There are several National Forest Campgrounds along Chalk Creek in the Mt. Princeton Area (near Buena Vista, CO).  A few years ago these campgrounds were pretty rough and not developed at all but now they are very nice with level sites and plenty of space.  We were lucky and found an empty site right along the fast flowing creek that also has numerous little waterfalls as it is dropping in elevation on it’s way to the Arkansas River not far away.

What is so nice about this area is that the ghost town of St. Elmo is only about 4 miles away and was where we accessed the road to Tincup Pass (previous post).

The Mt. Princeton Hot Springs Pools and Resort are perhaps 4 miles from the campground but in the opposite direction from St. Elmo.  The pools and lodge used to be pretty rustic but have now been completely redone.  There are at least 4 pools, rental cabins, a lodge, and a spa.  The pools have differing temperatures and they receive their hot water from Chalk Creek.

Looking closely, there is a woman sitting on the edge of the creek.  We have sat in this same area as there are little hot jets coming out of the creek.  It’s like being in a jacuzzi except that the rest of the water is cold.

It was time to see how our Chevy Tracker would do on a four wheel drive trail and so we headed to the Mt. Princeton area in central Colorado.  We picked up the road to Tincup Pass in the old ghost town of St. Elmo.

I got out to guide Steve around the bigger rocks which actually were larger than this picture shows.  Sometimes we had no choice but to crawl over rocks and a few times the bottom of our Tracker got scraped.   This rocky part of the road lasted five miles and we only encountered ATV vehicles who seemed surprised to see us.  A couple of them took our Tracker’s picture!

Once we got to the opposite side of Mirror Lake the road improved 100%.   Actually, Tincup pass is not all that steep or winding and if it weren’t for the five mile stretch of rocks, it would have been an easy drive.  The Tracker did amazingly well considering it has 2 ply tires that are for ice which we shouldn’t even be driving on in the summer.  We tried to buy more aggressive 4 ply tires but found out that none are made for our wheel size so our plans are to check into getting bigger wheels before attempting another outing such as this.