground! We love Moraine so much that I doubt we would have ever gone away from it otherwise.
So Friday after work we loaded up the car, went to the grocery store, and headed to Rocky! We didn’t arrive until almost 9 pm, so we set up the tent in the dark (and totally had the footprint the wrong direction because of it), and started a fire. We thankfully didn’t plan on cooking an actual dinner Friday night, and instead just chowed down on leftover pizza. Since we knew we were getting up and packing everything away in the morning, we tried to get out as few things as possible (I didn't even blow up my sleeping pad!), which made dinner cleanup and getting ready for bed a breeze! It was cloudy so I didn't even try to get out my camera for pictures, we just crawled in the tent and crashed.
I fell asleep quickly, but then woke up at 3:30 am just absolutely convinced I was hearing animals. After 30 terse minutes, I woke Logan up and made him open up the fly so I could just see out and know that there were not, in fact, 6 elk standing just outside the tent. He groaned and grunted, but knew that the only way he would be able to go back to sleep would be to appease me. So he opened up the tent and (to no one's surprise) there were no animals. What there was, though, was a totally clear night and the milky way shining behind Long's Peak!! I woke Logan back up to look for my tripod, only to realize we left the piece that connects to the camera at home! I crossed my fingers and set the camera up laying against the tent pad, just hoping it would work out.
I stayed up until about 4:30 taking pictures, and fell back asleep totally content (and not worried about the 6 imaginary elk...). We woke up with our alarm...since Sam was meeting us later that afternoon we wanted to get our hike in before he was going to arrive so we could just all go to the campground together. We broke down camp, skipped breakfast, and headed up to Bierstadt Lake to hike!