A few of the best kid-friendly campsites
What I learned from camping when my daughter was a toddler
Living in Colorado affords some amazing opportunities to go camping. There’s nothing quite like packing up the car, driving to the mountains, cooking over a fire and sleeping under the stars. Whether you reserve a campsite or forge out on your own will determine your proximity to civilization and amenities. The best part is camping can be an inexpensive getaway of which you need relatively little gear to do so…perhaps just a sleeping bag and a tent.
Unless of course you’re camping with a toddler.
My parents never took me for a weekend in the wild. My mother’s parents made her camp all the time so she decided when she was an adult with kids that sleeping outside on the ground was not the sort of vacation she’d choose. Luckily she had four children and we lived in Alabama where camping isn’t as attractive as a Gulf Shores beach getaway. With the exception of a boyfriend in college who dragged me along on his trips, I never really camped until I lived in Colorado. My husband and I initially took camping trips born out of a necessity to have a 4am start time hiking 14ers. We rarely camped more than a night and for a while I borrowed a tent since we didn’t own one. I didn’t understand why anyone would camp if they weren’t hiking a mountain the next day because what else was the point of sleeping in the dirt?
After having Charlotte my husband and I decided to be daring and take her on her first trip when she was 1.5 years old. We couldn’t carry her up a mountain but we wanted to be in close proximity to hiking so we drove down to Buena Vista. Naïve as I was, I thought we could just drive into the Collegiate Peaks Campground up on Cottonwood pass and find a first come first serve spot on a Friday evening in summer. We ended up driving halfway up the pass and finding a spot off the side of the road where a fire ring was present indicating others had camped there before. It was right by a stream and seemed to be the perfect place to spend the weekend. What could go wrong now that we had a spot?
