For much of the year, Colorado lies buried under snow. Rich people glide across it on skis and 4X4s, between resorts at Aspen, Crested Butte and Breckenridge. But when the snow melts, Colorado’s perilous mountain passes, plains and canyons make the perfect setting for a road trip that takes in the best of the American landscape.
Colorado is tucked right up in the middle of North America, between the cool mountains of Wyoming and sun-baked desert of New Mexico – think Brokeback Mountain meets Breaking Bad. My partner and I had only ever visited American cities, and had romantic notions of driving off into the wilderness. In Colorado, we could get a taste of these two extremes of America with one week of leisurely driving.
We liked the idea of the scenery changing dramatically every day, so planned to pick up a car in the Rockies then drive up as high as we could go, before heading south towards the desert, looping back up into the mountains to see Aspen, then down into the desert again.
But before we did any of that, the California Zephyr, said to be one of the most beautiful train journeys in the world, took us from Denver into the Rockies. As the train corkscrewed round the mountains, we tucked into a lunch of steak and red wine. Outside the window, sheer drops, swollen rivers and even a bear and a moose whizzed past. We drank a toast to the pioneers who endured the same journey on foot, and probably without wine.
We got off at Glenwood Springs – 1,798 metres above sea level – but our bed for the night was in Leadville, an hour and a half’s drive away, and closer to the clouds at an altitude of over 3,000 metres. The road curled up into the mountains and our ears began to pop. There was no crash barrier, just a glorious view stretching into the distance, aspen trees shimmering gold and the possibility of an imminent death plunge. Impatient drivers crowded behind us as I crawled around the bends at 10mph, sweaty hands glued to the wheel.
At last, as the sun dipped behind snow-capped mountains, we rolled down Leadville’s cool, still Main Street, the lack of oxygen making us feel giddy. Leadville was at the heart of the American silver rush, and would once have been heaving with saloons, hotels and brothels. Now, out of ski season, its picture-perfect 19th-century main street was quiet and sleepy, like a theme park after hours. We stayed at the Delaware Hotel (twins/doubles from $65), a huge, creaking Victorian building full of dark wooden antiques and heavy chintz, which, we were warned, is haunted. Everything in Colorado is. The dramatic lives and deaths of its pioneers still haunt the entire state.
The next day, local historian Roger Pretti, who runs tours of Leadville’s old cemetery, took us to meet some of them.
“Here lies Baby Addie,” he told us, gesturing to a lumpy patch of earth carpeted in the dry pine needles which scented the air. “She died when a piece of paper holding powdered morphine blew into her cradle.”
We wandered on, glancing at small, weathered wooden gravestones. “There lies Goldie Moore, farm girl-turned-prostitute who killed herself in desolation.” Roger pulled a copy of Goldie’s suicide note from his waistcoat pocket: “This is a cold, cruel world … I hope the next may be different.”
Leadville isn’t quite as cold and cruel as it once was, but at night the temperature drops and everyone ends up in the same old saloons. We did a pocket-size bar crawl from the ancient Silver Dollar, where the barman and waitress sported a black eye each, to the Manhattan, where we drank cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon with Mark, a taxidermist and “mountain man”, and another Mark who was too drunk to speak. Mountain Mark wore his straggly shoulder-length hair under a trucker’s cap and a thick lumberjack shirt. His huge black boots looked like they were carved from rock. He told us stories of runs-ins with bears and mountain lions, of hunting alone in the forest for eight days.
Strange things happen at 3,000 metres. The air is so thin and dry that you become electric, sparking on door handles and taps every time you touch them; sitting in the sun for five minutes gives you sunburn. And when we stopped the next day for a beer at the Green Parrot dive bar in Buena Vista, 35 miles to the south, we met a real green parrot. Three women who had spent the day at the nearby Cottonwood Hot Springs told us that they just had to pop in to show him around.
From Leadville, our journey took us through the wide grassland basin of South Park, once the summer hunting ground of the Ute people, to Fairplay, an abandoned mining settlement.
More of a street than a town, lined with rickety wooden wild-west-style buildings, it was dominated by the giant red HOTEL sign of the Hand Hotel (rooms from $64). Manager Richard showed us to our room, Silverheels. Our wooden balcony looked out on to a lake at the foot of the Mosquito mountain range, and we could see the streak of a beaver paddling through the water. As the moon rose and the mountains turned pale blue, it was like looking out at a gigantic prog-rock album cover.
We soon discovered that dining options in these tiny, unvisited mountain towns are limited. In Leadville we could choose between $6 steaks and jacket potatoes, or Mexican. In Fairplay we passed up the grill at McCall’s Park Bar – a rowdy tavern packed with hunters and cowboys – in favour of spaghetti at the Valiton Hotel. In the Valiton’s big wooden dining room, sitting beneath a mounted elk head, it felt a little Twin Peaks – as if Agent Cooper might walk in at any moment and order a slice of cherry pie.
From Fairplay, State Highway 9 took us over more rolling hills and past herds of buffalo. “For sale” signs staked in the ground next to idyllic meadows reminded us that this sort of unspoilt beauty won’t last forever. We stopped to stretch our legs in Cripple Creek because, on the internet, it looked picturesque and sounded creepy. But it turned out to be creepy for the wrong reasons: the old wooden saloons and grand hotels had all been turned into casinos. Heavy-set Americans trudged from building to building, sinking free litres of cola and funnelling cents into slot machines.
Fortunately, neighbouring Victor had so far escaped the same fate. The skeletal remains of old gold mines, as well as the only functioning mine we saw (a dusty gouge on the side of Battle Mountain), surround the town. Everything felt empty and slightly abandoned. In the post office we found a box of postcards from the early 1900s, which had never been bought, and in the Fortune Club the enormous chef prepared pancakes for us behind an original 1950s chrome soda counter.
That night we drank local ales in Dirty Sally’s bar with the manager, biker Bill, clad in black leather Harley jacket with long grey hair in a ponytail. Between tales of his biker gang pub crawls across Colorado (“the police leave us alone,”) he told us how Victor hopes to reinvigorate itself with a new microbrewery, capitalising on Colorado’s booming craft ale scene.
The Phantom Canyon Road, which stretches all the way from Victor to the desert, was perhaps the star of our trip. It’s not really even a road – just a dusty track through a vast, tree-lined gorge. We loved seeing the hard, grey mountains transform gradually into soft, red rock, and the spiky pine trees give way to bleached-out cactuses. We stopped looking up for eagles (no sightings) and started looking down for gophers, which popped out of their holes all along the roadside. Out on the other side, the flat desert landscape was terracotta red, and the ADX Supermax prison rose up in the distance.
Our next stop was Aspen. One of the country’s premier winter ski resorts, it’s a haven for biking and hiking in summer, and boasts a vibrant arts scene too. The new Aspen Art Museum building, designed by Pritzer Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban opened this month, boosting the town’s cultural kudos. But first we had to scale the mountains again – crossing the Independence Pass, which climbs to 3,687 metres, and is closed for seven months of the year.
Grey clouds had begun to gather, and a storm was forecast. I put my foot down, regretting stopping for lunch. At 6.30pm we passed the Twin Lakes, which were shrouded in mist rolling off the mountains. It would be dark by eight. As the daylight ebbed, the road became more and more terrifying – grey scree crumbling away at the edges, as we climbed up the mountain. Finally, after 30 minutes of making high-pitched fear noises, we burst out of the mist on to the summit, where the wind was whipping across brown cottongrass and peat-stained pools.
We settled our nerves that night at our one glamorous stop-off, the Aspen Meadows Resort (from $105 a night, room-only). The hotel felt a bit like a swish university campus, with rooms in Bauhaus-inspired buildings dotted about the grounds. We headed to the pool for a night-time swim to wash away memories of the drive, and suddenly my boyfriend grabbed me by the arm, yell-whispering “A bear! A bear!” Up ahead of us, a black bear lumbered across the path, clawing at the flower beds. We burst into the pool reception, shaking.
“Oh, you’ve seen the bear,” said the manager, barely looking up from his book. “He usually hangs out at the trash cans.”
Before we headed home, we couldn’t resist driving over the border into Utah to see Monument Valley. The contrast in landscape was hard to fathom. Yesterday we were on a freezing-cold mountainside; today we were sunbathing in a Mars-like landscape of red dust and towering mesas. If we looked eastwards, we could just about make out the faint outline of the Colorado Rockies. Our quiet little mountain towns were out there somewhere, resting briefly in the sun, before the snow descends once more.
• Accommodation was provided by the Victor Hotel in Victor (+1 719 689 3553, victorhotelcolorado.com, doubles from $80), and Three Dogs and a Moose holiday cottages in Utah (+1 435 260 1692, 3dogsandamoosecottages.com, cottages for two from $125 a night). For more information, visit colorado.com
Colorado in summer: hiking, hops and history
Climb up a ‘14er’
Colorado is home to 53 peaks over 14,000ft (4,200 metres – see 14ers.com), more than any other US state, and summer is the season for climbing them. Although many are the reserve of experienced mountaineers, the views from the summit of Mount Bierstadt, less than two hours west of Denver, are spectacular and within easy reach of most hikers.
White-water rafting
Royal Gorge Canyon, on the Arkansas river, is state’s ultimate rafting adventure, with near continuous white water and knee-trembling rapids such as the endearingly named Wallslammer. Arkansas River Tours (arkansasrivertours.com) has half-day trips from $70pp.
Colorado beer trail
Colorado’s front range, between Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins, is known as the Napa Valley of beer, with more than 100 local and award-winning breweries. Hop on the Colorado Brewery Bus (cobrewerybus.com, from $45pp) for a tasting tour of some of the best.
Native American history
The spectacular Native American cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde national park, in southern Colorado, are one of America’s best-preserved archeological wonders. Explore thousands of ruins and cliff dwellings then take a native guide into the Ute tribe’s ancestral lands that border the park (utemountaintribalpark.info day tour $48pp, half-day $29)
Music festivals
Colorado shows off its hippy roots in summer with an almost endless series of outdoor music festivals. Highlights include the Snowmass Mammoth music, brews and chili festival in June and the Global Dance festival at the picturesque Red Rocks Amphitheatre in July. In September there’s the cool little Telluride Blues & Brews festival and also Riotfest in Denver, with bands like Flaming Lips and the Cure.
Best of Colorado listings by Aaron Miller
