Never Summer Range

This holiday weekend took us up highway 14 to North Park where we ended up camping in the Never Summer Range. True to form it was chilly with a mean wind  blowing and  it rained several times on us. The original plan was to camp on the State Park lands but their rules are very restrictive now and only allow camping in official campgrounds, as closely packed together as a trailer park. That's not the kind of camping we like to do.
   We had a whole afternoon available to explore since we weren't camping there, and specifically went looking for a place where we had camped in 1997 when the kids were young. It was the back side of a high spur of ridge with a spectacular view of the whole range heading northwards. While we were there the kids built a temporary fort out of old  fallen logs and branches. The road was a little logging road that had branched off of the main road.  We couldn't find it at first - they had closed off many of the old roads for regrowth.
  Parking the car at a barricaded road that we thought might be the old original road,we set off hiking. It soon became apparent that the overgrown road we were on wasn't the right place but the hill off to the west looked familiar. Leaving the road we hiked up the ridge and found ourselves exactly in the old place we had camped long ago. It had been clear cut right before we had originally found it, but now with twelve years of new growth it was filled with small aspens and pines. I could even see the place where the kids had built their fort long ago. We walked back down the overgrown road and ended up several hundred yards from our car.
   We found another newer open road in the park near the same area that provided a spectacular view of the whole range.  The red-brown patches on the mountains are the large areas of trees killed by the beetle infestation that's killing off all the pine forests all over Colorado. In 1997 it was all green.