18 marvelous Colorful Colorado getaways

Trappers Lake, the second largest natural lake in Colorado behind Grand Lake, sits on the edge of the 230,830-acres Flat Tops Wilderness Area in northwestern Colorado Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock) (CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, THE GAZETTE)

EAGLE COUNTY – This winter, maybe on their way to ski resorts off Interstate 70, people will drive west on U.S. 24, passing Leadville and the turn for little Red Cliff to the stretch of road that bends around Battle Mountain. Maybe they’ll pay no attention to the ghost town to the left, seen there at the edge of a cliff, hanging on. That’s Gilman. The highway’s paved shoulders give one space to park, to step out and see the homes and buildings of last century’s bustling scene gone silent. Read more here (CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, THE GAZETTE)

NEDERLAND – Out on the boat he built to sail the Pacific and try to forget Vietnam’s hellfire and everything he saw behind a machine gun and the world gone mad, Scott Harrison stopped beside a whale. Two months had passed at sea. He was starting to doubt this solo “escape” he launched eight years after he fought; it had done nothing to ease his torment. Read more here. (CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, THE GAZETTE)

Long-time waitress Mo Ferrar visits with customers Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017, at the Woody Creek Tavern outside Aspen. Ferrar has been working at the restaurant for 20 years. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock) (CHRISTIAN MURDOCK)

The outside of the Indiana Jones Home Bed & Breakfast in Antonito on Sunday July 30, 2017. (Photo by Dougal Brownlie, The Gazette). (DOUGAL BROWNLIE)

ALLENSPARK – Traditions have come and gone here at Meeker Park Lodge, but this one around suppertime remains. The setting sun casts an orange glow on 13,911-foot Mount Meeker and below on the idyllic valley where knotty pine structures stand, some for nearly a century. They were built by the family of the three sisters who now sit on the lodge’s porch: Laura Dever, Bonnie Dever and Patty Dever-Cavaleri, beside her husband in the cowboy hat. Also here is a man from Chicago and a woman from Michigan, longtime family friends who have made this rustic resort their summer home, because they can’t imagine the season without the cabins and the country from their childhood memories. Read more here. (JAMES WOOLDRIDGE)

People bike around downtown Buena Vista on Friday, July 22, 2016. Photo by Ryan Jones, The Gazette. (Ryan Jones)

Visitors walk along 6th Street in Georgetown on Thursday, July 14, 2016. Photo by Stacie Scott, The Gazette (STACIE SCOTT)

Downtown Central City on Tuesday, July 26, 2016. Photo by Stacie Scott, The Gazette (STACIE SCOTT)

ALMA – It’s tough living here. “Definitely, you’ve got to be a hearty soul to make it a long time,” Mayor Gary Goettelman says. Just ask Erik Mursewick, 41, whose family has been here for decades. He’s shoveling the sidewalks outside what used to be Alma’s Only Bar, now boarded up like other structures around the place. Shoveling, he says, is how he makes money in the winter so he can live in the surrounding hills spotted with cottages and sideways-leaning shacks. Read more here. (STACIE SCOTT)

PAGOSA SPRINGS – The lights of the riverside resort downtown shone bright, illuminating the man across the way. Waylon Smith, long-haired and long-bearded, soaked happily along the banks, sitting in a steamy pool with rocks fashioned around it. The juxtaposition was not lost on Smith as he gazed over at the Victorian-style Springs Resort & Spa, which has enticed the likes of Oprah with its full-service spa and 23 stone-masonry tubs of varying temperatures and sizes. But here in one of the locally known “hippie dips,” Smith enjoyed his town’s hot springs free of charge. “I’ve got everything I need and more right here,” he said. Read more here. (CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, THE GAZETTE)

LEADVILLE – The blustery storm did not faze James Duke. There he was amid the raging snow that piled up on his black top hat and froze his white beard. He shoveled the old downtown storefronts, looking appropriately like someone from yester-century. “I want people to see what people may have looked like walking down these streets in the 1880s,” he said. After all, he is the official town greeter, and he feels this appearance is part of his responsibility. He hasn’t shaved since the mayor bestowed the title upon him. Read more here. (CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, THE GAZETTE)

WESTCLIFFE – The drive south starts out barren, the empty ribbons of dusty road carving through towns of crumbling buildings and rusting trailer homes, past barbed-wire fences wrapping open land and fields slowly turning green. Soon the landscape warps. Now Colorado 96 climbs into the San Isabel National Forest, and the rock outcrops show off their shapes and colors, red and pink, gunpowder gray and green with lichen. Read more here. (CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, THE GAZETTE)

RED FEATHER LAKES – Main street, as the locals know it, is a gravel lot where a three-legged dog hobbles. He wanders by the Ace Hardware, a new, strange addition to this mountain village where major commercial names are as rare as cell reception. If the dog has patrolled here over the years, then he’s more acquainted with the trading post, the lumber store, the auto body shop, the coffee shop and the post office, where business is business as usual on cloudy days like this before summer. Slow. Read more here. (MARK REIS)

Highway 24 crosses over the Red Cliff Truss Bridge, built in 1940, and the upper Eagle River Monday, June 20, 2016, in Red Cliff, Colo. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock) (CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, THE GAZETTE)

HUERFANO COUNTY – From Interstate 25, it’s as impossible to miss as the wind turbines that break the view of the mighty twin peaks: a 300-foot mound of what looks like black rubble, a miniature volcano in a field of yucca, cactuses and cow pies. Huerfano Butte is but one “volcanic cone” spotting the plains of Spanish Peaks country, as described in Ross B. Johnson’s 1968 report for the U.S. Department of the Interior. The geology, he wrote, “has inspired men for untold centuries,” long before the 1869 expedition of pioneer Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. Read more here. (JERILEE BENNETT, THE GAZETTE)

Colorado Springs Gazette

18 marvelous Colorful Colorado getaways

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