We can understand why John Denver was so inspired by Colorado. There is “Holy @#$%” scenery at every turn. We’ve seen beauty in every state we’ve visited, including beauty that is on par with Colorado’s. But Colorado has the ability to continually surprise like none of the other states we’ve so far seen.
Perhaps it’s because the mountains and canyons and winding roads provide so many nooks and crannies, each with its own specific beauty, each with its own near and far views, and each providing a curtain behind which is yet another jaw-dropping creation of nature. And each providing a new opportunity to say, “Holy @#$%!”
We visited two national parks and one national monument. We drove, walked, biked, and/or ran through mountains, canyons, mesas, buttes, and rock spires. There were red rocks, purple rocks, and orange rocks. We saw elk, bighorn sheep, and mountain lions in the wild. Rivers and waterfalls, sun and snow, and distant views.
We stayed in roadside parks, friendly driveways, and remote campgrounds. We were in city, suburb, and open range. We visited family and friends and met new people. We dealt with heater issues and booked appointments for new tires, suspension work, and an oil change. We also ran into the first weather event that impacted our itinerary – an early season Rocky Mountain snow storm.
Colorado Rocky Mountain high, indeed.
We started off our time in Colorado with one of our longest drives of the trip so far. There is no straight shot through the 50 states of the USA, and if you add in that you not only want to pass through each state, but explore as much of it as possible and end up, somewhere along the way, in a location where there is going to be an organized 5K race to run, there is going to be some zig zagging. That fact was never more pronounced than during our time in Kansas, leaving us as far east as Wichita on the morning that we intended to start our visit to Colorado and a solid 7.5 hours from our first itinerary stop – Denver. We opted to cut the drive a bit down to 6.5 hours which was enough to get us over the border and to a great spot to park for the night, Richmil Ranch Open Space, a park in Arapahoe County about an hour outside of downtown Denver. We had both been to Colorado a handful of times before, so, while there was much of it that we would discover in our time there, we had some sense of what to expect in terms of purple mountain’s majesties and all that jazz. We didn’t have much of a sense of the part of Colorado that was the west end of the prairies that we had seen so much of in prior states. And it was gorgeous in a new Colorado prairie sort of way. Our first parking spot for the night was the perfect spot to view it, with dark skies to sleep under, a small circular gravel parking area to park in, two conveniently located port-o-johns to, well, you know what in, a small picnic table pavilion, and 350 acres of open Colorado prairie all around us.
We slept like logs and enjoyed a relaxed and productive morning in the van the next day, finishing up our Kansas blog posts and Julie hitting her first songwriting writer’s block of the trip. Somehow, each state, her song has just kind of popped out at some point along the way. Sometimes the songs take 10 minutes to write from start to finish. Sometimes they take as long as a few hours, but this was the first time on the trip that Julie sat there and stared blankly at the page and the audio recorder.
”I have writer’s block” Julie said to Ryan.
And, just by saying that, the cork somehow uncorked and a tune popped into Julie’s head and it just flowed out from there.
Anytime we can fit a full morning in place into the itinerary, we eat it up as a chance to take care of various life logistics, work on the various writing, studying and creative projects we both are doing our best to find time to work on and get a chance to just take a few deep breaths amidst the otherwise breakneck pace of our daily itinerary. The mornings always pass by so quickly before it’s time to get back to adventuring.
After lunch we hopped back on the road to kick off Colorado with a visit to the State House. We planned to take a tour of the capitol and then go to the state museum. After our capitol visit, we were both too tired to hit the state museum and opted instead to walk around that part of Denver a bit, find the closest boba tea spot and then retire to the van to finish straightening it up and resting for a bit before heading off to our next spot for the evening to visit Julie’s cousin Jodie and her family in one of Denver’s suburbs.
We had a great time with a short but sweet family visit that had the added benefit of also being a tremendous pit stop replete with laundry machines, hot showers, toilets that don’t fill up after so many uses and a repository for garbage and recycling. We brought some housewarming gifts including a hat that Julie had bought at the World’s Only Corn Palace in South Dakota and wondered if it would be too young a present for her almost 12 year old second cousin, Hannah. Once getting the subtle signals that Hannah might not be excited to wear it, Jodie made the astute observation that Julie had seemed to really wanted to keep it for herself along. It may have been too ridiculous for a 12 year old, but at 45, Julie was all in for it. Jodie’s observation of Julie’s yet unembraced desire turned out to be very accurate. Much adult conversation was carried out while Julie delighted in her new hat.
Jodie, like so many other family and friend hosts that have happened to be right along our path along the way, encountered the same strangeness that the others had. Despite a perfectly good guest room, Julie turned it down and chose another night in the van over the hospitable offer of a bedroom in a house. And Ryan, except when we visited his sister in Rhode Island and Julie had been feeling under the weather, had consistently opted to be with Julie over the option to have the housed bed as well.
The bigger news is, Julie finally figured out how to explain this choice that so many seemed to consider strange. If you went over to your neighbor’s house to have dinner and a lovely evening, at the end of the night, they wouldn’t say, hey, we’ve got a bed here, you don’t have to go home, you can just sleep here. Why would you? Your house is right there. Why would you sleep in someone else’s house when your house is right there and completely available to you. For Julie, that’s how it felt. She even tried laying her head down in Jodie’s spare room. But all she could think about was that her house was sitting there, right outside the window. The issue is, so many people think of living in the van as a sacrifice of the comforts of being in a house. This may be true for Ryan to some degree, but for Julie, the van is her favorite place in the world. There is no house, hotel or building that she enjoys being in more than the van. The bed in the van is fantastic. The heater in the van works great, so it is every bit as cozy warm as a house (sometimes more so) and, just like anybody else’s house, it has the added benefit on top of all of this, of having all of our stuff in it. There is no place else that Julie would rather fall asleep and wake up than the van. So, while it may seem strange for someone to turn down a bed in a house for a bed in a van, if you think of it as turning down a bed in your house for a bed in their own house, it might make more sense. And, while Ryan may not share Julie’s sentiments to the same extreme, he certainly enjoys sleeping in the van and it appears that there is nowhere else he’d rather sleep than next to Julie, so he continues to opt to defer to her preference rather than leave her to enjoy the van sleep alone. So, despite confused and strange looks, Julie continues to sleep in her favorite house, even when it happens to be parked in the driveway of someone else’s ever-so-lovely and hospitable home.
We left Jodie and Dan’s house without getting much more than a quick hello with Dan as we packed up to head out in the morning. Julie got in a quick little run in the beautiful nature scape of a suburban Denver neighborhood with gorgeous mountain views in the backdrop and we hit the road by 8:30. We swung by what seemed to be the chichi part of town for Julie to grab a much craved massage in the Cherry Creek area of Denver while Ryan enjoyed some coffee shop time. We knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore, not just because our new doormat said so, but also, by the reams of perfect hair, perfect makeup and trendy clothing that walked in and out of the cafe in this upscale part of town.
Julie was dead set on hitting the state history museum that we had missed the day before and she was so glad she did. It was four floors of one fantastic and educational exhibit after another about the history of the land that is now called Colorado, starting, of course, with information about so many of the first peoples that had made this land their home for millenia. While the history in each state is unique, in many ways, there is a common story of what happens when the mixture of manifest destiny and a hunger to mine what could be found in the earth and was deeply valued by the European settlers came into contact with the people that had made that land their home for so long. The story has some degree of nuance in each place, but also so much of it is the same disturbing sequence of events from one place to the next where one group of people and their way of life was overtaken, looked down upon, brutalized or subjugated by folks that stood for ideals of liberty, democracy and freedom. Oftentimes there are broken lineages, broken treaties and broken bodies strewn about in the wake of this convergence of cultures and the stories usually end up with people that had once been nomadic to one degree or another being forced to relocate or change their lifestyle to be able to fit into the bounded home they would now be forced to live on. Julie learned about pieces of that story for those natives that had lived in the various parts of Colorado for eons before it became known as the state of Colorado. She was particularly appalled (but, unfortunately, not surprised) to learn about one of the most brutal versions of this oft repeated story when she entered the tremendous exhibit in the museum about the Sand Creek Massacre. If you are not already familiar with it, it is worth looking up and learning about – not if you are looking for a pick me up – but if you are interested to bear witness to some of the sobering and horrific pieces of American history and the legacy that they leave.
Julie eventually had to pull herself out of an exhibit with plenty left to learn and read, but the clock continuing to do as it had insistently done throughout the trip, went ahead and kept on ticking. Ryan had been making good use of his handful of hours in the van enjoying a few hours of relaxed time to eat lunch, finish watching a movie and finishing another book. These precious hours of downtime or key ingredients to our stamina for our packed itinerary.
Next stop, Red Rocks.
Julie had been to Red Rocks the year before to go to a concert with her cousin Jodie and her sister. Ever since that transcendent experience, Julie had been excited to bring Ryan there, totally confident that he would absolutely love it. It’s hard to imagine someone that wouldn’t be moved by Red Rocks, both the natural features and the manmade amphitheater that had been built there to make music soar amidst those striking features were elements that could easily uplift even the weightiest of spirits.
We took in the museum and got a hike started on the trails later than we had hoped. We didn’t want to hike after dark knowing we were now in cougar country and that an unpredictable weatherfront was coming in. We cut our hike to be a fairly short one and headed to Julie’s childhood friend’s house in Evergreen for the evening as the first fall of snow started to come down upon us as we traveled the winding roads of the Rocky’s foothills.
We arrived in time for what always promises to be an amazing dinner and a house full of the joyful and wonderful chaotic noises of an evening at the Nash house where little humans bounce about between playroom and back to the dinner table and make completing an adult conversation a delightful obstacle course. We loved every second of it. We visited with our friends and their families as we all did our best not to check election results every three minutes, each of us committing to only check here and there and just focus on enjoying each other’s company while the upcoming future of our county was being decided, state by state.
Once again, we received some mildly strange looks (though not as perplexed as others had been) when we opted to sleep in the van while one of Colorado’s unseasonably large snow storms fell upon us in the night.
We woke up in the morning and got the news of the choice our country had made and were glad to be with friends and family to have meaningful conversations about the election, our country and life as a whole. We felt, no matter whether anyone was happy or unhappy with the election results, being able to sit and have civil and constructive conversations with people we care about was one of the most important parts of a democracy, and we were glad to have the opportunity to engage in it in that way. We were glad that the itinerary had just happened to work out so that we happened to be with friends for such an opportunity.
As we were getting our heads wrapped around how far we would make it that day to our next destination, the weather made it clear we wouldn’t be going anywhere – so we got to enjoy another day with our dear friends. This included Julie getting to finally make the gluten free pie she’d been wanting to make since we bought huckleberry pie filling in Montana and having the chance to do it in a kitchen with a rolling pin and alongside the best possible co-chefs she could have asked for.
We ended up leaving the van in the middle of the night to partake of the indoor available bed when Ryan woke up to the smell of exhaust in the van and Julie woke up to the sound of him fidgeting about trying to figure out what was going on. Julie only barely smelled it and didn’t want to leave the van. Ryan is a smart husband and knows his wife well and said, “Sweetie, you know how you don’t want to die as a result of being an idiot. Well, if you sleep in this van tonight – you are taking that risk.”
“Well played, sir. Well played.” Julie acknowledged as she knew Ryan had her on the ropes and she conceded to the wise choice. She could not deny that her desire to willfully ignore sucking in fumes all night was definitely textbook idiocy. Begrudgingly, she followed Ryan into the house.
Now, we had tires to fix and a heater that needed some addressing. When we ran the situation by our friend, John, he pointed out that it might be that something related to the snow might be blocking the exhaust pipe coming out of the van’s heater. He was exactly right. We didn’t know exactly what it was since we didn’t yet know where our exhaust pipe for our heater was, so we never saw the block. But, by the time we had cleared the snow off the van and made the drive back to Denver to visit a Thermo King that is an outfit that is able to fix our particular brand of heaters, a drive that melted all of the frozen bits of water that had concentrated and clung to various nooks and crannies of the van overnight, the fumes were gone. At Thermo King, they gave our heater the full thumbs up for being in good shape and we were back in business. No fumes and now, more knowledge about our van if we ever get fumes again. We just need to go see if something is blocking the exhaust pipe. All part of the fun and the adventure and we are lucky to be in a position to address these challenges when they inevitably arise.
We made our way towards Vail on I-70 and found that the roads were now absolutely fine and we had no trouble making it through the stunning mountain passes. Ryan had never been to Vail, so we got off the highway and just drove through its streets so that he could at least see it.
We ended the night at the Grizzly Creek Rest Area to join a mini neighborhood of vans, RVs and 4x4s that had also chosen to take up residence for the night at this fantastic highway rest stop that was encircled by a cozy gaggle of striking mountains lining Glenwood Canyon right along the famous Colorado River.
We stayed cozy in our fume-free, well-heated van and enjoyed a short but relaxed and productive morning. Julie hopped on her bike and took in a short 5 mile ride alongside the Colorado in the frigid air before we headed off to Glenwood Springs to take in a soak at the Ironmountain Hot Springs, warming ourselves amidst the view of a stunning mountain backdrop. We got in our Colorado swim in the large mineral pool as we did laps in the most lovely warm water and crisp, cool, almost winter air. It was delightful.
We stopped at the Potawatomi Trade Post in Palisades, Colorado, to do a little shopping and refill our water tank on the way to Colorado National Monument in Grand Junction. Neither of us had heard of the Colorado National Monument before finding it on the map and deciding to check it out. Boy was it worth the trip. We’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
We made our way along the mountain roads as dark started to settle into it’s place for the night at the first of Colorado’s four national parks that we would manage to visit – Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. We rolled into the first come first serve campground that was covered in a soft blanket of newly fallen snow – the branches of the shrubs and bushes throughout the campsite were glowing white. Well, we were both the first come and the only served. We were the only ones there. We meandered around the two campsite loops that were made accessible by a snow plow and found that, while the loop itself had been plowed, very few of the sites were. We found one site on the loop that was melted enough that we felt comfortable driving into it, knowing that, if we got stuck in this spot, we were not going to have much help getting out so we wanted to play it safe. It was pretty romantic falling asleep under a brilliantly starry sky in a winter wonderland that we would have all to ourselves for the night. And, thank goodness, our heater was still on board for keeping us warm without any fumes involved.
In the morning, we made our way into the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in the sunshine and were immediately taken aback by what it appeared that we had been sleeping amidst all night. Again, the pictures can more than speak for themselves. We knew coming into Colorado, we would be delighted by striking mountain views from nearly any nook and cranny we would visit, but this view was one we wouldn’t have even dreamed up even if given free reign to do so. Never before had we seen rock striations like this that were vertical and with this smokey blackish brownish purplish hue that glowed underneath the snow that covered it. All that with a view to the meandering river flowing so casually so very far below us through this awesome canyon.
We loved it. We also ate the newly fallen snow. Cause, why not?
We had a delightful surprise as we drove out of the park and it was not just the striking vistas that opened up as we descended out of the mountains surrounding the Black Canyon. Ryan saw a little movement about 200 yards down the road. We slowed down so as not to scare whatever it was. There, crossing the road in front of us was the ever elusive Mountain Lion! We were freaking out (in the happy way) as we had both really wanted to see a cougar, but also not from anywhere other than the safety of the inside of the van. And here we were! It got better. As the cougar crossed the street, two smaller cougars scurried up behind her. We were overcome with excitement, trying to drive slow enough to avoid scaring them off, but fast enough to get close enough to see them before they disappeared back into the privacy of their wild world. Ryan fumbled for his phone but also wanted to just take it in. He managed to get one picture as the second baby finished his road crossing. Wow. It doesn’t take much to feel the thrill of the wild (without feeling the bite) – and this was doing it for us.
Our next stop was Telluride, Colorado. It is yet another famous Colorado town and we could see why when we arrived. It is famous for its film festival, but also for being so dang beautiful, both the natural context of it and the manmade historic town in the middle. Having chosen to get married in the charming mountain town of Lake Placid, NY, we both felt that Telluride was most everything that we love about Lake Placid, but on steroids. It definitely was the upscale version of a charming mountain town and we could see evidence that it suffered the same struggles that we had observed in so many fantastic small towns across the country that people want to visit and be in – that is the struggle of so much of the housing moving out of the long term rental market into the more lucrative short term rental market, leaving the locals that grew up there or were trying to work in the charming shops and restaurants on its main drag struggling to be able to afford to live in a town where many people have second and third homes or simply rent a condo for a week, a month or a season. Aside from the complexities of its economics, we enjoyed wandering the streets and Julie REALLY enjoyed finding a gluten free pizza that was a THICK CRUST Detroit style pizza. This was a first. Julie hadn’t had such thick pizza in decades.
After enjoying a few hours wandering the streets of Telluride, we made our way to another campsite that would make it onto our short list of favorite campsites of the trip. This one was run by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) which meant it was free to camp on as long as there was an available spot. In the summer and early fall, as we understand it, it is hard to get a spot at this popular location, but us being well into the shoulder season, we were lucky to have a handful of spots to pick from. We parked for the night under another stunning dark sky. One of the fun things about arriving at campsites at night is the surprise in the morning of the beauty that you realize you have been in all night. The view from our spot couldn’t be beat and, after many busy days, we had the good fortune to have a full morning in place until 1PM to enjoy life in this special spot. Again, the time went by too quickly.
When we pulled out of the dirt road that led to the campsite, we were also happy to see that we were right at the entrance to our day’s destination, the second out of four Colorado National Parks and the last of which we would get to partake in on this trip, Mesa Verde National Park (we would miss out on Rocky Mountain National Park and Great Sand Dunes National Park).
What can be said about this park that doesn’t pull from the same set of adjectives that we are quickly wearing out on this blog? Stunning, beautiful, jaw-dropping? Yes, yes and definitely, yes. The English language, or at least our command of it, might need to expand its available options if we want to have diversity in description as we roam from one striking display of nature’s domain to another on this trip.
And, of course, in Mesa Verde National Park, its not just wild nature’s beauty that is so jaw dropping, it is also the Ancestral Pueblo people and how they lived in these green mesas and canyons and cliffs for centuries over a millennium ago. We saw the cliff dwellings and, like anyone else that sees them, found ourselves slack-jawed, staring into the face of history, human potential and a way of living that seems so different from what we could fathom in our own lives while also dripping with the humanity and human life that emanates from all cultures just the same – family, economy, food, home, community.
We had hoped to grab a 2.2 mile roundtrip hike to the top of a mesa at the end of our time in Mesa Verde. We couldn’t help ourselves to keep stopping to look at another pit house or cliff dwelling as we drove the loops in the park. We didn’t regret a single minute taking in the sites, but found that all the minutes we gave to that activity left us with too little time before sundown to make the hike. We were both disappointed, as we had been looking forward to the hike. But, we were consistently battling significant tiredness by the end of each day at this point of the trip and didn’t want to push our luck tackling such elevation in the dark during a day that was warm only thanks to the sun being out, whose temperatures were sure to drop significantly when the sun traveled around to the other side of the planet.
Though we were disappointed to miss the hike, it was hard to be anything but deeply satisfied as we pulled out of such an awesome park.
We made our way to our last overnight location in Colorado to a Harvest Host with a tremendous Mountain View about 20 minutes from Durango, CO where our 5K would be taking place bright and early the next morning.
We had a great chat with our Harvest Host, Cody, as we pulled in that you can read about in our “People Along the Way” section and enjoyed a nice evening in the van, cooking up one of our standard dinners of rice, broccoli and chicken.
For no explicable reason, we both struggled to sleep on our last night in Colorado. Maybe it was all the excitement, maybe it was knowing that we would soon be leaving, or maybe it was just cause. Either way, our wake up time of 5:15 the next morning that would usually be fairly normal for us was a little harder to do than usual. We would have slept in, but we had a 7AM 5K leaving out of Durango to get to. You can read about our Durango 5K in our 5K section.
After a really fun race on a beautiful course on tired legs, we made our last stop in Colorado. Sure, we had already partaken of one hot springs in Colorado and we hadn’t done much hiking and zero skiing in a state that is famous for both – but we certainly weren’t skimping on the Colorado hot springs experience. We spent the last few hours of our Colorado time at the Durango Hot Springs soaking, swimming and recovering our tired legs and eyes.
There was a lot of Colorado we left unvisited, as per each state. However, with Colorado, we had a little more under our belt from previous visits to the state. We had had a chance to take in the nature and culture of places like Steamboat Springs, Leadville, Boulder and Colorado Springs on other events. We still left many spots unseen by our eyes, some famous spots like Aspen, others not as well known like the sand dunes in the southeast, but, regardless, we left Colorado with an overall sense of what life might be like there and what makes so many folks want to leave wherever they are from to settle into life here.
We knew what to expect coming into Colorado. That is to say, we knew to expect beauty and lots of it – not to mention plenty of opportunities and reasons to be outside. But, still, Colorado took us by surprise at nearly every turn. There wasn’t a moment on the drive that wasn’t worthy of a picture or twelve. There wasn’t a stop that wasn’t worth a weeklong stay and there were every bit as many stops worth making that we would have to forgo only thanks to time’s cruel cage. There is a reason Colorado has a lot of transplants living there. And there is a reason why John Denver sang about how coming to Colorado at 27 was like being born again. What could we possibly say that would be better said than how he did? “I know he’d be a poorer man, if he never saw an eagle fly”. We left Colorado basking in the riches of all we’d seen and soaring like that eagle on that famous Rocky Mountain high.
R and J in the USA 
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