Colorado Springs

The last few weeks have mostly been spent in the towns and cities of the Front Range, with little photogenic activity to make the blog post exciting. Drinking beer, visiting family, and making friends do not make for exciting blog posts, so I apologise in advance for the lack of colour.

On leaving the Buena Vista area, we drove down Highway 24 towards Colorado Springs. As is common in this part of Colorado in late summer, the heavens opened again, and we pulled off the highway on County Road 28 near to Pikes Peak, to find somewhere to make lunch and sit out the storm. The road leads down to towards Catamount Reservoir, but the dirt roads accessing the waterfront had all turned into muddy rivers, and I didn’t want to risk getting Jim bogged in the wet ground. We found a trailhead to stop at, and waited until the skies had cleared. After an hour, we returned to the highway, and almost immediately found ourselves stuck in a line of stationary traffic. The Front Range seems particularly susceptible to flooding, and a flash flood had made the road impassable further towards Colorado Springs.

After an hour or so, the road was reopened, and we continued to Manitou Springs where we found somewhere to park for the night. As we often do, we parked adjacent to a town park, in an area just outside of the centre. We walked into the town centre and spent the afternoon enjoying the strange collection of shops, bars and amusement arcades. Unfortunately, our stroll into town revealed the unusually precarious nature of our parking spot. The stream that runs through Manitou Springs had turned into a muddy torrent, and we found television camera crews waiting for the predicted flood, and numerous closed shops with sandbags in front of their doors. Our parking spot on the riverbank suddenly seemed like a stupid choice.

We kept an eye on the level of river throughout the afternoon, and when we turned in for the night, the level had dropped considerably and the rain had eased off. Thankfully in the morning the truck remained where we had parked it, and we drove up to the nearby Garden of the Gods city park, without having to test the fording capacity of the truck. Garden of the Gods is a great place to spend a few hours, and I’ve no doubt that for climbers it offers a lot to do, but having recently driven through Utah, the strange rock formations did not seem as exciting as they are described by the locals. We enjoyed a walk in the park, but it was extremely busy, and we left after little more than an hour to head into Colorado Springs.

For the first time since arriving in Colorado more three weeks previously, we left the mountains behind us, and caught our first glimpse of the Great Plains that stretch for more than a thousand miles toward the east coast. With the backdrop of Pikes Peak and the Front Range, Colorado Springs still feels mountainous, but the topography of the city is relatively flat, and the altitude is almost a mile below Leadville from where we had recently come. We parked alongside a city park, and spent nearly a week in the same spot without being moved on.

The downtown area of Colorado Springs is nice, but most of it can be seen in a day. We spent much of our time with my cousin and her family, enjoying feeling part of a family again after seven months without seeing familiar faces. Living on the road is awesome in many ways, and for me this trip has been a dream become reality, but I miss the proximity of friends and family, and I’m not sure I’d permanently want to feel like a stranger in every town we visit. Leaving Colorado Springs, I felt recharged, and ready for the journey into the big city of Denver to the north.

Avoiding a boring trudge up the interstate, we returned west on Highway 24 to Woodland Park, and, after stopping for criminally delicious doughnuts at the Doughnut Mill, headed north on Highway 67 into the Pike National Forest. The pressures on the forest's resources from the large nearby population centres, mean that we found no places to free camp. All of the roads off of the 67 lead to private properties, and there were clear ‘no camping’ signs at the few trailheads we saw. Having passed through most of the forest, we diverted onto the 126, and headed east at Pine towards the remote Buck Snort Saloon. It was recommended to us by my cousin, and its location and age make it worth the trip, but the narrow canyon location means that there is limited parking, and on a Sunday evening there was nowhere for us to park without blocking the road. We were forced to head back to the highway, and being so close to Denver, we decided to drive into the city and find somewhere to park.