My wife and I took a recent trip to Colorado for vacation. We had discussed a number of things including a baseball trip to watch Major League Baseball games in St. Louis, Atlanta and Cincinnati; a trip to Louisiana; or going back out to Colorado for a few days. In the end, the Colorado won out for a various number of reasons.
After a trip across Iowa and Nebraska, we stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming to check out a brewpub there that was in the old Cheyenne Depot. The depot also housed a museum that depicted the ties between Cheyenne's growth and the railroad that brought people to the west. The Union Pacific still has a large working yard next door to the old depot.
After having a couple beers and a bite at the Accomplice Beer Company (you'll read about A.B.C. in a future Road Tips post), we drove down the street to see the Wyoming State Capitol Building in Cheyenne. When I was five years old, I could tell you the capital city of every state in the union. My parents would parade me out in front of their friends when they would host people at our house and tell them to ask me what the capital of Vermont was, or the capital of Montana. (Montpelier and Helena, respectively.) So, I've been a bit of a geek for state capitals and their capitol buildings for years. Wyoming's state capitol was the 20th state capitol building I've seen. Unfortunately, the state capitol building in Cheyenne was undergoing an extensive external renovation and was shrouded in tarps. Streets around the capitol building were also shut down due to construction.
From Cheyenne, we made the short (45 minutes) drive down to Fort Collins, CO. We had friends who talked highly of Fort Collins, especially the number of brew pubs they had in the area. We got into town right at the tail end of the annual Bohemian Nights at NewWestFest, a three-day music festival across downtown Fort Collins that features a number of Colorado-based musicians and bands. (Although Blondie headlined the festival on Saturday night and I said to my wife that I didn't know Deborah Harry had moved to Colorado.) We walked up to the main stage just in time to hear the Sunday headliner The Decemberists, an indie-rock band from Portland, OR, finish up their show.
We spent time in some of Fort Collins' very good brewpubs and taprooms, but we were not as enamored with Fort Collins as we thought we would be. The breweries are all spread out in Fort Collins and not within walking distance like we found during our visit to Asheville, NC. Many of them were very good, but having to get in a car and navigate around the city to the next one was not what we expected to do. We did spend some time in the Colorado State Trial Flower Gardens (pictured above right) looking over various annual flowers and plants that the botanical department at Colorado State University plants each year to test different varieties of annual plants.
After spending a couple three days in Fort Collins, we were sort of wondering where to go next. We were talking with a young woman who waited on us at one of the brewpubs and she suggested that we head up to Steamboat Springs, approximately a two-and-a-half hour drive from Fort Collins. We really wished we had spent a longer time in Steamboat Springs as it was the type of place that we both really liked - laid back, off-the-beaten path, friendly people, good restaurants, great brewpubs and just a wonderful peaceful vibe to the area. We stayed at a hotel near the banks of the Yampa River and we spent our mornings walking the beautiful trail along the river. Steamboat Springs immediately became our most favorite place in Colorado.
One of the things that my wife was hell-bent on doing during our trip to Colorado was to spend times in a natural hot springs bath. There were two in the Steamboat Springs area - the Old Town Hot Springs, a sort of combo hot springs/health club/athletic center in downtown Steamboat Springs; and the Strawberry Park Hot Springs located about six miles outside of Steamboat Springs. The guy at the front desk at our hotel was very cautionary to us - "The road out there turns into a mountain dirt road with some ruts and such. But if you go slow, you can make it. Oh! And it's clothing optional after sunset." We weren't planning on being out there after sunset, so that was no problem. My wife was sold on going out to Strawberry Park for her natural hot springs session.
Nestled at 7500 feet above sea level in the mountains north of Steamboat Springs (see map), Strawberry Park has been there for a number of years. It consisted of a couple of main pools where the water temperature was at 101°(F), and a smaller pool where the temperature was at a balmy 106°(F). The steamy babbling brook coming out of the mountain went into a cooling area and then sent into the pools. (There was a third pool up toward where the hot springs came out of the mountain, but it appeared that it was closed off possibly because it was too hot.)
It cost $15 a person to use the pools - and even though I was just going to hang by the pool and read while my wife used the pools, I still had to pay $15 bucks. But it was worth it. It was - by far - the most relaxing aspect of our vacation. Water trickled from pool to pool and continued on to a new pool that was being constructed on the north end of the property. I could have stayed there all day (no food or drinks are allowed by the pools), but my wife decided that she had enough after being in and out of the pools numerous times over a two-and-a-half hour period. (Here's a tip from my wife if you go - wear an old bathing suit. The sulphur in the water and the algae from the rocks in the pool stain your clothing.)
Also north of Steamboat Springs were two state parks that were about a 45 minute drive from the city - Pearl Lake State Park and Steamboat Lake State Park. Pearl Lake State Park was the more primitive of the two state parks with a couple of small, non-electric campgrounds that overlooked the lake. (The photo at the top of this blog post is Pearl Lake.) Pearl Lake had a handful of kayakers and paddle-boarders on the lake and it was also a wonderfully laid back place. Steamboat Lake was much more modern with a welcome station and larger campgrounds that featured electrical and non-electrical hook-ups. Steamboat Lake was literally in the shadow of Hahn's Peak, one of the taller mountains on the northern end of the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
After an all-too-short stay in Steamboat Springs, we headed down to Breckenridge. We took the backroads down through the Colorado River valley to Interstate 70 and up to Breckenridge. The drive on State Highway 131 through the high plains and valleys of western Colorado featured a number of magnificent vistas. We were anywhere from 5000 to 8000 feet above sea level along the route and we went through a number of small towns before hooking up with Interstate 70 near the town of Eagle, CO. By the time we had gotten to Interstate 70, the weather had gotten cloudy and cool.
We pulled into Breckenridge around 2 p.m., and as we drove down the main drag of the small ski town it reminded us of Gatlinburg, TN - only wearing a fur coat and a leather cowboy hat. There were a number of shops and small restaurants that catered to tourists. Breckenridge had much more of a commercial feel to it than Steamboat Springs. Brewpubs were also scarce - we did go to the original Breckenridge Brewery (there will be a future post on that, as well), but walking the main street of Breckenridge showed us nothing more than boutique clothing shops, toy stores, and ski shops. One pass up and down the street left us pretty numb.
Above is our "alpine" view from our hotel balcony of the mountains to the east of Breckenridge. It was a very nice town, but even with it not being ski season the place was swarmed with a lot of people. We were very happy to leave Breckenridge the next day.
But one of the main reasons we wanted to go to Breckenridge was to drive from there down to Colorado Springs. One of my accounts told me before we left to go to Colorado that the drive from Breckenridge to Colorado Springs across the Continental Divide, down through the high plains of South Park, and across the Wilkerson Pass down to Colorado Springs was one of the most breathtaking drives he'd ever been on. "It's probably a two-and-a-half hour drive, normally," he told me. "But by the time you stop every 10 minutes or so to see something along the way, it could end up being close to 4 hours." I think I had to talk my wife into this route considering that she really wanted to go back to Colorado Springs on our trip.
We took Colorado State Highway 9 south out of Breckenridge around 8:30 in the morning and headed down the road. We started out at 9600 feet above sea level when we were in Breckenridge and the altitude indicator on my GPS immediately began to go up. In fact, there was a time where it seemed like we were actually going down on a grade, but the altimeter on my GPS was going up! It wasn't long before we passed 10,560 feet - exactly two miles above sea level. There were a number of switchbacks with turnouts that allowed us to stop to let traffic pass and to get some pretty nice shots along the way.
We crossed the Continental Divide at Hoosier Pass at an altitude of just over 11,500 feet. Hoosier Pass is named for the nearby gulch where men from Indiana were living in a placer camp panning for gold in the late 1850's and early 1860's. And like a handful turn-out areas in the mountains, Hoosier Pass was the trailhead for a couple three hiking paths that went up further into the mountains.
Leaving there, we wound down the mountain toward Alma, dubbed as the highest incorporated city in the nation. At 10,335 feet above sea level, Alma is at the start of South Park, the high plains region of southern Park County consisting of flat lands between mountains with peaks of up to 14,000 feet. (South Park, Colorado bears little resemblance to the television show South Park, although Alma did have a wooden cutout of the characters from the TV show where people could place their faces in the holes for pictures.)
My wife was completely enamored with the nearly tree-less, flat terrain along both Colorado State Highway 9 and then after we turned on to U.S. Highway 24 at Hartsel, CO. She was even more enamored with the dozens of camper trailers that just seemed to be out in the middle of nowhere on both sides of Highway 24 as we worked our way up to the Wilkerson Pass. My wife wondered aloud many times as we drove southeast on the highway how people could live out there like that. When we stopped at the visitor center at Wilkerson Pass, she had to ask the lady working the desk what all the campers were all about sitting out in the middle of nowhere with no trees around.
Turns out they aren't squatters - the first thing she assured my wife - but merely people who have acquired 10 to 40 acres of land at a pretty cheap price. She told us that they'll put campers on the property and they'll come out and stay over the weekend or for vacations. The people supposedly have two years before they have to do something with the land - like build a house on it - or they have to sell it or they lose it. She also told us a couple of other things about Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak that we found out later on weren't true, or her facts were twisted, so we don't know if we know the real story about the campers on the land.
After a stop at Lake George to go to a gem and rock show that my wife wanted to go to after we drove by, we wound our way down the mountains and around Pikes Peak to Manitou Springs where we got off U.S. Highway 24 to go to the Garden of the Gods. We had been there before five years ago and my wife liked it so much that she really wanted to go back. However, the place was packed with people of all ages and many nationalities. We had hoped to have a leisurely walk around the towering jagged sandstone formations that rose over 300 feet above the base. But with a ton of little kids - many of whom were probably wondering why the hell why their parents drug them there in the first place - and a boatload of inconsiderate people who would hop over the fence and climb a smaller rock formation for a picture (even with signs telling them to not do that), it wasn't as peaceful and laid-back as our first visit years ago.
We decided to get out of there and check out Colorado Springs again. It wasn't quite the city that we remembered it being was when we first came out five years before. There seemed to be a healthy number of vagrants in the city, something that we really didn't see that much of (or didn't notice) on our first visit. They were near freeway exits, hanging around downtown and other areas of the city, and it seemed like there were a lot of them. We talked to a guy later that evening and my wife - who always has to ask questions - asked him about the number of homeless people in the city. "When they legalized pot in Colorado, it brought an influx of all different types of people," the young guy told us. "Some came out to work in the cannabis industry, either growing it or working in dispensaries. But many came out thinking that maybe they could bum pot off people instead of money. They thought jobs would be easy, but it's a highly competitive work force out here." He said the homeless population in the area is higher now than when it was during the recession of 8 to 10 years ago. "Yeah, the optics of the transient population out here isn't good for the locals," he said to us.
But it was other aspects of Colorado Springs that sort of left us limp. We spent some time in downtown Colorado Springs which we felt was sort of dull. We went over to Manitou Springs which was all torn up with road construction. We had already done all of the tourist things before - Pikes Peak, Garden of the Gods, Broadmoor. We'd sort of fantasized about possibly retiring in Colorado Springs. But this visit may have changed our minds on that.
So, that was pretty much our trip out to Colorado. We fell in love with Steamboat Springs, we were underwhelmed by Fort Collins, we thought Breckenridge was too touristy, and we were disappointed in our second visit to Colorado Springs. Thanks to forest fires in the northwest United States and up into Canada, most of the days were hazy cutting down on some spectacular views. But, still, it's tough to say anything bad about the mountains, lakes and streams that make Colorado, well, Colorado. I'll be telling you more in the coming weeks about some of the restaurants and brewpubs that we went to during our trip.