Santa Barbara Campground is in the Carson National Forest and in the heart of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains (meaning “Christ of Blood”). You are surround by beautiful mountains with varies types of trees and pines.
Upon getting to this park, you must travel on Hwy 75 (from the town of Mora) to the town of Penasco, then veer left onto Hwy 73. Now according to the internet instruction, you turn onto FR 116 (which we never found the sign)-but it’s actually a county road now (C-021). After missing the road and getting into ranch country, we knew something just wasn’t right. Upon asking a few locals, we soon discovered that we were on a “back” rough road into Santa Barbara and not RV friendly. So having to unhitch the car and get turned around we headed back in the opposite direction. Again we could not find this “forest road-116”, asking another local we soon discovered that FR-116 was actually C-021!
Travel about 5+ miles and the road dead-ends into the park. The only downfall is the road turns narrow once you get onto national Forest Rd. Here are some pictures of what the gravel roadway looks like:
View as if leaving the park.
View of the road heading towards the park.
We hoped that we didn’t meet another RV coming out-for it would have been a tight squeeze for two large RV’s or even a horse trailer to pass each other. We got lucky…
After biting our nails on this stretch of the roadway, we entered into Santa Barbara Campground and we thought we found heaven! The campground was just beautiful, spacious and oh, so peaceful (well, for the most part).
In this park you are at about 8800 feet in elevation and if you are not use to this kind of height-you need to take a few days to acclimate yourself. So we took the first two days just kicking back and enjoying our campsite and the awesome view surrounding us.
There were plenty of sites that provided lots of shade-but we preferred this particular site with lots of sunshine for our solar panel to work.
We had a great view of the surrounding mountains.
We came across this particular campground by the word of mouth from an elderly lady at Coyote Creek State Park. She told us if we enjoyed hiking to come and check this out-well of course that got my interest in a heartbeat and that is why we came here.
True to her words-we had our choices of hikes and never getting bored with the hikes. She told us about two different lakes (No Fish Lake & Truchas Lake) and even a waterfall that would be along the trails. What she failed to tell us was how far it was to those lakes and the waterfall! In order to reach Truchas Lake or to the water fall-you would need to spend one night out on the trail! Even by horse you could not do it in just one day. The water fall was 15 miles-one way Truchas Lake was also about as far for it was at the Santa Barbara Divide (The Continental Divide).
We did adventure on some trails and enjoyed them greatly. The first one we did was called the Centennial Trail. We went from 8800 feet to 10, 545 feet in elevation. Although we only hiked a total of about 7 miles-it was very strenuous climb up and then back down. Here are some pics of the view from this trail:
The next trail we did was the West Fork Trail leading to Truchas Lake. That day we did about 12 miles around trip. It wasn’t nearly as strenuous as the first hike. It was spectacular and I think I could have kept going. But we go by how much water we carry and what is left. Rule of thumb; when we drink 1/2 of our water source-it’s time to head back. Here are some spectacular pics of this trail:
And last but surely not the least, we took the trail just outside of the campground. This one was to be a leisurely hike and we decided that once it climbed-we would not keep going up and head back down. Well, I didn’t take our hiking GPS on this, so not sure what elevation we did climb. All I know is it kept going up and up and up. We later learned that it does a loop circle and connects to the East Fork and somewhere along this trail a plane went down many years ago but evidence was still there along with a grave marker. The trail would have eventually taken us along a rock cliff where rams roam the area. We didn’t get to see any-but enjoyed the hike non the less. Here are a few pics of this trail:
We only got to spend a week here and would have loved to stay longer. But not sure what might happen with the upcoming 4th of July-we headed to a state park that we knew would stay open during the busy holiday. Last year many National Parks and State Parks in the mountainous areas shut down due to extreme fire danger. No one knew for sure if they would be able to stay open or if they would shut down again, especially with the season starting out in a drought….so better be safe than sorry. So we will see what happens…until next time…..
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