Gore Creek Campground – Vail CO

Gore Creek Campground –

Just about every stop we have had on this road trip included some combination of hook-ups – water, electricity and sewer, water and electricity, or just electricity but this was our first stop where we didn’t have any.  This experience brought us back to our early days of camping when we had our wooden teardrop, so this wasn’t completely foreign to us.

Remember Her?

Those trips were typically long 3-day weekends in the summertime when the weather was warm and we spent most of our time outside.  Now we have a bigger setup with 300 watts of solar, a 30-gallon freshwater tank, a sink, tankless hot water heater, lots more storage, a shower, toilet, and an external grey water tank.  We have come a long way since then and we are now able to camp 100% off grid. Fortunately, this stop was only for 2 nights so we didn’t have to go too long without the comforts and convenience of having full hook ups.  It was also nice practice for being of grid if we ever decide to do it for a longer stretch.

For this short stop, we stayed at Gore Creek, A small campground just off of highway 70 set among the trees of the White River National Forest. The campground is a short drive away from the ski town of Vail and unlike Ouray and Telluride, Vail is a pretty sleepy town in the summer.  There really wasn’t much going on in the village, most of the shops shut down early and many of the restaurants were closed, so we didn’t spend much time there.

Our main excursion was a fun and slightly challenging hike along Gore Creek.  We walked over to the trailhead from our campsite and made our way up the trail which goes all the way up to Gore Lake, but we were not ambitious enough to make it that far up as we were still getting acclimated to the elevation. The mile or so that we did hike on the trail was filled with beautiful scenery – 360 degree views of trees wearing every shade of green, thousands of colorful flowers, water thundering down the mountain and several caterpillar nests along the way.

Sato really enjoyed this hike too and can be a good model when he is tired enough to sit still (or motivated by treats).

We also made a video of him racing up and down and exploring the trail that has been posted to our Instagram and TikTok pages – perhaps you have seen it? 😉

Main takeaways from Vail / Gore Creek:

• The campsite is bare bones but that is to be expected for a government-run campground.
• The price is right at only $30 a night.
• Not much to do in Vail in the summer, but there are plenty of hiking trails to keep you busy.
• The Continental Divide trail is nearby which is a 3,028 mile trail that stretches from the US border near Chihuahua Mexico and the border near Alberta Canada!

Cheers,

Tiny Trailer Trips Crew

PS – If you are wondering why these blog posts are coming more frequently it’s because we finally have some downtime and excellent cell service and I’m trying to get caught up.  This could be a post of it’s own where I can go into more depth on internet and cell service at camp, but for now the net net of it is that the wifi at the campgrounds is spotty at best and incredibly unreliable and the cell service at camp hasn’t been much better.  Typically we have full bars and LTE on the highway and once we pull into camp it drops to 1 bar if we are lucky.  This is just enough juice to make phone calls or send texts and is not very conducive of uploading pictures or accessing the internet to update the blog or post videos to our social media accounts.  It’s nice to finally have good enough cell service so I can access the web and get some of our adventures posted.