Havertz Family Colorado Trip May 2026

Oscar's sister, Melissa, and her cute family came to visit us right after school was out. They arrived on Saturday just in time to have cake and pizza with us while we celebrated Tyler's birthday. Those first days were filled with a lot of play time. I finally got to know sweet little Samuel! We'd spent time at their house during our Thanksgiving visit, and he hadn't even acknowledged my existence then. This time he was very affectionate and very social. I was worried about what toys we have that would entertain a two year old, but he really liked our Velcro ball dart board, our Magnatiles, and our Spelligators (which we sent them home with at the end of our visit).

After church on Sunday we put together a little egg hunt for the kids. Melissa and I took the kids to the park while Oscar and Matthew put all the eggs out in the house and on the lawn. 

Samuel has a little toy cat that he played with on our cat tree. The cat looked cute on it, but we had to stop Samuel from climbing on it. It can't quite support his weight!

The next day we took them up to Rocky Mountain National Park. We left comfortably a little after 9:00am since our reservation wouldn't allow us to enter the park until 2:00pm. As we got closer to the area, we saw a bachelor group of elk. The full grown males tend to stay at higher elevations, but the females and younger males, like these, will come down into the city. To quote from a post I saw on Instagram "during the summer months, bull elk form what’s known as bachelor groups - groups of males living peacefully together as they grow their antlers in velvet. Unlike the fall rut, when competition takes over, this is a time of calm companionship and growth. The velvet covering their antlers is living tissue full of blood vessels that deliver nutrients to help the antlers grow at an incredible rate. By late summer, these bachelor groups will split as the bulls prepare for the rut, where friendship quickly turns into rivalry."

Our family arrived before they did, so we stopped to have lunch at a cafe. After eating it still wasn't late enough to enter the park, so I suggested we all go down to Lily Lake. We knew from our previous visit that Lily Lake is on Rocky Mountain National Park property, but you don't need to go through an entrance station to get there. Once there I had to take a photo of Lily with Lily Lake in the background. She's very photogenic!

It's an easy hike that's mostly flat taking you on a loop around the lake. I only picked easy ones for this trip since we had young children with us.

The highlight of the lake was being entertained by two rival garter snakes who got in a fight in front of us. I wish I'd had my camera on video, but it was on "photo" while I was getting pictures of the snakes before they came together, and the fight happened too quickly for me to change my settings. It's common for garter snakes to fight over fish, and the 2nd one took advantage of the first having slower reflexes while it was feeding on the fish in its mouth. There was a bit of a battle in front of us, but ultimately the first managed to hang onto it's prey while the 2nd lost interest and slithered away.

On the other side of the lake the Havertz kids with water resistant shoes waded into the water. Allison didn't want to, so I kept walking around with her. It'd been overcast the last time we came to this lake, and there was still a lot of cloud cover on this visit, but it was clear enough that we saw some mountain peaks in the distance. 

We finished up our hike and met up at the visitor's center just outside the entrance gates. We saw lots of female elk along our way. Their kids got their first Jr Ranger badges! Samuel looked extra cute with his pinned on his shirt.

Our Bear Lake Corridor entry wasn't until 4pm, so we did a little scenic driving as far as we could go. Trail Ridge Rd was still closed from some late season snowstorms, so we turned around once we got to a dead end. This was our first lookout/place for the kids to climb.

And of course, we had to stop at Lily Mountain lookout. I took a photo of Lily with Lily Mountain behind her, along with Aliza (Lily Mountain is the smaller peak just to the left of Lily's head in this photo). Then we got a photo of all of the kids there before driving to the Bear Lake Corridor. 

Once on the Bear Lake Corridor we saw more elk then stopped to hike around Sprague Lake. I brought them here for these beautiful mountain views. 

And to our great delight, there were Moose! We were on the opposite side of the water from them, so we weren't sure at first, but with the zoom features on our camera we figured out they were female moose. Kids were starting to complain after all the driving we'd done, but seeing the moose totally made the day for them. They'd never seen moose before. 

Havertz Family photos!

We continued our walk around the lake enjoying the lovely views along the way. It's so shallow the animals can just walk right into it when they need to hydrate.

We got lucky that the moose were still there by the time we got over to the other side of the lake. The kids were motivated, too, since the faster we walked, the better we saw the moose.

After looping around the lake, the youngest Havertz kids were getting pretty tired. They started the long drive back home while we took Emma Lee with us to walk around Bear Lake.

As we came around the bend, we got very close views of this female elk. You can see how close we were from my passenger's side mirror in the bottom left corner of this photo on the left. Oscar practiced some elk calls he's heard from the TV show "Alone," and it really got her attention. We slowly started to drive away, and she followed us! We booked it out of there quickly not wanting to risk her ramming us, and she chased us for a few seconds until she realized she couldn't catch us. Now we wonder what exactly Oscar was saying to her in "Elkese" that peaked her interest so much. 

When we got to Bear Lake, Oscar imitated the slipping man on the "trails may be icy" sign. Emma Lee was delighted to discover some snow in late May and to get close up to a Stellar's Jay. She uses the Merlin app on her tablet to take photos and log her birds.

Although we had a long drive back from Rocky Mountain National Park and didn't get back home until nearly 10pm, we drove up to Denver the next morning to spend the day at Elitch Gardens. Originally we planned on a rest day, but cold weather and thunderstorms were predicted for Wednesday, so we changed our plans.

We started off in the water park where Allison, Lily, and I did several water slides. Unfortunately the splash area and wave pool were all pretty cold, so we left the water park after a short time and took the kids over to the theme park. Allison is too tall for the kids' bumper cars and several other kid rides, so she took Matthew to a few of her favorite big rides while Melissa and I stayed with the other kids.

I often complain that Elitch's has poor operations and rough rides, but I have to admit they do have a good collection of kid and family rides. It was a good fit for their family.

Allison came back to do a few of the kids' rides with her cousins that she's still allowed to do, like the Jumpin' Jack

And the kids' roller coaster.

Later on she and Lily went on Troika.

I ended up staying with Samuel for about 30 minutes while everyone else went on family rides. Samuel loves balls and had a grand old time playing with them in the Goofy Gazebo. 

At some point he started asking for "mama" and led me out of the play place to look for her. We met back up with Melissa, Lily, and Allison and went over to the Sidewinder roller coaster. Samuel couldn't go on it, so we did a rider swap where I stayed with Samuel while Melissa, Lily, and Allison rode the coaster, then I handed off Samuel to them and did the coaster with Allison. This was our first time doing it in the front row! I then took Samuel and Aliza back to ride some kid rides while the others kept going on bigger rides. 

Samuel was having fun on these motorcycles at first, then he got scared and cried for the rest of the ride (I cut off the video when he started crying). When the ride was over he said "that was a fun ride!" Go figure!

The next day was mostly a chill day at our house. We were exhausted from the previous two big days, and the weather was cold and rainy. We did go over to the rec center for a little swimming, but otherwise we just hung out playing with games and toys. I got these photos of Samuel falling asleep to some Cocomelon videos upstairs. Matthew worked remotely both Wednesday and Thursday. I'm impressed with how well he can tune out everything around him and go into "work zone." We offered him our upstairs office, but he only used it for a Zoom meeting. Otherwise he had his little portable desk and just did his work in the basement or on the couch.

Unfortunately Melissa picked up some sort of stomach bug and wasn't feeling well on Thursday. She spent most of the day in bed while I took the 4 girls out for some fun. We started off at the play area at Focus on the Family.

We then spent several hours at the new Jungle Reef touch aquarium. Moms were free for the entire month of May! We saw lots of animals and did several different kinds of animal feedings, including stingrays, sharks, fish, and birds.

Occasionally they'd bring an animal out for up close encounters.

The bird feeding was very popular with these girls, especially Emma Lee and Allison. The staff were generous and let us keep coming back for more feedings. Aliza was a bit skittish when they would land on her and dropped her cup of food a few times, so she stopped doing the feedings but would still come in the room with us and sit on the bench. 

He was resting when we first saw him, but later their black throated monitor lizard "Waffles" was very social and very active. He was clearly trying to get to the kids through his enclosure. 

We finished off with bunny feeding,

Turtle feeding,

And more bunny feeding.

That afternoon and evening Tyler and Oscar went with Matthew to visit the Paint Mines and camp at a campground there. Unfortunately they got rained on. Oscar and Tyler had been in sleeping bag hammocks and Matthew had been in the tent. Matthew was fine in the tent, but Oscar and Tyler had to sleep in the car once they started getting wet.

There was a thunderstorm and rain the next morning that weren't in the forecast, but then it cleared up enough to see Pike's Peak. Once we were sure we weren't going to drive back into the storm, we went to Garden of the Gods. Emmalee was happy to go somewhere to see more birds. The one on the right is a Black Billed Magpie and the one in the middle is a Woodhouse's Scrubjay. 

They had a fun time playing and exploring. Here in the cracks in the rock EmmaLee found a new bird called a "Rock Dove." She thought they were pigeons, and technically they are, but the pigeons we see everywhere are actually feral descendents of wild rock doves that escaped being domesticated. Their genetic makeup is the same, but wild rock doves tend to be a bit more pale. 

We walked out of the central garden area then made our way over to Steamboat and Balance Rocks.

Balance Rock was a great place to get out and climb. I never knew you could climb it until this visit when we saw plenty of people out there on it. 

Lily and Emma Lee liked posing to look like they were lifting up the rock.

From Balance Rock there are some lovely views of the central area we'd just explored.

That evening the girls had some fun on the trampoline.

And the next morning the Havertz family woke up bright and early to start their long drive home. They stopped at the only Buc'ee's in Colorado, which my family still hasn't been to!