Longmont/Estes Park, CO
Park Review – Gopher Gulch RV Resort, Longmont, CO
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Location: Longmont, CO
Type: Commercial
Check-in/Check-out times: 2:00/11:00
Site Quality / Amenities: The park is new. Some sites are all gravel while more premium ones have concrete pads. There are onsite restrooms with showers and laundry facilities. There is also a small camp store and a community building.
Access: Easy access from I-25 north of Denver.
Staff: Friendly / Helpful staff.
Cellular/WiFi: Good cellular and decent WiFi within the park. Starlink has an unobstructed view of the sky as there are few trees.
Nearby parks: We didn’t look at other parks in the area.
What we liked: The park is close to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park – Only about an hour away. New park. Lot’s of stores an restaurants in Longmont.
What we didn’t like: Sites closer to highway 30 got a lot of road noise.
Verdict: Definitely a good park, we’d stay here again.
Walsenburg, CO
Park Review – Love’s RV Stop
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Location: Walsenburg, CO
Type: Commercial
Check-in/Check-out times: 2:00/12:00
Site Quality / Amenities: Roads are dirt/gravel but sites are concrete. There is gravel between the sites. Each site has a picnic table and premium sites have a roof over the table and a larger patio. Power and water hookups were good. There is no sewer but there are two dump sites on the way out of the park.
Staff: There was no interaction with staff onsite. Everything was fully automated.
Cellular/WiFi: T-Mobile was 4 bars with download speeds of about 248 Mbps and upload speeds of 3 Mbps. The park also had WiFi but we did not use it.
Restaurants: We ate at TC’s Diner nearby the park. The place looks a bit rough from the outside. Inside it’s a typical old school small town diner with friendly staff and decently good food.
What we liked: Nice paved sites. Very quiet – we were concerned about being next to a large gas station / truck stop as well as nearby the freeway but there was literally zero noise from any of those. The entire campground is in a bit of a bowl which helps with the noise and could be protective for wind and other weather.
What we didn’t like: Next door to the park is a wrecker yard with some destroyed cars and one RV. The good thin is that it’s on a hill above the park so we couldn’t see most of it. There is also a county prison on the other side of the wrecking yard. Our site (11) was not level front to back or side to side although it was not necessary to use extra blocks.
Verdict: We would stay here again. This is definitely an upgrade from the KOA in Raton.n
Estes Park, CO
Well we thought we had seen most everything but on the way to Estes Park we stopped at the Wyoming rest stop just before entering Colorado. While there, we saw a trucker pull in and set up a long ramp from his passenger door. Next he guided his two pet hogs down the ramp and out to the grass where most people take their dogs. It was quite a sight and it might be a while before we can say – well now we’ve seen everything again!
Penrose (Colorado Springs), CO
We spent a month in this area in October 2023. The actual park we stayed at is about half way between Colorado Springs and Penrose / Cañon City. Also nearby is Florence which is the home to numerous prisons including the ADX supermax prison sometimes known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies. It is one of the most secure prisons in the U.S. and has housed several high profile criminals including Ted Kaczynski (the Unibomber), Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Boston Marathon Bomber), and Richard Reid (the Shoe Bomber). We drove by but didn’t linger in the area!
Also nearby is the Royal Gorge near Cañon City, several roads with beautiful scenery up into the nearby Rocky Mountains (although we played it safe and didn’t try some of the more challenging ones with our dually truck), and of course Florissant, Divide, Woodland Park and Colorado Springs. We took a few road trips and hikes but mostly just hung out at our park. Just before the end of our stay, the area got it’s first winter snow and we woke up one morning to 8″ of snow. Luckily most of it was gone before we left.
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