Colorado Springs

Mueller State Park & Woodland Park — Elk Meadows, Aspen Trails & Dome Rock

Fifty minutes west of Colorado Springs, US-24 climbs through Ute Pass into the cool, high country of the Rampart Range's western flank, where the plains give way to ponderosa forest, aspen groves, and rolling elk meadows at over 9,000 feet. This single day trades the Front Range crowds for Mueller State Park — 5,000 quiet acres of meadow and forest laced with more than fifty miles of trail, where elk, mule deer, black bear, and the occasional bighorn move through the aspens and the views open west to the Sangre de Cristo and Collegiate ranges. The route walks the park's classic aspen-and-meadow loops, drops to the granite spire of Dome Rock in the adjoining state wildlife area, and bookends the day in Woodland Park, the friendly mountain town on the divide known as 'the City Above the Clouds.' Come in late September and the aspens turn the whole plateau gold; come any season and the air is thin, clean, and twenty degrees cooler than the city below.

Palmer Lake & Monument — The Front Range Foothills of the Palmer Divide

Just twenty-five minutes north of Colorado Springs, the Palmer Divide rises out of the plains — a high, forested ridge of ponderosa pine and meadow that separates the Arkansas and South Platte watersheds and gives the twin towns of Palmer Lake and Monument their cool, mountain-village feel. This unhurried day loops the little reservoir that gives Palmer Lake its name, walks the shaded trails beneath the foothills, and lingers over the history of a town built around a railroad ice house that once shipped Rocky Mountain ice across the West. The Front Range unfolds to the west in an almost continuous wall — Pikes Peak anchoring the south, the Rampart Range marching north — and the whole day moves at the pace of a slow afternoon in the pines.

Pueblo — Steel, Riverwalk & the Union Avenue Historic District

Just forty-five minutes south of Colorado Springs, Pueblo is the working heart of southern Colorado — a river city forged by steel, immigration, and the confluence of the Fountain and Arkansas Rivers. This single day traces that legacy from the Steelworks Center of the West, housed in the original administrative offices of the mighty Colorado Fuel & Iron Company that once employed tens of thousands, to the El Pueblo History Museum's re-created 1840s adobe trading post at the birthplace of the town. In between comes the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk of Pueblo, a downtown channel restored to the river's original course, and the brick-lined Union Avenue Historic District of Victorian storefronts and galleries. Lunch is a Pueblo institution — the slopper, an open-faced cheeseburger drowned in the city's beloved green chile.