Morrison, Granby, Grand Lake, Winter Park Trip 2026

After my week at the Vocal Arts Festival, we took a 3 night trip to Granby, CO. Granby is about 3 hours away, so we made our first stop in Golden, CO to walk along the Triceratops Trail. It's a neat trail full of fossils in the wall near the Fossil Trace golf course course. Most of the fossils are plants and small vertebrates, but there are some triceratops tracks in the walls.

You get fossils and a beautiful view. Just watch out for stray golf balls!

It's not a hard trail at all, but it was VERY hot that day. 

We grabbed some lunch then drove to Morrison to visit Dinosaur Ridge. We parked in the museum parking lot then started our hike around the actual Dinosaur Ridge.

Many people take guided bus tours here, but we opted to save money and walk. We heard bits of other people's tours when their driver/tour gouide would make a stop to tell them about what they were seeing. However it was around 100 degrees outside, and the kids and I were definitely struggling to hike uphill in that heat. You'd never know it was that hot with this obvious rainstorm in the distance. 

The hike takes you around the ridge and back, but the kids weren't up for the hike back. Oscar hiked back to get the car while the kids and I went to the nearby Discovery Center.

It's pretty small (you could see everything from the entrance), but it was air conditioned, which was a great relief.

While there we learned that the first Stegosaurus fossil was found in Morrison. At first they thought the plates covered the dinosaur like a turtle, but when they found a fossilized stegosaurus in the mud, they realized the plates went up, not across.

They had a small aniatronic of a Maiasaura mama with her eggs. 

Since it was so small, we were more than ready to go buy the time Oscar arrived. Our $10 tickets were also valid for their little museum back where we'd originally parked the car, so Oscar took us back to it. 

During our hike, we'd learned there was a piece of the ridge itself taken by a fraternity. They used it as a door step for decades with fraternity members having no idea where it came from. It was finally returned in 2006 when one of the guys brought it to the museum asking if Dinosaur Ridge was interested in it. They recognized it immediately, and now it sits in this glass box in the museum.

I like how these leg fossils were placed with this mural so you can see how they would have looked on the dinosaur. They do a similar thing with the fossil replica in the dinosaur statue below. 

This photo above makes it look like the dinosaur is eating leaves off of Tyler's head!

Before we left, the kids got to dig for fossils in the sand pit and take one home. They were small fossils that aren't hard to come by, like shark teeth, but it made a fun souvenir for them.

After visiting the museum, we finished our drive up to Granby and got checked into our room. The kids were too tired to do anything else that evening, so we let them have their tablets and make themselves easy mac for dinner while Oscar and I went on a date night. We started off with a little hike up to the Granby Gazebo.

We then drove into town and had a delicious dinner! Oscar had a burger, and I had an delightful chicken piccata. We also got a yummy bread pudding for dessert. When it was time to pay the bill, I got my credit card out sooner than Oscar did (it's a shared credit card from the same account). He took this photo and joked that he was taking me on a date but making me pay for dinner. 

The next morning Oscar went on a jog, we went to church at the local branch, then we took the Granby ski lift up to play some disc golf. It was a good course that took us downhill as we played. We were hoping to take the lift back up to see some more of the scenery, but the weather had other plans. 

The weather cleared up later, and we drove up to Adam's Falls at Rocky Mountain National Park. Even though it's not in one of the main park entrances, it still requires timed entry between 9:00am and 2:00pm in order to reduce crowds. We drove up in the rain and thought we'd have to hike in the rain, but it cleared up just as we arrived. By arriving at 6:30pm, we didn't need a timed entry reservation, and we didn't have to deal with crowds.

Here's Oscar and Tyler making a "duh" video and Allison balancing on a fallen tree.

We then drove into the town of Grand Lake for dinner. I picked up food at an old stagecoach saloon restaurant that had been converted into an Indian restaurant. I wasn't super hungry and just grabbed some soup and naan, but it was yummy! The family had picked up food and an Oreo Churro sundae at an ice cream place, so I just got my food to go and joined them there.

The next day Oscar took a walk to a local breakfast place. We picked him up from there before driving up to hike the Monarch Lake Loop.

This trail was busy and the parking lot was packed. We got lucky and were able to snag a spot just as someone was pulling out. 

The trail loops around the lake, but you have to go well beyond the lake to get beyond the woods to a bridge that crosses over to the other side. I walked at Allison's pace while Oscar and Tyler walked ahead of us after the crossing. They saw a female moose in the woods. 

If you're coming for the view and don't care about the exercise, the best views are near the start of the trail head on both sides of the loop. Walk about 1/4 of a mile in both directions and you'll see the best views it has to offer. 

From there we continued on to Grand Lake to get lunch and go mini golfing. We enjoyed the beautiful views as we drove around Lake Granby. It was still very lovely in spite of the water being much lower than usual.

I insisted we go back to the yummy Indian place for lunch. We had an excellent meal then went to the Meandering Moose Mini Golf course. It's a well maintained course with a pretty mountain backdrop as you play. 

That evening we tried going swimming at the nearby sister resort, but the pool was closed temporarily for cleaning. We played a little racquetball in their racquetball courts until 6:30 when they said the pool would reopen. That never ended up happening since a HUGE lightning storm started up right as they were about to reopen the pool. Instead we went back to our room where I sat in the hot tub. I didn't get any photos, but our room had its own full size jacuzzi! 

The next day we checked out of our room and drove down to Winter Park. We'd bought their summer day pass to do some sightseeing, alpine sliding, mini-golfing, and disc-golfing. Here's Allison and I riding up the ski-lift. 

 

We had a fun ride down. Oscar went to the bathroom after our first ride then got some video of us coming down our second ride while he was taking the ski lift back up.

It's a good slide, but the line was long and SLOW. We took a break from the lines and went over to play mini-golf on their putting course. 

From there we took the scenic chair lift up assuming that's where we needed to go to play the disc golf course. 

We soon learned the scenic lift ride wasn't the lift for the disc golf. The lift for the disc golf was actually the same lift as the one for the alpine slide. We stuck around for a little bit to do some sightseeing and hike the Alpine Fairy Trail.

We enjoyed our lovely views riding down then waited in the long line for the alpine slide lift. Employees had to give us instructions to the start of the disc golf course.

No one else was playing disc golf, and it soon became abundantly clear why. The course was extremely hard on overgrain terrain. If you throw any direction but straight through the fairway, you're going to lose your disc in the tall grasses and shrubbery. It also wasn't straight down like the one we'd done in Granby. It winds you up and down the mountainside ending in the same place it started. I think we played about 7 holes and searched for our discs at least 10 times before deciding we were done. I bet it would have taken several hours to complete the whole course since it's basically a big hike combined with a disc golf course. 

We decided to walk back down to the chairlift, but this ended up being much more challenging than expected due to mountain bike trails. We ended up having to bushwhack our way down and keep as far away from the bikers as possible. This took us over 30 minutes just to get back to the base of the hill. 

We decided to go up the lift for one last ride on the alpine slide, but only Allison and I ended up making it down. It started raining just as I was finishing the slide, with Allison right behind me. At first we hoped the rain would pass and they'd be able to go down the slide too, but then it started coming down HARD. The slide isn't allowed to operate while it's raining, so Oscar and Tyler had to wait at the top of the slide to be bussed back down to us before we could start our 3 hour drive home. I hadn't realized alpine slides were so sensitive to water. We'll have to keep that in mind the next time we visit a mountain resort.