Colorado
2022

The trip opened with the main event: Red Rocks Park & Amphitheatre, ten miles southwest of Denver. The towering sandstone monoliths that flank the bowl — Ship Rock and Creation Rock — date back nearly 300 million years, to a Pennsylvanian-era coastline whose sandy beaches compacted into stone and picked up their rust color from iron-rich groundwater. The Ute people knew the site long before an 1820 Army expedition "rediscovered" it, and it passed through a string of owners and names — including, briefly, "Garden of the Titans" — before Denver's Civilian Conservation Corps crews built the amphitheater by hand between 1935 and 1941.

What makes it famous today is what those crews were smart enough not to fight: the rocks themselves. Red Rocks is often called the only naturally acoustically perfect amphitheater in the world, and standing in the 9,525-seat bowl between two red stone giants, looking out past the stage toward the Denver skyline hazy on the horizon, it's easy to believe it.

A detour through Boulder's Mapleton Hill historic district turned up the McAllister House, built in 1883 for lumber merchant Ira McAllister and redesigned twelve years later by Denver architect Robert Balcomb into the Queen Anne showpiece it is today — turret, wraparound porch, and all. It's a City of Boulder Landmark, plaque and all, sitting quietly on Pine Street among its Victorian neighbors.

Quietly, that is, except for the tour buses: this is also the house that played the Nanu-Nanu home of Mork and Mindy on the late-'70s sitcom filmed in Boulder, which means a lumber merchant's 1883 Queen Anne has spent the last several decades moonlighting as one of television's more famous alien residences.

Two days later, the trip closed at Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, where jagged red sandstone fins jut out of the ground with snow-capped Pikes Peak standing behind them. The park earned its name in 1859, when two surveyors scouting the area disagreed about what to do with it — one thought it would make "a capital place for a beer garden"; his companion, Rufus Cable, looked up at the spires and said it was "a fit place for the Gods to assemble."

The Gods nearly lost it to development. Railroad executive Charles Elliott Perkins bought 480 acres here in 1879 at a friend's urging but never built on it, preferring to leave it wild. When he died in 1907 without formally protecting the land, it fell to his children to finish what he'd intended — in 1909 they deeded the whole property to the City of Colorado Springs, with the stipulation that it remain "a free and public park forever." It still is.