Manitou Lake

Spring Break once again went too fast for us. The highlights were seeing the movie, Divergent, which we all really liked, playing games together, and taking an afternoon to get back into nature again.

It only takes about seven minutes from our home to be in beautiful forest with picturesque views and lakes, but during Spring Break we wanted to see new lakes and views, so we headed West into the mountains.

 Bigbuddy remembered a lake he and his dad have passed several times on the way to their favorite motorcycle roads, so we followed his directions and ended up at Manitou Lake. He told us it was a great place to take a picnic so we brought one.

 The picnic area has large red rocks popping up all around. They were easy for our climbers to climb on and added to the unique beauty of the area. Note the grill in the foreground. I think we'll bring some grilling food when we come back in the summer.

 This is facing the north side of Pike Peak. Its the mountain furthest left. In the creek here there were three different beaver dams.

 There was a nice hike around the lake which we all went on. It was a little chilly, I'm not going to pretend it wasn't. It was a warm, 60 degree day, but we've had a wind blowing off and on, and that day, it was on part of the time, so we were glad we were prepared with our warm jackets. When you're up around 9,000 feet, you know to be prepared for cold temperatures.

 The only wildlife we saw were these two geese walking on the ice. And near the water's edge we saw some large cougar tracks. Just glad it didn't make any appearances.

 This is actually a good sized lake, but not too huge. It took us about twenty minutes to walk all the way around it. It would be a great place to come back and fish in the summer. We already told my folks that it's on our list of places to return to with them this summer.

 This is the view from the north side of the trail. The lake is behind me here and I'm facing where the motorcycle trails start further ahead.

 On the northwest side of the lake you can see that this lake is actually caused by the dam here, with water flowing north to the creek that eventually runs down into the South Platte River, which we drove by later that day.

 This facility has two fireplaces and is covered. There were also three different decent bathrooms around.

You can see where the lake is just starting to thaw up at the top. There were a couple of fishermen there while we were hiking around. We saw several more down at the river near Deckers. We'll wait til its warmer for fishing, but it was a beautiful day for a mountain picnic and a drive through some of the more scenic parts of Colorado.