July 1-6, 2023 – Kremmling, CO

July 08, 2023

We left Loveland on Saturday morning and drove up Poudre Canyon and over Cameron Pass on our way to Kremmling. This was the area we loved to camp in when we lived in Fort Collins. The Cameron Peak fire devastated this area in 2020. This fire was the largest in Colorado history and consumed 208,913 acres. We were dismayed at the devastation in a canyon that was our playground.

We arrived in Kremmling and are staying at The Red Mountain RV Park on the east side of town. We are not overly impressed with the park, but it is the only RV park in Kremmling. It has a lot of permanent residents in older RVs with lots of “stuff” outside.

We spent the rest of Saturday getting set up and looking around town. We were disappointed that the Visitors Center was not open and when we stopped for ice cream, they told us that it is almost never open. Sunday, we walked across the street to the BLM Kremmling Field Office where they had a lot of brochures on things to do. The ladies in the office were very helpful and informative. We spent the rest of the day looking through the information and deciding what we wanted to do – site seeing in the Jeep, kayaking, hiking, and Rex wants to do some fly fishing.

We were walking Tacky Saturday afternoon and watched some parasailers over a hill outside of town. You have to look close to see the 5 parasailers,

On Monday, we took a scenic drive on Trough Road. We had a beautiful drive and stopped at the Gore Canyon Whitewater Park at Pumphouse where we watched rafters going down the Colorado River. The Trough Road follows the Colorado River and ends at the State Bridge on Highway 131. We turned around here and drove back up Trough Road.

Colorado River

Gore Canyon

We stayed at the RV on July 4^th to avoid the holiday crowds. We did some reading and planning for what to see or do next. Kremmling usually has fireworks display on the Cliffs outside of town, but a Bald Eagle is nesting there so the fireworks were cancelled this year. The RV Park had a root-beer float party, so we enjoyed a good old fashioned root beer float. After dark some kids shot off fireworks at the entrance to the park. As the fireworks were loud and Tacky tends to bark, we stayed in the RV and watched a movie.

Wednesday, we did another scenic drive through the Wolford Mountain Travel Management Area. At the end of our drive, we stopped at Wolford Mountain Reservoir for a picnic lunch at the Ritschard Dam

We had a beautiful view of the mountains in Rocky Mountain National Park. There is still some snow up there.

On the way back we drove up on the Kremmling Cliffs.

The view of Kremmling from the top of the Cliffs. Our RV park is off the left side of the picture.

We drove to the Kremmling Cretaceous Ammonite Site on Thursday. In 1983, the BLM designated this 160-acre site as a Research Natural Area. The site contains calcareous sandstone layers of the Pierre Shale, once part of an ancient ocean sand bar during the Cretaceous Period some 72 to 73 million years ago. This shore area was occupied by a unique, diverse biotic community of shallow water invertebrate animals. Fossil remains evident today include the giant ammonite Placenticeras, a shelled, squid like animal, along with more than one hundred other fossil species. Several invertebrate fossil species found here had not been previously recorded in the Western Interior of the United States.