Elk graze the meadow below the Moraine Park campground, and from the pad Longs Peak fills the view across the valley. Above it all, Trail Ridge Road switchbacks up past treeline onto open tundra, then drops over the Continental Divide toward Grand Lake. Most Colorado families taking a rig to the mountains for a week build it the same way, a night on each side of that road and a few slow days in between.
The rest of the state's RV trips sit closer to home or much farther out. Summer weekends belong to the reservoir state parks on Denver's edges, where the motorhome parks beside a swim beach and stays there. And some trips leave Colorado for good and end the week in another state.
Rocky Mountain National Park, from Estes Park to Grand Lake
Three of the park's four campgrounds, Moraine Park, Glacier Basin and Aspenglen, sit a short drive from Estes Park, close enough for a grocery run or dinner in town after a day on the trails. Timber Creek holds the west side, the base for Grand Lake and the quieter half of the park. A week that starts on one side and crosses Trail Ridge to the other sees both, and the drive over the top is the day the kids remember.
The Park Service offers both electric and non-electric sites across its campgrounds, and the private RV parks in Estes Park and Grand Lake are the other way to stay near the entrances. Summer is the busy stretch, and the fall aspen weeks fill the same sites, so a September trip gets planned as early as a July one.
Settle the campground before the rig. Each one has its own length limit, and that number decides how long a motorhome the family can bring, so start with the Rocky Mountain National Park RV page, which keeps the caps and the timed-entry rules. For two people, or a tight park loop where a long rig is more trouble than it's worth, the Colorado campervan page has the smaller version of these trips, along with the foothills camps and the southwest canyon parks.
Families renting out of Boulder, Fort Collins or Evergreen already start in the foothills, and each of those towns has a mountain week of its own for the dates when the park is full.
The other big mountain week is far to the southwest, where the San Juans rise behind Durango and Montrose and the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde sit tucked into alcoves under the mesa rim. It's a long haul from Denver and usually a trip of its own. The Western Slope around Fruita and Colorado National Monument has its own page in Grand Junction.
The long roads out, toward Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Dallas
Pointing a motorhome west out of Denver means the Front Range wall shrinking in the mirror and, a few nights on, the Wasatch rising ahead. Past Salt Lake City the country empties into basin and range, long dry valleys between bare ridges, on the way toward Las Vegas. Phoenix is the desert run, and Dallas goes the other way, south and east across the plains until the Rockies are gone from the mirror.
Each of these drives is a string of overnights, an RV park or campground every evening and the last night close to wherever the rig goes back. As of September 2026, Cruise America runs one-way rentals from its Denver hub in Frederick, Road Bear RV lists Denver, Dallas and Las Vegas among its one-way pick-up and drop-off locations, and El Monte RV's one-way list includes Denver, with both of those working from branches near Denver's airport.
Chatfield, Cherry Creek and the Front Range lake weekends
Cherry Creek on a July Saturday is sand beach and sailboats, with the foothills stacked up behind the water, and Chatfield's cobble shoreline faces the same mountains from Denver's southwest edge. Once the rig is set nobody moves it, the kids live at the water, and the drive home is short enough that Sunday never feels rushed.
The state park at Chatfield holds 197 campsites, and here too the site gets booked before the motorhome. Both parks also make an easy first night for anyone flying in, with no mountain drive at the end of a long travel day. The Castle Rock page covers both, and north of Denver, Boyd Lake and Carter Lake fill the same weekends for the northern towns on the Longmont page.
Farther south, Colorado Springs is the base for the Pikes Peak summit road, climbing well past where the trees give up, and for the Royal Gorge bridge hung high over the Arkansas River.