Hidden Valley Sledding
Activity: SleddingDifficulty: Easy
Location: Rocky Mountain National Park
Description:
We were aiming for a relaxing family day with not so much physical effort as our last adventure of failed cross country skiing. Rocky Mountain National Park had a ski resort, Hidden Valley, until the 1990's. It has since been closed and revitalized as a snow recreation area including a sledding hill on the old bunny hill and plenty of trails for Alpine skiing or snowshoeing. Obviously, you could visit this area in the summer, too, but it is managed well in the winter. The parking area was nice and the weekend is staffed with a Park Ranger to direct traffic. We couldn't believe that such a nice area was not very crowded. The Ranger Station is also open with a warming room on the weekends. Public flush restrooms are available every day.
Take the road towards Trail Ridge Road, past Deer Junction and up a ways. Turn right off Trail Ridge road and the parking area is not far. If you get to the closure at Many Parks Curve, you've gone too far. We took our picnic to the warming room because it is not easy to feed 2 kids in the car. We socialized with other skiers and families there for sledding. We got the kids bundled up and headed out with our sleds to the hill. Neil went down once with Brett and then decided that he would rather just dig and play in the snow. Boyd and I kept climbing up and sledding down. It went much easier after I figured out a better way to pull him in the sled without him tipping out. He seemed to keep asking to go down again so I kept taking him back up. Brett stayed at the bottom with Neil and chatted with a volunteer Ranger while Neil played.
I did convince Neil to go down on the sled with me before we headed to the warming hut again. We let the kids run around inside and get warm before we loaded Boyd in the trailer and put on snowshoes for a very short hike. We weren't sure where we were going to hike to or how far. We ended up letting Neil hike with his snowshoes for awhile and then it started to get too cold. After only hiking a very short distance we turned around and went back to the truck. We thought about hitting the sledding hill for a few more runs but decided to just head home. This was a very fun day and we will definitely be making this sledding trip a regular winter activity.
We finally saw elk in the park on this visit and we purchased our annual park pass!
