US Forestry Department

Allllright. The one and only reason why I even feel compelled to waste my time writing this review is because I’m still so angry about this… I guess the rant will help me slowly get over this…
We decided to spend our vacation in Colorado. Beautiful ATV Colorado. We came to pick up some friends in our RV and sort of wing it as to which RV parks we’d check into according to how good the ATV trails were. In any case, we settled probably at the wrong time of the year here, when RV parks were just opening up since winter was ending. Hills were still snowy, slush everywhere, but beautiful and sunny so I guess it was that time of year to bring out the ATVs. We settled at Ute Bluff Lodge somewhere in this vicinity. The owner of the lodge had just opened the place up, actually opened up the day we pulled in. We asked him about the trails and how they were, etc, he said that because winter was just about ending, a lot of the trails were still blocked off, but to just go around the barricades. Okay, so that’s exactly what we did. We traveled up this great hill, tons of slush and snow though. Enough to make me want to go back actually. Once we hit the point of no return because the entire rest of the mountain was snowed over, we decided to head back down. We got halfway down and we were met by not one but 4 rangers and two squad cars. I totally felt like I had committed a crime and all I did was listen to the guys advice back at the lodge! They took our licenses and we had to follow them back down. That’s when we were verbally abused by this forestry service. This man had eyes that had no warmth to them, just sleet was all I could see. He spewed his venom and had no mercy on us whatsoever. He then claimed that we had done over $ 2,000 worth of damage to their mountain trail and that now someone would have to fix our damage. Please, I seriously doubt that. Let me go up there with my field dragger that I use for softball and it will take me an hour, tops. I rather would have done that than get the $ 300 ticket I was given. Once I started to complain considering we were clearly visitors, he said I should be glad that he didn’t ticket all four of us. The older gentleman that was there clearly felt bad about this and even said that he was sorry that we were given tickets. Its just a rough time of year with the ATV situation and they have to be very careful.
My thoughts on this entire thing: US Forestry Department of Colorado, thank you for ensuring that I never ever everrrr return back to this state. You are not welcoming whatsoever and are as cold as your winters. Maybe I should have mentioned that we almost died in Vail because your ridiculous people that you call rangers didn’t shut down the highway we were trying to get up.
Funny story though, shortly after this, my husband and his friend were pulled over because they were on the highway on the ATVs. Oh, also no mention of having to be trailered to the trails. Its a law that you have to and every place we went to said that we didn’t have to worry about that. We were pretty certain that the ranger that busted us called over to make sure that we weren’t seen on the highways and if we were, we needed to be pulled over. In any case, they were pulled over by a super cool Colorado police officer who pretty much told them that the CO forestry department were full of a bunch of rejects that wished they were cops. They shared a smoke and the guy pretty much told them that they really just shouldn’t do that anymore. Now, let me ask you forestry department of Colorado, why can’t you be like this also?

We visited this ranger station to pick up our backcountry permit before hiking into Gourd Lake. They are open until 6pm on Fridays — which was super helpful since the drive from Morrison to Idaho Springs took 2.5 hours (thanks, accident). We just made it and after we left, they called us and then stayed open long enough for us to drive back to pay the $ 5 they forgot to collect (haha).
This station has a lot of neat/​fun/​creepy taxidermy’d local wildlife. They also offer a lot of free information pamphlets. All of the staff we encountered were friendly and helpful. The lady who took our information gave us good tips for our trip: extra socks due to wet hiking, beware the bears (not a real danger but they had been spotted in the area), mind the mosquitoes and ticks. Even though these suggestions are good to keep in mind for any hiking/​camping/​backpacking trip, it was still helpful to have useful information for real-​time conditions.
I suspect if we do more trips in this area, we’ll be back to this station since they’re conveniently located (if you’re headed that way, that is) and quite helpful.