Travel reports and advice for families for the best outdoor experiences, including national and state park visits, camping or glamping
My nieces from Arkansas recently visited Boston and New York with on a two week road trip with their parents. The girls used CityPASSes to visit top attractions and museums in New York and Boston.
The skies are blue, the air is clear and there is no evidence of fire where tourists would go. “Some people watching TV thought the whole city burned up,” one local told me. “Some people thought the entire state burned,” said another in Crested Butte. Fortunately, Colorado’s fire-impacted areas represent less than 1 percent of the state’s 23 million acres of public land.
What’s left? Biking, of course. Locals are huge mountain bikers so we’ve at least got to give it a shot. We opt for the Rio Grande Trail—a rail to trail favorite of locals for running, hiking, walking and of course biking.
ACES, as the environmental center is known, offers a variety of winter and summer activities for families from custom hikes (a bargain at $40 an hour) to a free birds of prey program we dropped in on in the afternoon meeting the resident horned owl and golden eagle…
The St Regis underwent a $40 million redesign in 2011 and it shows. They welcome kids and pets with special amenities. The spa is the go to place in town to be pampered –15,000 square feet with 15 treatment rooms. There’s steam and sauna and cold plunge and hot tubs.
until this morning, Zach Lewis hadn’t been fly fishing—a popular Aspen activity. This morning at his first spot on the Roaring Creek River Zach caught a nice sized trout. It was all catch and release, but that’s not what this is about.
“We plan the itinerary so that we can stop like this,” says our captain, Dano Quinn, who has been piloting vessels in Alaska for the last 16 years. “The best of Alaska is the wilderness,” he adds. “Not in the towns and we provide the opportunities for that.”
I’d always wanted to do the famous hike between Crested Butte in Southwest Colorado and Aspen –12.2 miles along the West Maroon trail, crossing the Maroon Pass which is 12,500 feet high. I’d first heard about this hike years ago when we took our kids to Crested Butte, one of my favorite mountain towns to ski.
People are afraid to come to the Springs, locals tell me, saying they think the entire city has burned, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. But the Broadmoor, which has been welcoming families for 19 years, is tranquil and at it should be. So is downtown Colorado Springs, where an outdoor festival is underway.
I’m also glad to be in The Springs as locals call it for another reason—to tell everyone that the Waldo Canyon Wildfire that destroyed more than 300 homes earlier this summer has been completely contained and the city and all of its attractions are open for business.