Colorado: One of our Favorite States to Enjoy Nature
UPDATED: 2/4/2023
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There are certain places you suspect you’ll love and so you go there. Sometimes you are disappointed. But sometimes your suspicions were right. The latter is Colorado for us. We love hiking, mountains, non-humid but weather warm enough to enjoy the outdoors, and so for years, Colorado was on our list of places to visit. Luckily, a few friends from high school moved there and gave us an excuse to visit…a few times!
We first visited Colorado in July 2007. Just a few years post-college, and we were on a tight budget but already knew travel was worth it to us. Luckily, a friend we were visiting had just proposed to his girlfriend a few weeks prior and was in the process of moving out of his place and to hers, and he was generous enough to let us stay at his apartment.
We were only there for a long weekend and spent a fair amount of time visiting with friends. We went to a Colorado Rockies baseball game at Coors Field, with its big, expansive blue sky and hints of the Rocky Mountains on the horizon. We spent a little time wandering through downtown Denver, enjoyed the convenience of the light rail, which seemed so much easier to maneuver than our Washington, DC Metro system, which of course was much older.
We took a day trip with another friend and her dogs up north of Denver for a few hours to a hike in the Rocky Mountain National Park, where it was substantially cooler even in July. We took another day trip to check out Boulder, CO where we wandered on their walking street, Pearl Street, and took Boulder Creek Path out through the University of Colorado - Boulder campus. Boulder has a reputation for being an outdoorsy town that is very bike and pedestrian friendly, and we found it to live up to the hype.
A view from the road up Mount Evans
Almost exactly a year later, we headed back to Colorado for a second time. This visit was to attend the wedding of one of the friends we’d visited the previous summer. A couple of other friends accompanied us, and (still very much on a recent college grad budget) we were able to use Marriott points that I’d accrued through work travel to stay at the Courtyard Denver Downtown. We flew in on the 4th of July and as we landed at the Denver airport could see fireworks exploding in the sky, which was a really cool thing to see. It was a special day for us because at that time, we were engaged and would be getting married exactly one year later.
We decided to cram in as many things as we could while we were there for the wedding and ended up enjoying a really nice variety of activities.
Just above the tree line
After flying in Thursday night, on Friday we headed out to Mount Evans . At 14,130 feet above sea level, it is the highest paved road in North America. The route is 49 miles of sharp turns and switchbacks, and it’s estimated to take 2 hours round-trip. By around 10,000 feet above sea level, I started feeling a little short of breath. By around 12,000 feet, I started seeing some spots, which was exacerbated by heavy fog and poor visibility on the mountain and turned the car over to a friend.
Ultimately, we decided to turn around before making it quite all the way since we were all feeling the altitude, but the scenery and drive were amazing all the same. And it was cold! Of course that’s not surprising with such high elevation, but for comparison, the average July high temperature for Mount Evans is only 51 degrees. For Denver, about 60 miles away and still a mile above sea level, the average high is 92 degrees.
Old passenger cars are so cool inside
On Saturday, knowing we needed to be back in Denver in time for the evening wedding, we got an early start out to Golden, Colorado (about 25 miles west of Denver). On the way, we visited the Colorado Railroad Museum on a whim. It was very cool and had a yard of many old trains that you could explore on your own.
From there, we headed to downtown Golden, which was original a Gold Rush town (hence the name) and maintains the overall character of that style of building and feel. We had a little time to wander and could have spent more time there. We grabbed lunch and then headed to the destination at hand: the Coors Brewery. I would not advise going there on a holiday weekend like we did. The line and wait were pretty bad, but we stuck it out, enjoyed the 30-minute self-guided tour, and the free samples of beer at the end. At that point, we high-tailed it back to Denver to get showered and dressed for our friends’ wedding.
Mind the thorns!
Nothing beats a serene water garden.
On Sunday morning, we had a few hours before we had to go to the airport and decided to squeeze in a visit to the Denver Botanic Gardens (York Street), which is pretty much the most amazing place. Situated right in downtown on 24 acres, the gardens have everything from a Monet water lily pond to Japanese gardens.
For a map and a list of the various areas within the garden, see here. Other than the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, which we previously wrote about (read about that trip here) and which was very different (being the desert and all), we had never really been to any botanical gardens before and after this experience, started looking for others in cities we visited. Since then, we’ve visited ones in Vancouver, Asheville (read that blog here), Toledo, New Mexico, and Akureyri in northern Iceland (read that blog here).
Colorado deserves an actual, dedicated, week-long trip, but to date, we’ve had two long weekends where we’ve been able to see quite a good variety and would love to go back.
Such a peaceful walk
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Check out our other posts about Colorado:
