Santa Fe Trail — Bent's Fort, the Comanche Grassland & the Purgatoire

Two hours southeast of Colorado Springs, the shortgrass prairie of the Arkansas Valley holds one of the richest concentrations of frontier history in the American West — the old Mountain Route of the Santa Fe Trail, where fur traders, soldiers, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Mexican caravans crossed paths for decades. Day one reaches Bent's Old Fort, a meticulously reconstructed adobe trading post on the banks of the Arkansas where costumed interpreters keep the 1840s alive. Day two turns to the Native and immigrant cultures of the plains at the Koshare Indian Museum in La Junta and walks the volcanic canyon country of the Comanche National Grassland at Vogel Canyon, threaded with rock art and stage-route ruins. Day three descends into the Picketwire Canyonlands to the largest documented dinosaur trackway in North America, then explores the coal-and-coke boomtown history of Trinidad before the return. Overnights in La Junta and Trinidad anchor a weekend of adobe walls, prairie canyons, and deep time.