Collegiate Peaks — Whitewater, Ghost Towns & Fourteener Country in Buena Vista

Two days in the high heart of Chaffee County, where the Arkansas River tumbles out of the mountains and a wall of 14,000-foot peaks — the Collegiate Range — rises straight out of the valley floor above the old railroad town of Buena Vista. Day one is spent on and beside the river: a whitewater raft trip through the granite drops of Browns Canyon National Monument, followed by a walk on the Midland Trail, the graded bed of the abandoned Colorado Midland Railway that now traces the river's edge at the foot of town. Day two climbs the mining road up Chalk Creek to St. Elmo, one of Colorado's best-preserved ghost towns, passes the strange white glare of the Mount Princeton Chalk Cliffs, and ends at an overlook beneath Mount Princeton itself, with the full Collegiate skyline of Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Princeton spread across the valley before the drive back to Colorado Springs.