Colorado Family Holidays
Take the Family is a travel agency specialising in active, adventure and luxury holidays. Your personal travel advisor will create the perfect Colorado holiday for your family, with expert advice and dedicated support throughout.
Places to visit in Colorado
Colorado for family holidays
This state in the western USA combines desert, river canyons and, most famously, the snow-covered Rocky Mountains and Rocky Mountain National Park that protects many of them. It’s a vast state bigger than the UK and about seven times bigger than Switzerland, and family holidays here are mainly focused on the Rockies in the north-central part of Colorado.
We send most families to the Rocky Mountain National Park itself, or to Estes Park in the Front Range, gateway to the Rockies. The National Park is one huge outdoor playground, with 60 mountains rising more than 3500m, glacier lakes, 550km of trails, climbing, wildlife sightings, camping, and, at every turn, heart-stopping beauty.
Anywhere you choose to alight in this stupendous mountain chain, which stretches 4800km from British Columbia in Canada to New Mexico (more than twice the distance from Helsinki to Rome), you’ll find scope for a huge array of activities, a vast variety of landscapes, wildlife and plants, family-friendly accommodation ranging from condos to campsites, lots of restaurants, and majestic vistas worthy of poetry. Plus – if you so choose – utter silence.
Book a holiday in Colorado with Take the Family and enjoy cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, sledding and snowboarding, then warm back up in front of a roaring fire, a cup of grog or hot chocolate in hand. Or between late June and September, revel in the great outdoors with some hiking, fishing in mountain streams and ponds, tennis or golf, and boat hire.
As a specialist UK-based family travel agency, we can tailor-make the perfect holiday in Colorado for your family. Contact one of our travel advisors now and let's discuss your trip of a lifetime.
Below is everything you need to know to inspire you to book a Colorado family holiday.
Let us tailor-make the perfect Colorado holiday for you
Call us on 020 3633 0653
Things to do with kids in Colorado
Colorado Winter Holidays
• Try cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, sledding, snowboarding, ice-fishing, snowmobiling, dog-sledding, horse-riding and a moonlit sleigh-ride through the Colorado back-country.
• Spot epic wildlife including coyote, elk, bighorn sheep and maybe the occasional mountain lion and bear.
• For downhill skiing and snowboarding, drive to Eldora, 95km from Estes Park, or to the well-known resorts of Colorado. Among the most family-friendly is Winter Park Resort, or instead try Colorado’s big name, Vail, and its posh sister resort Beaver Creek.
Colorado Summer Holidays
• From mid-June to September, when it’s usually mild, enjoy hiking (on your own or on naturalist-led tours), biking, birding, guided nature walks, horse-riding, fly-fishing, golf, tennis, mountain-tubing, swimming in indoor aquatic centres, and cave tours (Glenwood Springs) – enough for several family holidays in one! Winter Park Resort is a great place for family activities and amenities.
• Ask about ranger-led children’s and family programs at one of the nine Rocky Mountain National Park visitor centres (four of them open year-round) – one, the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
• Head to the Mesa Verde National Park in Montezuma County in Southwestern Colorado to see some of its 600 Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings, which feature among more than 4000 archaeological sites in the area.
• Explore Denver, Colorado’s capital and largest city, perched a mile above sea level, with a vibrant Downtown area including a children’s museum, a museum of nature and science, interactive art, and the Elitch Gardens Theme & Water Park.
Getting Around Colorado
Car hire is strongly recommended and we can include this in the holiday package we tailor-make for your family. Alternatively, we can set you up with an RV/motorhome.
If you're not self-driving the Rocky Mountain Nation Park by hire car or RV, there are free shuttles within the park. Note that Trail Ridge Road, which runs through the park from Estes Park (eastern entrance) to Grand Lake (south-west), is closed in winter.
Sleigh-ride
Eating in Colorado
Food in Colorado includes lost of excellent locally raised beef, great pub fare, and all the fast food you can imagine but also all manner of fresh, healthy and organic alternatives – this outdoorsy state is Shangri-La for granola heads!
South-west Colorado
When to go to Colorado
To best time to go to Colorado depends on where you go and what you plan to do. The ski season in Colorado is December to April: the best conditions tend to be in late January and February, although Christmas in Colorado is beautifully festive too, and there’s sunny spring skiing in March and early April.
Summer in Colorado is at its most enjoyable from late June to August, when the weather is warm, the hiking trails fully accessible, and the mountain roads open and clear of snow. Wildflowers deck the landscapes in July and August, while September seems the start of the fall foliage.
How to get to Colorado
There are direct flights from the UK to Denver from London and Manchester, taking almost 10 hours. We will include the most convenient options for your family in the holiday we tailor-make for you, matched to your exact needs.
The drive from Denver to Estes Park takes about 90 minutes. If you are heading to one of the resorts off I-70 (a longer haul), we can include a night in a hotel near the airport or in central Denver for when you arrive. Or you might transition out of jet-lag in Boulder, an all-American city that is home to the University of Colorado, with actives galore, or take the hour-long flight from Denver to Eagle County Airport 50km from Vail.
Colorado Travel Info
Flying time10hrs All flight times are based on flights from UK London airports, to the capital or nearest destination airport.
Carbon footprint8.47 CO2 Estimated tonnes of CO2 produced for return flights for a family of four.
TimezoneGMT -7
CurrencyUS Dollar
Weather Today
14°C
57.1°F
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![Arches National Park [copyright]© Tracey Davies[/copyright]](/sites/default/files/styles/ttf_2_1/public/arches%20national%20park.jpg.webp?itok=fidg4W_f "Arches National Park [copyright]© Tracey Davies[/copyright]")
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