Highway of Legends in Colorado

One of the blogs we follow has been on the same route as we have been for a little while but are head of us. They stopped at a place just over the Colorado border from New Mexico and it looked pretty nice. So we decided to make it our next stop. Trinidad State Park is on a reservoir named Trinidad Lake. We loved our time in the Arizona desert especially with the wild flowers in Spring and also the more open area of New Mexico but also happy to see the awesome mountains of Colorado. We picked the same site, 46, as the Lowe's (blog I mentioned above) did and were glad we did. Lots of nice greenery and view of the water and the mountains beyond. The pictures below are taken from our site.

Thursday we set out for a drive on the Highway of Legends, which starts at Trinidad. It is a Colorado State Byway and a National Forest Byway. It is 44 miles on Hwy 12 between Trinidad State Park and Lathrop State Park and total of 82 miles round trip.  We had a brochure that lists a number of the highlights. Our first stop was the Cokedale Ovens, an interesting structure that looks like Roman Ruins but are coke ovens that transform coal into coke for use in smelting iron.

Took a quick drive through the town of Cokedale.. Below is the Cokedale Museum which didn't look open to us.

The scenery is just beautiful, especially with the snow capped mountains, the Spanish Peaks.

Interesting rock formations and also some of the buildings in the small towns of Segundo and Virgil.

In Virgil we checked out the unique "House on the Bridge", a famous landmark in this area.

We continued on viewing more interesting rock formations found throughout the rockies, North Lake and lots of green, green trees. Lovely. We went over Cuchara Pass, which is just under 10,000 feet. A little chilly.

We even some a little wildlife as we spied a group of deer on the side of the road.

We drove down a dirt road we thought went to Blue Lake but ended up turning around. There was a nice little waterfall though. Also aspens which would be so beautiful in the fall when they get their yellow flowers.

Below are some more great sights on this highway.

We stopped at Lathrop State Park. We wanted to check it out as we could only get 3 days at Trinidad and wanted to check out Lathrop. We can't make reservations online for the next day(can only reserve 3 days later) but looking online it looked like there were some not reserved. We drove through and there were some without tags for the weekend. We like the Park and so marked the sites we liked. We plan on getting up early Friday so we can get a spot for the weekend.  Stay tuned.