Side Trip: Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, CO (~6500')

After spending most of the morning looking up directions for my new, Rocky-less route through the West, I once again bade goodbye to Nancy and departed Denver. The Kansas high point, my goal for the day, was only a few hours away, so I figured I had time to detour down I-25 and see a little more of the Front Range (from the plains, of course). I don't know why I felt the need to taunt myself with more views of those inaccessible peaks, other than that they were there, and I was there, and even after yesterday's near-asphyxiation I still hadn't entirely stopped wanting to climb them.

So I followed the highway south to Colorado Springs and pulled off at the Garden of the Gods, a famous park on the northwest side of the city. Its Wikipedia article, which I'd come across ages ago while looking into rock climbing, is full of glorious photographs of red stone outcroppings jutting up from an empty hillside--and when the Lars saw those, they insisted we stop by.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

You might be wondering why a bunch of rocks in a mid-sized Colorado city wound up with such a grandiose name. The answer, I'm told, goes back to a dialogue between two surveyors who explored the area in 1859. The older one, perhaps a bit thirsty at the time, remarked to his companion that the area would be a "capital place for a beer garden," to which the awestruck young fellow replied, "Beer garden? Why, it is a fit place for the gods to assemble!" and thus it was called "Garden of the Gods." The land was purchased in 1879 by Charles Elliott Perkins, a railroad baron, who intended to build a summer home there but never quite got around to it. Upon his death, his children ceded the land to the city of Colorado Springs on the condition that it become a free public park, and public and free it has remained through the years... perhaps uncomfortably so.

Now, if you've learned anything about me from following this blog through 64 posts, you know I'm not objecting to the freeness of the place. So what went wrong with this ol' heavenly rockpile?

Side Trip: Lookout Mountain (7377') and Golden, CO

I pulled to a stop atop Lookout Mountain (7377'), a foothill just west of Golden, CO. An aptly-named town, I thought as I emerged from my car, because that's just what those hills were, golden with the grass of the plains:

I later learned the town was named after an early prospector, Thomas Golden, who founded the town during the gold rush of 1859... but the grass is the only gold left in these hills, so there.

I wandered around for a bit:

then sat down on the rocks to decide what to do next, if not climb the high high points. You know, the ones that were kind of the entire purpose of this trip.

High Point #35... erm... (gasp)... no.

The eastern third of Colorado is much like Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas: gently-rolling plains as far as the eye can see filled in with a tricolor palette of corn, hay, and soybeans. From the Nebraska high point, I drove a long way down a gravel road, my eyes fixed on the western horizon. Any minute now, I thought, as trucks full of hay bales whizzed past in the opposite direction. One more mile, one more rise, and I'll see them at last, the skysplitting Rockies of my dreams.

The gravel turned to pavement; a small town flickered by. Flat and straight the horizon remained, clogged with dull clouds. Another dozen miles, a slightly larger town, and then just as a few grubby brown foothills resolved out of the murk, I hit I-25 again at Fort Collins and turned away from the Front Range. No Rocky panoramas for me today. Oh well; there'd be plenty of chances for that later on, I figured.

Though I re-entered only 50 miles south of where I'd exited at Cheyenne, the highway was noticeably more crowded--which meant, of course, that it was full of Northern-Virginia-grade tailgating going on at Wyoming speeds. After a tense hour of mentally begging giant SUVs not to crush my bumper, I pulled off at Denver, the Mile High City home to mediocre pitching, high-altitude cooking instructions, and, as of late, weed dispensaries (at least half of which were named some variant on "Rocky Mountain High"). I generally avoid major cities while traveling, but my aunt's friend Nancy, a local, had offered to host me for a night on my way to Mt. Elbert, so here I was.