We’ve been trying to decide where we want to camp at next, so we set out on a day trip to Colorado Bend State Park. It’s about a two hour drive for us so it wasn’t too bad to make a day trip out of it. We packed our lunches, snacks, water, and our puppies into the car and drove off down the road! We actually really enjoyed the drive up to the park. It was very beautiful.Once we got inside the park, it was another 6 miles to the visitor center to check in. If you are just going hiking to the Gorman Falls, you can stop at the entrance to pay your fees, but if you are camping, just keep on driving and enjoy the views.
Click here to view all of our photos from Colorado Bend SP
We went just to go hiking, but we also wanted to check out the campsites to see if it’s somewhere we want to camp in the future. Unfortunately, we were not impressed with their walk in or the drive up campsites. The only thing nice about them were the lantern posts and the grills. It might as well be a golf course. There are hardly any trees for privacy, but it’s probably a really great place to camp in large groups! We will not be camping here in the future. There are some newly planted trees all around, so I suspect that many years down the road they may be very beautiful camping spots, who knows! But here are some pictures of the campsites if you are interested in seeing them for yourself:
Colorado Bend also has primitive backpack-in campsites which are about a half mile to 1 mile from the parking area. So it’s not too far of a walk, but unfortunately they don’t allow campfires, only fuel stoves. That really puts me off so we definitely won’t be trying their primitive camping. If you’ve tried the primitive hike in campsites here, let us know what you thought of them in the comments below!
So then we moved on to their day use area which we liked a lot. It is near the campsites, with picnic tables, lots of parking, and access to 
the river. This is where we sat down to eat our lunch before we set out on our hike. Here’s a picture of the river from our picnic table. It was really muddy on the shore, so we didn’t even let the dogs go down there and check it out so that was unfortunate.
Gorman Falls Trail
Probably the absolute best thing about this park is the Gorman Falls Trail. It is about a 3 mile round trip hike , but totally worth every step! They say this trail has a moderate difficulty, with some rugged terrain. The last 100 yards or so is a very steep rocky cliff that you have to climb down, but they installed railing along the sides so you don’t get hurt. We saw people of ALL ages hiking this trail, so I do believe almost anybody can handle it. Just remember to bring water! Here’s a couple pictures of the beautiful falls. We might be back to Colorado Bend SP to try out their other hiking trails!
