Thursday 8-29-24 Leadville National Fish Hatcher, Refrigerator & Bike Ride

 

Leadville National Fish Hatchery Visitor Center

 

 What a gorgeous day. We woke up to 41 degrees and the high was 70 degrees. We had a lot of sunshine. 

When Larry woke up he lit the Wave3 so when I woke up it wasn't too cold. It was a little nippy. I made pancakes for breakfast. 

After breakfast we went for about a 2 mile walk. We walked to Silver Dollar Campground and back. It was a very nice walk.

Larry had to get up at midnight because the refrigerator alarm was going off, which meant that the refrigerator was off. He tried to light it but was unsuccessful. The refrigerator runs on either electric or propane, the owner's manual says if you are above 5500 ft elevation it may not run correctly. They recommend you to be plugged into power. Where we are there is no power and the elevation is 10,125 feet. This is really high. We had this problem last year but it happened on our last night. The next morning we left and when we got to a lower elevation Larry was able to get it to relight.

When we got back from our walk Larry played with trying to get the refrigerator to turn back on. He tried using a inverter we have for the computer but it was too small and it blew a fuse. The refrigerator uses a lot of power to start and run. He waited for people to get going and fired up the generator, that got the refrigerator working but we can't use the generator all the time. We didn't have an inverter powerful enough to run the refrigerator. Leadville is a very small town, there is one auto parts store, two hardware stores and one grocery. Larry got on O'Reilly's Auto Parts website to see what they had. They had two different ones. We unloaded the motorcycle and went to town. When we got to O'Reilly's Larry decided to get the bigger inverter. Then we went back to the Minnie. The ride was a little brisk but nice.

The refrigerator worked using our lithium battery and the inverter but Larry was surprised to see how many amps the refrigerator drew. He said we couldn't continue using the inverter because our battery would be dead in a few hours. When it got warmer outside he was able to get the refrigerator turned back on. It worked great until the sun went down. We have thermometers in both the refrigerator and freezer so we can monitor the temperature. With the low air temperatures the refrigerator is staying cold enough that we're not worried overnight as long as it lights again when it warms up.

After lunch we went on another motorcycle ride. We went back to town to take a shower at the laundry-mat. But we couldn't because there was no attendant. We tried the coin changer to get dollar coins for the shower but it didn't seem to work, it wouldn't take $10  or $5 bills. We decided to wait a bit for someone to show up. So we walked across the street to Safeway. Then we walked next door to Ace Hardware to buy some fuses to replace the fuse in the smaller inverter. We went back to the laundry mat and still no one was there. So we left.

On the way back to the Minnie we stopped by the Leadville National Fish Hatchery. The Leadville Fish Hatchery was established in 1889 and is the second oldest federally operated fish hatchery. It's a beautiful facility. It has a gorgeous visitor center. We parked the bike and walked through the visitor center where we learned the history of the fish hatchery facility. The hatchery has 16 raceways and 20 nursery tanks and is on 3,072 acres of land. Then we walked around the raceways, there wasn't a lot of them but they were stocked with rainbow trout. Before walking around the raceways, there is a beautiful pond full of rainbow trout and feeding machines. You can feed the fish for a quarter but we didn't have any quarters. You can feed the trout as you walk around the raceways. The trout in the pond were very big and beautiful. The raceways were very nice and had a lot of trout in them. We had a nice walk around the hatchery. On the site there is a mile long loop nature trail. We hiked it. It took us through the trees and by small lakes (we saw three out of seven lakes) formed by a glacier on Mount Elbert. We hiked over boulders and tree roots. As we hiked there were sign about the pine trees, other plants and wildlife (coyote, fox, mule deer and birds) that live in the area. It was a very nice walk. Then we went back to the Minnie. We had a wonderful time touring Leadville National Fish Hatchery.

 

One of the lakes on the nature trail

 

Larry checking out the feeding pond

 

The feeding pond with rainbow trout

 

The raceways full of rainbow trout

The ride back was very pretty. When we got back it was 3:30 so we relaxed until dinnertime.

For dinner we barbecued sausage links and flour tortillas. After dinner I walked around Silver Dollar Campground. I walked for 40 minutes for about 2 miles. By the end of the night I had gotten 18,500 steps, which put me in 2nd place in my group. While I walked Larry research on where we're going from here. 

We had another super day in Colorado at Matchless Campground.