Road trips, thanks to the closeness they enforce, can be a great way to facilitate conversations on life’s most meaningful topics, like how much wood a woodchuck would chuck and so forth. As we were eager to know all the particulars about woodchucks, Jason and I instigated a lengthy drive to Fort Collins, Colorado last summer. It was a boring drive with an excellent destination, which means it was typical of the road trip genre.
Fort Collins is Colorado’s 4th-most populated city. Colorado State University is the city’s largest employer, and its research facilities have attracted multiple tech firms to the area. However, for tourists, Fort Collins’ downtown is much more of a draw than its research facilities. The streets of its sizeable, historic district are charming and contain ample dining and shopping options. (I’d recommend the chocolate shop Nuance.) Visiting downtown was first on our itinerary after arriving. Following a bit of browsing in its cute stores, what was beneath those shops, which was less cute, held our attention.
We joined a Fort Collins Ghost Tour and went below the streets to learn about the darker side (literally and figuratively) of the settlement’s early days. Underneath the oldest part of Fort Collins stretches a secret: the buildings are linked via a network of underground tunnels. I’ve found conflicting accounts on whether these tunnels were created for ordinary reasons like merchandise delivery or to facilitate the steam heating of the entire area. Whatever their purpose, they added an element of bizarreness to the already spooky subterranean spaces we visited.
Amongst these basements was the one belonging to the town’s original firehouse, which was built in 1881. The firehouse had an underground jail. Why underground? Its placement served to separate the diseases that flourished in its cramped quarters from the public and provide an undisturbed spot for solitary confinement. The prisoners’ morgue in the basement next door with its dirt ramp for body drop off and cold storage room for corpses was the creepiest part of the tour.
In contrast, the coolest part of the tour was the speakeasy found in the tunnels under the Northern Hotel during modern maintenance work, a leftover from the decades when alcohol was banned in Fort Collins. The old speakeasy had been blocked off shortly after its discovery for safety reasons, but the door to it was still swinging. Surprisingly, considering the current proliferation of breweries in Fort Collins, the alcohol prohibition era spanned much longer there than nationally, lasting from 1896 to 1969. The Northern Hotel was completed in 1873 and opened as the Northern in 1905, amid that prohibition. During its heyday it was frequented by celebrities like John Wayne, Vincent Price, and Franklin D. Roosevelt… and apparently, they got thirsty. In addition to all those mysterious spots, we also visited the Avery Building, which might be haunted by the ghost of businessman William Avery who might have been poisoned by his wife in 1890.
The next day, we moved our explorations to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. Rocky Mountain National Park is the 4th-most-visited national park in the US due in large part to its proximity to Denver. In 2022, that equated to about 4,300,000 sightseers. As a result, you not only need an entry time reservation to get into the park between 9:00 AM and 2:00 PM but must obtain an additional reservation for the Bear Lake Road, if you want to access the area where a hefty share of the park’s most popular short hikes are located. Reservations for the Bear Lake Road can be particularly hard to come by. The overuse of the park has also impacted the staff. Many of the rangers we encountered were grouchy, probably from dealing with a surplus of confused idiots every day.
Miraculously, we were able to acquire a Bear Lake Road pass. Hence, we chose to hike 3.6 miles out-and-back to Nymph, Dream, and Emerald Lakes on one of the most trafficked trails in the park. As we were running out of time to complete this route before our next mystical rendezvous, those of us who wanted to go all the way to Emerald Lake needed to make the return 1.8 miles in 22 minutes. We managed to arrive back at the trailhead only five minutes late by running the entire way down and averaging about 13:30 per mile. Overall impression of Rocky Mountain on this visit? Beautiful as always but way too many people.
That evening, we upgraded from the natural to the supernatural on a ghost tour at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park per the request of some of the youngsters in the group. While about half of us had done this tour before, our guide this time made it a much scarier experience. She used the power of suggestion to alter perceptions and bring imagined sensations into reality. Still, the kids had a blast and were thrilled to try out their new spirit box.
Our hike the next day was much more satisfying than Rocky Mountain, despite its lesser renown. We traversed about 6.5 miles in the Horsetooth Mountain Open Space visiting Horsetooth Falls and the top of Horsetooth Rock, which has an elevation of 7,256 feet, via the Horsetooth Falls, Spring Creek, and Wathen Trails.
Our time in Fort Collins came to an end the next day and all that was left was the tedious drive home. During that drive, we stopped at the Wyoming Territorial Prison State Historic Site. Although this was intended to be a brief stop, we stayed for a couple hours and still didn’t get a chance to read most of the signs. If you find yourself in its vicinity, it’s a fun and informative place to take a break.
As a side note, it was pouring when we got to the prison and, oh yeah, our whole trip was very wet. We were rained on generously every day at some point, but we didn’t let that stop us- obviously.
Road trips are both exciting and tedious. Through them we encounter new wonders, develop techniques for staying alert in landscapes of never-ending sagebrush, and of course, learn how much wood a woodchuck would chuck. I’m not going to give you all the answers though; I’ll let you discover those on your own road pilgrimage.