Rifle Gap State Park

Before our ridiculous Friday the 13th "fun", we journeyed from our rest stop in Goodland, KS to Rifle, Colorado.

Welcome to Colorful Colorado! 

Kora, who is truly a wonderful camp kitty, threw mini tantrums off and on throughout the day. I wish she would be a better traveler since she seems to love camping so much.  Dexter has become an excellent travel kitty since we have fixed his diet (he know eats prescription, easy to absorb, cat food) and has put on some weight.  He now will purr and relax in the car.  I keep hoping that Kora will get that way at some point.

Let me sing you the song of my people

Minus the backseat sing-a-long from Kora, the drive was amazing. Having never driven this way before, we didn't know what to expect. What we learned is that I-70 goes straight through (literally - we drove through several major tunnels) and over the lower portion of the Rocky Mountains.  

Approaching the Mountains

The scenery was just beautiful for the majority of the drive. We saw snow capped peaks (up close and personal at 12,000 feet!), and steep and narrow canyons, and tons of waterfalls from the snow run off on the side of the mountains.  

Towards the end of the canyons we drove through

After 7 hours (only 1.5 hours longer than we had planned - I am sensing a theme here. Boo), we arrived at Rifle Gap State Park, outside of the town of Rifle in western Colorado.  We chose this campground purely on the fact that it was a good midway point between Goodland, KS and Moab, UT. It was fantastic - minus the fact that we had no real internet or cell phone connection. Every once in awhile we would get a bar, but for 95% of the time, we were completely technology free. Which, I don't mind at all - if I know ahead of time that will be the case.

The reservoir - the orange arrow is pointing to us in our spot.

Rifle Gap is a state park on a fairly large reservoir.  The area is surrounded by mountains and is mostly what I would call a high desert ecosystem. 

Our primo spot

I was not really expecting much of this place since we just chose it out of necessity, but it turned out to really private and beautiful. Our spot was one of the most private with no one on any side of us.  The overall park was very quiet and isolated, which is a rare thing since we were actually only a few miles from town. 

You can really tell how private our spot is in this picture

The town of Rifle itself is also an extremely cute little town. According to wiki, it has a population of about 10,000 people.  The downtown area was really nice and they have obviously put a lot of effort into maintaining its charm. Thursday morning we ate breakfast at this pretty fantastic downtown diner called the Base Camp Cafe - complete with lots of cheery dead animals on the walls!

Part of downtown Rifle

Then we headed back towards camp - and continued for about another 10 minutes to another state park called Rifle Falls State Park to see what it was all about. I guess I have lived away from waterfalls for a long time because I was thinking that this would be just a nice little trickle or something.  But, wow - these waterfalls were absolutely AMAZING. One of the most beautiful waterfalls I have ever seen. They are 70 feet tall and were just gushing water.

The triple falls at Rifle Falls

There is a short path that leads you to the top of the falls so you can get a great "behind the scenes" look at them.

Just gorgeous!

I could have spent hours here. There were some nice benches and picnic tables nearby that would be wonderful to have a nice lunch and enjoy the falls. However, it was a fairly small park with not a lot of parking, so I imagine that a person would want to get there early on the weekends to get a spot.

But first, we're gonna take a selfie

After we got done enjoying the waterfall, we headed back to camp where I cut up some chicken breast and marinated them in a honey mustard sauce. My mom gave us some flexible skewers as part of our anniversary gift so I decided it was about time to cook up some kabobs. These turned out amazing - the marinated chicken, plus garlic and herb seasoned mushrooms and tomatoes with a side of red beans and rice. So good!

MMMMM Kabobs!

Then, in the evening we got to watch as storms rolled by next to us. We were never rained on, but you could see where the storms were dumping rain on the mountains next to us. It was very pretty to watch!

Storm clouds rolling by

All in all our temporary rest stop turned out to be much better, more secluded, and more beautiful than we had imagined! We will be definitely keeping it in mind if we ever come back out this way in the future!