The Adventures of Bubbles and Coach Pa - Colorado Trip Day 9: Loch Vale and Mills Lake

We took our biggest hiking adventure of the trip on a 7 mile excursion around Loch Vale and to Mills Lake in the Bear Lake area of Rocky Mountain National Park.
We didn't exactly pick the best day for this. It was hot. I mean sizzling hot. Then, it rained. That only made things steamy when it got hot again. Lots of fun, but we were wiped out at the end.
Not posted in this was our adventure even getting into the park. We could not get reservations because I did not log onto the website at precisely 5p the night before and they were all gone by 5:05 (no joke). So, we chose to get tickets on the shuttle from Estes Park to the lake. Folks - if you do that, be sure to get a ticket for each member of the party - even if that means buying a group ticket for each person. Even though the reservation says that you only need to buy a pass for the group of 4 and then just specify the number of people - that second part was not an option on my phone and it was not clear if we were okay. Turns out we were NOT. Hopefully they clean up their website because it is misleading as heck and nearly caused us to miss our shuttle.
Using the shuttle option got us on the trail just before noon -- which was WAY later than we wanted to start. Trying to make up some time, we took the "fire trail", which cuts off about .5 miles of hiking, but at the cost of a much more steep ascent at first. Then, we went up to Loch Vale with actually the plans to keep going forward to Lake of Glass, but as luck would have it, I busted my hiking boot so we chose to head back and try to hit Mills Lake if our fix to the shoe held. That was probably the right decision. Unfortunately, just as we got to Mills, it started raining.
All in all, it was a fun hike, but I think we will do it again next time we come to Colorado because I feel like we missed quite a bit dealing with the adversity (not enough time, equipment failure, bad weather).
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