Colorado in the Fall
I can't keep away from Colorado, so I went back in the fall of 2024 as my last trip of the year. It's hard to imagine how the same place can re-impress even after multiple visits, but such is the magic of the mountains.
Vedauwoo Campground Laramie, WY¶
Vedauwoo is a campground between Laramie and Cheyenne, WY. It's a great pitstop before continuing on to the Rocky Mountains. I've been here multiple times and it never fails to delight.
Pikes Peak Woodland Park, CO¶
My mom decided to come along for part of my trip, so I picked her up from the Denver airport on my way through, and we headed off to Woodland Park. Also holy shite, I didn't realize tolls were so expensive in this part of Denver! 😧
We ended the day with a trip to the Wines of Colorado, which is probably my favorite restaraunt in the area. We got a table by the creek and had delightful wine flights!
Morning Views Woodland Park, CO¶
On my trip a few months ago, I found our secret campsite that has stunning views of Pikes Peak. We were fortunate to have found ourselves in the midst of a near nation-wide Aurora Borealis. While our eyes could barely see more than a faint glow in the sky, our cameras peeled back the veil of the sky to reveal one of nature's most spectacular sites.
The magic continued the next morning as we were visited by a group of 4 bucks right outside our window. Judging by their unafraid disposition, they clearly couldn't see us inside the trailer peering back at them. What a better way to get close with nature; and furthermore, the views were free!
Shelf Road Cripple Creek, CO¶
The fastest route to Cañon City from Woodland Park is through this through Shelf Road. It's a 4WD trail that winds through BLM land dotted with numerous old mining claims, most of which have been repurposed into grazing ground and private single-family houses.
Royal Gorges Cañon City, CO¶
At the end of Shelf Road is Cañon City which isn't exactly impressive as far as mountain towns go, but it does have a lot of interesting history. More notably, it has one of the best Indian restaurants I've ever been to called Nirvana Culinary Paradise. We stopped there for a late lunch and then continued onto the Royal Gorges.
My mom wasn't a huge fan of this park. The picture of her walking across the bridge above might look so nice and serene, but her internal state was more like this:
She was clenching the handrail with the power of a thousand suns and desperately trying not to freak out. Oops! 
I didn't mind the heights that much so I was just enjoying life. It's hard to describe how far down the river is from the bridge. It's a looong way.
The park itself is pretty cool and definitely worth the visit if you're in the area. At the bottom of the gorges is a narrow train track that employs some impressive engineering in order to get around the space constraints. Parts of the river below were so narrow that there wasn't enough space for the track ballast (the crushed stones you typically see rails sitting on top of). So they had to engineer this suspension system that allowed the weight of the train to be driven into both sides of the gorge. Here's a marketing video of the train you can take a ride on at the bottom of the gorge:
Disaster in Paradise Fairplay, CO¶
I took my mom back to the Denver airport a few days after we went to the Royal Gorges. Next on the agenda was to make my way to Crested Butte (pronounced byoot, as in like beee-yooot-iful. Yes I have to acknowledge to you children that it looks like Crested Butt). The plan was for me to drive from our campsite in Woodland Park 3.5 hours to Crested Butte. I left early enough in the morning that I should get there before dark.
However, the gods had different plans for me. How arrogant of me to assume my trip would go without a hitch! Around the area of the nuclear explosion, I was humbled:
The gods decided they hated me today, so they smote my trailer's right tire with nothing other than the head of a... panicking mule deer? I swear to god this happened, I'm not making it up. As I got on the interstate, a MULE DEER was panicking on the highway because it was stuck in this 15 mile stretch of road that is flanked on both sides by fence. Of course I slowed down as fast as I could when I saw it, but as I was passing it at round 20 mph, it decided to RAM MY F-CKING tire while I was driving by. My thoughts uttered the word "damn" and I thought I would just go to the next town to look for damage instead of pulling over to the side of the road. Well 5 minutes after it rammed my tire, I felt the trailer pull to the right fairly firmly. Smoke was billowing from behind me as I looked in the mirror, so I was forced to stop and look at what's happening. This is what I saw:
I don't know if you can see right there in that there picture, but that's what's called a f-cked up tire. I didn't have many options. I could either call a tow truck, which I really really really didn't want to do, or try to install the spare tire. Installing the spare seemed easy enough, so that's what I did.
I got the spare on just fine, but it was only at this moment did I realize that my electric tire pump wasn't capable of pumping to the spare's recommended PSI of 65. It could only go to 35 
. Woohoo!
I made a detour to Fairplay, CO which fortunately I was already familiar with and knew that there was a somewhat (or mostly) year-round campsite with full hookups. And they were still open for the season! I did some research and realized that ST (Special Trailer) rated tires, the kind that most trailers install, are actually shitty pieces of junk. ST tires are designed to have thicker sidewalls than normal car tires, but usually have less ply counts on the treads than normal car tires. This is done to stabilize the twisting motions that trailers experience. But overall, the construction tends to be worse because people don't usually care too much about their trailers, and they just want something cheap. These cool, beefy looking offroad tires you see on my trailer are in fact Rainier ST Apex tires. Their speed rating is 81mph and the max load of the two tires combined was 4800 lbs, only 600 lbs over the trailer's max gross weight of 4800 lbs. So, not only would the tire be damaged at anything over 80 mph, it didn't have a lot of leeway for payload (although yes, to be fair I would never load the trailer past 4000 lbs as that's patently dangerous).
My research led me to the conclusion that for single-axle trailers, it's actually totally fine to put truck tires on them. So I bought two Falken Wildpeak A/T4W All Terrain LT235/75R15 116/113R E tires and had them shipped to the local tire shop.
Here's the comparison of specs between the two:
| Rainier ST Apex | Falken Wildpeak | |
|---|---|---|
| Speed Rating | 81 mph | 106 mph |
| Load Rating (Combined) | 4840 lbs | 5512 lbs |
| Ply | 6 | 10 |
| Max Pressure | 55 psi | 80 psi |
While I was waiting for the tires to arrive, I took a hike up Mt. Pennsylvania.
Although it's not a 14'er, it's still a decent hike up to the summit at 13,013 ft. Parts of it were especially challenging because the trail was basically straight up with no switchbacks. It wasn't anywhere near as challenging as Mt. Sherman (an actual 14'er I did a few months prior that I haven't yet written a post about) but it was the kind of exercise I needed.
Trip to Crested Butte¶
Stranded in a town I didn't necessarily want to be in, I did this for the next few days: work remotely, hike a mountain, make dinner and go to sleep. My new tires eventually arrived so I put my trailer on jacks and remove the rims, go to the tire shop, pet the tire shop dog, and finally put on my brand spakin new 
off-road TRUCK TIRES! 
I was back in business baby! I started my trek back to Crested Butte, my original destination.
The drive was long and involved going through some incredibly gorgeous towns. I drove through Buena Vista which stunned me in its majesty. Also keep in mind, this was near the tail end of fall so there will still many trees that had fire yellow leaves. I began driving down US 306 (instead of US 285/50 that Google maps shows above) and I could really only describe it as driving through a fairly tale. Like, you know those movies where the main characters (who happen to be magicians) are riding a train across a picturesque Swiss mountain landscape? Where wizards and fairies and knights are running around? It kind of felt like that, although this time the magical story was real. Don't believe me? Sit down in that chair and shut yer trap. Let me show you something else I saw:
A dark road! No wait, there's something in the sky? A UFO? Joe Biden? You see that streak of cloudy light just above the trees? That's a comet! Now I'm not gonna get sentimental and tell you that that's a sign from the sky gods sent specifically to me to deliver a message that says "move out here" because I'm not crazy, but that's exactly what happened.
That comet's name is C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, so I just call it Kit Kat for short (because the initials of that long name would be CAT-A, I guess?). Anyway, Kit Kat and I saw each other for the next hour or so, but when I got to my campsite, I looked all around and realized that the mountains were now obscuring Kit Kat from my view. I never saw it again 
Stay At Crested Butte¶
I pull up to my campsite for the next few days and can't really see much of anything beyond what the starts illuminate. I picked a spot that I guess was good, but I was so tired from the driving that I just wanted a beer then to go to sleep.
I wake up the next morning to THIS
I've got a mountain in front of me, real-life cowboy cattle ranchers behind me, and a BEAUTIFUL rainbow just jettisoning out of the porta-potty as if someone on an exclusive Skittle diet just had explosive diarrhea.
I'm just partly kidding, the porta-potty was in town and there were no signs of civilization at my campsite. But holy cow this place is amazing! It turns out I actually came here for a reason, because the mountain behind me is Mt. Gothic, a not-quite 14'er but considered to be a challenging, steep climb nonetheless.(1) I saw that mountain on the map and again thought to myself: "eh, that's a good one to climb up."
- I say this a bit sheepishly because I'm sure many Coloradans (and my future self) are looking at that and thinking "haha that's so cute."
That's the beauty of this state. You can just pick a random spot on the map and say "meh, I'll hike up that mountain today." In fact, that's how all of my few mountain hikes have gone so far. I just see one off in the distance and think to myself yeah, that'll do.
I only really had one day that I could hike up the mountain: on Saturday when I could dedicate the whole day, and not Sunday because I'll have to start heading back home. So I worked Tuesday through Friday, just enjoying the scenery and not doing anything too strenuous (and I couldn't anyway, because it was getting dark at 4:30 pm).
Saturday morning comes and I head off to the mountain. By this time it had started snowing pretty heavily which made me concerned for my ambitions.
I'm not one to take unnecessary risk, and I knew it would be an unnecessary risk to climb to the top of a mountain you're unfamiliar with when it's snowing and you don't have proper cleeted boots. I thought I would go as far as I could before I thought the slippery ground would pose a danger.
I'm glad I did go on the hike despite the snow because I got to meet those *cue David Attenborough voiceover* wild mountain cows, a rare breed of cow only seen in this part of CO.
I didn't even know cows would even want to climb a mountain, but I'm just here to learn. I decided near the point when the trail started sharply angling upwards that it wouldn't be wise of me to continue any further, so I sadly had to start heading back.
I can't lie that I was on one hand disappointed because the weather prevented me from achieving my goal of making another summit, but on the other I got to witness (not surprisingly) another incredible view. The peace, the solitude, the serenity of this land when the snow began to come felt palpable. It was as if I was going back to a place that was familiar to me, although I had never been there before.
On The Road Again¶
That last hike on Saturday marked the beginning of the end for this trip. The following Sunday morning, I packed up and started making my way back. I drove through Monarch Mountain where it had also recently experienced snow, but was high enough in altitude to not melt it off. My last last camping site in the mountain was some dispersed location near Bailey, CO. I don't know exactly where, I just remember that it required driving through lots of washboard dirt roads that I thought were gonna shake the other tire (the one that didn't blow up) off my trailer.
Again, it was stunning. Again, I was blown away at the beauty around me. Although this night I had a sense of longing. You know that feeling when you're about to say goodbye to someone you love that you know you won't see again in a long time? There's not an English word for that feeling, but that's what I felt.
I sat outside in the cold night just taking in as much as I could, because this would be the last time I see the mountains for probably 8 months. And that felt like eternity. I looked at the twinkling lights of the houses on the mountain thinking to myself how lucky those people must be to be able to live in a place like this.