Irish Independent, July 14th, 2012
Wild fires may have been raging across the Rocky Mountains when I landed in Colorado last month, but a few simple detours left me with plenty to discover in the slice of America, known as ‘Colourful Colorado’.
Fresh out of Denver, my backcountry escape began on Colorado’s Rocky Mountain foothills, just shy of the Wyoming border. A brushy scape of Brokeback Mountain foothills, dotted with grazing cattle and wagon-wheels can only mean one thing: I’m in cowboy country. Sylvan Dale Ranch, located outside the trippily named city of Loveland, is a self-professed paradise of the ‘dude vacation’, and where I saddled up for an afternoon of cowboy dreams. After meeting my stetson–toting wrangler, Lonnie, I was partnered up with ‘Ricochet’, an American Quarter horse with a docile gaze and a creamy palomino pelage.
Then, it was a case of ‘check your previous riding experience at the stables’, as I cantered off across the Big Thompson River ‘riding Western’: one hand on reins, one hand on lasso (or in my case, camera). From the picket-fenced South Fork estate out into a virtual John Wayne screenplay, Ricochet and I trekked across a rocky scrubland of prairie dog burrows and cacti, bonding through a parley of yee-haws and horse-whispering. I had truly been broken in.
As the forest fires in nearby Fort Collins spewed into the heavens, I kept my Wild West theme on track, by venturing cross-state to Grand Junction: Colorado’s final outpost, where the I-70 burned an asphalt thread to Utah and the Great Basin Desert beyond. The scenery around the remote town was a lunar spectacle. The Grand Mesa – the world’s largest flat-topped mountain – panned across a heat-fizzed horizon, while in the lowland valleys, lush farmlands irrigated by the Colorado River burst with peach groves and winelands.
However, most tourists make their way to Grand Junction, for the Colorado National Monument: a sandstone wilderness of vast plunging valleys and dramatic inselbergs (don’t expect an actual monument here, this is Colorado’s very own Grand Canyon). I rose with the roadrunner to mount the 2000ft mesa by sunrise. Deep in the distance, the iconic siren of the Zephyr Express, enroute from Chicago to San Francisco, offered the only intrusion to an otherwise desolate paradise. Turkey vultures soared and chipmunks and lizards scuttled around me. Thankfully, Colorado’s healthy cougar population were breakfasting elsewhere.
From the sublimely lonesome to the ridiculously wealthy, my Colorado circuit reached its peak in the long-time playground for America’s fabulously wealthy: I’m talking about a little place called Aspen. The historic mining town turned ski-resort has a lazy village feel, with its criss-crossed pattern of red-bricked streets and quaint boutiques, kitted with everything from Armani to Zinc. As I ambled its street-side cafés buzzing with brunching billionaires, I noticed a refreshing lack of pretence to the resort ; perhaps it’s best not to flash your cash in a town where there’s always somebody ready to out-bling you.
To reach the town’s signature Aspen Mountain, I grabbed one of the resort’s swit-swoo gondolas, which boast the world’s first solar-powered iPod deck. Seventeen minutes of cathartic tunes later, it was really only upon reaching the mountain summit that the sheer vastness of the state’s Rocky Mountain range came into view. Amid the infinite ivory capped crests, Tirolean meadows of wild lupins surrounded me, just mere hours after I basked under an amber desert sunrise. Colorado me beautiful, indeed.
Getting there
Aer Lingus (0818 365 000; aerlingus.com) flies from Dublin and Shannon to Denver (via Chicago O’Hare) from €620 return.
Staying there
Sylvandale ranch provide dude vacations and cowgirl roundups from €38pps (001 970 667 3915; www.sylvandale.com). Grand Junction’s Double Tree offers welcome cookies panoramic desert mountain vistas and (001 970 241 8888; www.doubletreegrandjunction.com; €45pps) while Aspen’s historic Jerome is the ultimate apres-mountain refuge (001 970 920 1000; www.hoteljerome.com €188pps).
For more information, visit colorado.com
