Bockman Campout with High Plains Drifters

We left Scottsbluff July 9th to meet up with the Hi Plains Drifters from Fort Collins/Loveland area. We stayed the night on Wed at Dutch George Flats on the Poudre River about 30 miles outside Fort Collins. It was a nice quiet night. We went up to Bockman Campground the next day, it is located about 15 miles on the other side of Cameron Pass area of Hwy 14. We were hoping to see some moose along the Hwy as this area has a lot of them around, but after 4 days there we never saw a single one. We probably would have seen one if we had gone out in the evening when it was cooler.

We had a fun time with the group, Bobi and Larry came up from Ault and we went on a 3 or 4 mile hike. We also drove around the area to see if we could spot some wildlife and managed to see a herd of elk. We had a BBQ on saturday nite and the club had their meeting and did some voting, for some reason when I kept voting no on everything they ignored me(must be because we are only honorary members now)

Looks like everyone had a great time and the food was great as always. We hope to be able to see the group each time we come back to Fort Collins area. (maybe we can win the 50/50 someday that way also)

Everyone left on sunday and we stayed up there till monday morning before leaving to go to Rocky Mtn National Park in Estes Park.

Here are a few photos of the area around Bockman and some of the camping group.

Scottsbluff Nebr

We left the Black Hills on the 4th of July and headed for Scottsbluff NE to stay at my folks house. Mt Rushmore had a fireworks celebration on the 3rd of July that we wanted to go see but we found out that over 30,000 people attend the display and there is only 2 ways into the monument and I did not want to spend hours getting out of there in the traffic at 1030 pm. We heard that your have to arrive about 730am that morning and sit there all day to "reserve" your spot to view the fireworks at 930 pm!!
Not my idea of a good time!! We were camped about 10 miles away and we still heard the fireworks. they really put on a display!! (we saw it on the news)
We arrived in Scottsbluff in mid afternoon at my folks house and it was hot!! probably around 94 or 95. Just perfect for a 4th of July.
That evening we sat out in the driveway and watched the professional display of fireworks being set off up near the college. It was great to see it, they did a nice job. What was amazing to me was the number of fireworks being set off around the town, people were setting off tons of rockets, fountains and whatever else they had purchased. I dont think I had ever seen that big a display of fireworks being blown up by just the local people. When we lived in Fort Collins fireworks were illegal to set off in the the city limits so we never saw much around town. We sure enjoyed watching all of the local displays though!! I did not take any photos while we were there but I should have.
We enjoyed our visit and Shasta, our dog, really enjoys staying at my folks house as she gets all kinds of treats and gets to be lazy most of the time, except when they take her for walks. She gets to stay with them for 3 weeks while we run around colorado and visit our friends. Hope we can fit her in the RV when we get back to pick her up!!

Mt Rushmore and the Black Hills

We drove down to the Black Hills of South Dakota and found room at a campground on Lake Sheridan. It is a national forest campground and our site looked right down on the lake with a great view of the skiers and nice area to view the sunsets.
Everything in the Black Hills area is fairly easy to get too and not the far away from where we were staying. We first went to the Mt Rushmore Monument. We did not realize that it had been many years since we had been there. Now they have a 2 or 3 level parking garage and it was almost full. We must have hit the time of year that it starts getting very busy as the monument was full of people. We took a short hike on the trail that runs underneath the monument and gave us a great view of the faces from different angles.
My folks came up from Scottsbluff for the day and we went to lunch with them in Hill City and had a good visit. They went to Custer State Park for the rest of the day and we went over to Jewel Cave to visit it. We found out that you need to reserve your tickets ahead of time so we bought them for the next day and went back.
The Jewel Cave hike was very interesting!! we went down in elevators to 379 feet below the surface to begin the tour. The formations were very interesting, it was hard to take good photos as we werent allowed to take tripods but I managed to get a few good ones. It was a total of 750 steps, most of them down so it wasnt really that hard of a trip thru the cave. It maintains a nice even temp of around 49 deg which was cool but not too bad. The Cave is now the second largest cave in the world due to over 150 miles being explored on several levels. It is amazing that they have found that many miles of passages. I highly recommend this tour if you ever get the chance!!

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

We went to Teddy Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota for a short visit after traveling thru Montana. Would have liked to spent more time in Montana but our schedule would not permit it this time around.

RNP is along the Missouri river near the town of Medora ND. It is a nice little town mainly made up of tourists stores and several restaurants. Its main draw is a nightly musical that we did not get to attend but it must be very popular as it draws around 2,000 people a night during the season.

We enjoyed our short stay at RNP except for one thing, the bugs, seems like we hit the time of year that all the flying type of beetles, flies etc were everywhere. There were no mosquitoes but that is because the rest of the bugs probably ate them!!

It was hard to sit outside anytime of the day due to the number of bugs flying around your face all the time.

As you can see by some of the photos here the animals are very large at RNP!!