A few weeks ago we headed up to Poudre Canyon for one of our last camping trips of the year. By the time you read this review, it might be a little snowy up there, but I wanted to get it written and added to the Family Travel Guide so you can reference it next year!
We’ve camped at Mountain Park Campground before about five years ago, and we’ve been wanting to get back. It’s a fairly large campground (and you’ll pass tons of others along Hwy 14), with some electric sites. It’s just a few miles on a windy road outside of Ft. Collins, I think it took us about 90-120 minutes or so to get there. (Remember in another review how I said it takes us forever to get somewhere? We only stopped once on this drive, it was a miracle!)
One of the best things about this campground is that it’s right along the Cache la Poudre River. Our favorite site is #54 and at the far back of the campground. It’s right along the river and fairly secluded, we loved it! But sadly it was taken this time, so we took an electric site (#4). It was right across from the showers and a playground (that we could see from our site), so we thought it would be a good pick! (And other than the bear that wandered through late one night – didn’t bother us, went to another camper’s truck – it wasn’t a bad spot!)
There’s a great trail that runs the length of the campground along the river, and we went for a nice walk the first evening with the kids. They loved the narrow path and all the fun views of the river as we went. Bonus was that they ran the whole ran and then were so ready for bed when we got back to the trailer!
The next morning we headed out to hike Lower Dadd Gulch Trail Head [insert link: https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/colorado/lower-dadd-gulch-trail]. The trail is an old Jeep Trail and was a really fun and beautiful hike. We encountered lots of little creeks along the way, which the kids LOVED figuring out how to cross on the rocks. Our daughter even said it’s her favorite hike we’ve done! We got a little later start than we had planned, and it started to get very close to lunch, so we turned around after about a mile to get the kids fed and avoid a meltdown. But there were lots of hikers on the trail and it sounds like it was a beautiful hike! When we started the trail we weren’t sure if it was 3.5 miles roundtrip or just one-way, and it does look like it’s 3.5 miles one-way. So the full hike would be seven miles, definitely too far for my two kiddos at this point. But it was definitely worth hiking in a mile or two and turning around.
During our visit we also went to play in the river a couple times. There are several places where the rocks have created calmer areas that the kids can play in, and both of our kids were able to go out pretty far into the river, which they loved. I’d recommend bringing water shoes along, it’s all rock and slippery. We had our kids rain boots, which were okay, but water shoes would have been much better!
This was a bit of a shorter trip for us, we pulled in late on Friday and headed out on Sunday morning, but it was a great weekend trip to get out of the city and get the kids playing in the mountains. I would definitely recommend it for a fun family getaway!
