Cripple Creek, CO

September 3 – 7, 2020

We took a trip through Colorado at the beginning of September, mainly looking for tiny towns where we might want to move to at a later time.

We left Thursday, September 3, stopping for the night in Raton, NM. We woke up on Friday and headed up to Cripple Creek, about an hour southwest of Denver. It was a cute, little mining town with a short touristy shopping district and lots of casinos. The booming metropolis is a whopping square mile and a half and houses a whole 1,200 people. There was a small residential area to the east perched above the town. There was a cute little house for sale at that time, a bit of a fixer-upper but it had a little shed that would have turned into my art studio had we purchased it.

We drove around a little bit more before heading further north where we met up with Brandy’s friend Christy around the Estes Park area (Allenspark, to be specific.) Christy had rented an AirBnB with the expectation that a bunch of her family would come on the trip but most of them backed out. Brandy and I showed up on Friday, September 4, while Christy and her husband and kids were out on an ATV tour. We unloaded the car and sat outside while waiting for them. It was eerily quiet.

We made friends with some chipmunks before Christy and family returned. We sat up until about 11:00 drinking, talking and having a generally good time.

Saturday morning, I made breakfast for the whole lot of us before heading out. We headed south then west through cute little towns like Central City and Black Hawk before pulling in to Leadville. We had a very unimpressive lunch at “The Legendary Silver Dollar Saloon”. A Ruben with no flavor, a French dip made with lamb, and wings that wound up being the only thing we both kinda liked. We strolled through their little shopping area for a minute, but the town was very crowded, we later surmised because of the holiday weekend.

We left the saloon and continued south to the town of Salida, which was just as crowded as Leadville was. We walked in to the Five and Dime, picked up a couple things, including some vintage candy like Boston Baked Beans and a Zagnut before heading out of town.

On our way back to the highway, we passed through a little residential neighborhood where we spotted four deer on peoples lawns. Just chillin’, munching on these poor people’s grass. It was an odd sight for me.

We headed up highway 50 to the Monarch Mountain Lodge. We thought it would be a nice little spot for a night in but we got there to find they didn’t have an air conditioner, a refrigerator or Wi-Fi. The website states they take call in orders for the restaurant, but when I tried calling in an order, they said I had to come in to order. When I did, their menu had about a tenth of what was listed on the website. We ordered burgers and fries, each meal had a grand total of six french fries. We were very disappointed.

Sunday morning we tried to get breakfast at the restaurant but it took forever to even get coffee so we left and headed back to Salida and had breakfast at Uptown Grill. Since we were in Colorado and Colorado claims their green chile is better than our in New Mexico, I decided to put that to the test and ordered their version of huevos rancheros. It was an interesting take on the dish, not that I didn’t like it but there’s no way it was better than anything I’d get in New Mexico.

We continued south heading toward Royal Gorge. We got there and the parking lot was PACKED. We decided against it and continued our drive through Cañon City stopping for the night at a Super 8 in Florence. After dropping Brandy and our stuff, I ran out to get Chinese for dinner before settling in for the night.

Monday morning, we left Florence for the 5 and a half hour drive home.

As is always the case, it was nice getting out for a long weekend. We were planning on returning to Crested Butte a couple weeks later, the weekend of Sept 18, to see the fall colors but the state saw a freeze and snow just after we left. We were under the assumption that the trees wouldn’t get real colorful, so we decided against going again only to see countless pictures from Ouray of trees ablaze in color. After seeing these pictures for the last few weeks, Brandy can’t take it any more, so we’re going up this coming weekend, leaving Friday afternoon, October 2.

Be sure to check out my Photo Diary page for pictures from this trip.

To leave you today, I present a quote from T.S. Eliot:

“We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.“

See you again in October!