Colorado Adventures

The word that best describes my time in Colorado is beautiful. After driving through the never-ending plains of Kansas, I was so ready for a change in scenery. Then, not long into Colorado, you see them, the Rocky Mountains. I had never seen anything so big and amazing before. I've been to different parts of the Appalachian Mountains before but those are puny compared to the Rockies. And then the drive from Denver southwest all the way to Moab, Utah was just incredible. I got up close and personal with the mountains, driving many scenic highways. I believe I got up as high as an elevation of 10,000 feet. Since it's still winter, the mountains had a beautiful cover of snow. I drove past a ski resort, I drove past a family of mule deer, and I got to see all of the pine and juniper trees that I've never seen before. The whole drive was like a postcard.

Denver was a really cool city. It's right east of the Rockies so there are beautiful mountain views from all over the city. I found there are lots of funky local places which I really like about a city. I ate at a Native American restaurant that is described as the Chipotle of Indian food. I had a "Indian taco" which was traditional frybread topped with beans, beef, cheese, sour cream, tomato salsa, and the best part was a hominy salsa with cranberries. The whole dish was very good. The next day I started off going to this amazing REI store. Its the REI Flagship store and it had a Starbucks inside of it. It was my kind of place. The store was huge. It was three stories with so much cool stuff. It even had a climbing wall inside of it. It was a lot of fun just looking through everything. After that, I went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. This museum was pretty similar to a typical natural history museum, but many of the exhibits were geared toward Colorado. For example, most of the many wildlife halls featured Colorado plants and animals. This was very interesting to me because I was very unfamiliar with the region. And in the gem hall, there was a big section about gem and mineral mining in the area. After the museum, I walked around the lake at City Park. It was a lot of fun watching the geese and people watching the locals bike riding and walking.

The next day was a beautiful drive to Mesa Verde National Park. I saw the landscape transition from the snowy Rockies to a snowy combination desert and mountains. Mesa Verde National Park is a very interesting one. I had never heard of it before planning my trip and I'm glad I took the time to stop by. Many of the roads, trails, and tours were closed for the season, but I still got a good taste of the park. The park preserves artifacts of the ancient Pueblo culture. The Pueblo people lived on top of the mesa and in the Mesa in cliff dwellings. Traveling through the park involved a really curvy drive up to the top of the mesa to get to the exhibits. Then there were several stops to pull over and walk around to look at the archaeological sites. I've always been interested in archaeology so I was very impressed with the cliff dwellings built into the side of the mesa. I hope to come back to this park and go on the tours so I can get up close the villages.

Overall, I had a lot of fun in Colorado. It was so pretty and I only scratched the surface of the activities. The people were very friendly and had a relaxed, outdoorsy, and active vibe which I liked. And in Denver, it was very noticeable how environmentally conscious the city is. There were recycle bins everywhere, reusable bottle refill stations, low-flow toilets and just many signs and postings about being green and reducing waste. I really appreciated that. So Colorado, I'll be back.