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 4^th-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 4^th-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.

Jason and I are all about experiencing life and sharing experiences with others. This ideology led to us giving our family members their choice of one of four activities in lieu of birthday presents in 2023. One of these options was a trip into Utah’s unconventional and under populated West Desert for some world-famous rock excavating. Eight of our family members chose this as their birthday activity and three others tagged along. The primary objective was trilobite fossils, but we found many other solid masses of significance. Here’s the scoop on our scooping.

We started this stone excursion with a stop in Eureka and nearby Silver City. Eureka was once Utah’s 9^th-largest city. It’s story of boom and bust is typical of any mining mecca, except the boom lasted for over a century. Once home to nearly 4,000 people, Eureka is now an interesting and colorful settlement of 650 hardy residents and many relics of the past. If you are passing through, I’d recommend checking out the historic brick buildings, Porter Rockwell’s cabin, and the Star Theater’s projection equipment from 1935. (The theater itself closed in 1958.) We also stopped at Crazy Mary’s Rock Shop in the Gatley Building, which was constructed in 1898. Mary kindly gave us a tour of the old structure including its 20-foot indoor well used for cooling purposes during the prohibition days.

From Eureka, we traveled to neighboring Silver City, a true ghost town. At one time, Silver City was home to a population of 1,500. From 1869 to 1915, it went from being a mining town to an ore sampling mill and smelter. After 1915, the mill closed, and by 1930 Silver City was mostly deserted. Massive concrete foundations with compartments, tunnels, arches, and towers are the principal remains at the location. We explored these and then headed up the road to the mouth of Dragon Canyon where the Dragon Mine still operates. Outside the gates of Dragon Canyon, we found a promising patch of dirt and started digging. There, we believe we found samples of hematite but plan on further analysis to confirm.

Long before the brief influx of miners, the West Desert was home to lasting residents, trilobites. Trilobites, one of Earth’s most successful lifeforms, evolved over 300 million years into more than 25,000 species. These sea-dwelling creatures flourished about 1,000 times longer than the entire span of current human existence.

Roughly an hour past Delta, an outcropping of Wheeler Shale containing some of the highest concentrations of trilobite fossils in North America was forced to the surface from thousands of feet below by warping and weathering. This remarkable layer is open to curious enthusiasts for personal excavation and fossil removal at U-Dig Fossils: Quarry. That was our destination the next day.

While trilobites survived for hundreds of millions of years, the trilobites at U-Dig are from just the Cambrian Period, 500-550 million years ago. A lot of fossils can develop over 50 million years though. They are prolific at the site, and no one walked away empty-handed.

We chipped and pried through rock in one of the quarry’s prehistoric pits from noon to a little after 5:30, almost closing time. At least, some of us did. You see, there was no rain in the forecast that day, but that didn’t stop it from raining. The showers started about 3:00 and continued the rest of the afternoon. The less resilient members of our group left early because they didn’t appreciate the soaking. Jason and I, along with a few others, kept at it and found some great specimens while chilled and water-logged.

The following day, we headed to Obsidian Hill in search of Apache Tears, which are rounded obsidian pebbles. We found them and a whole lot of jasper. Unfortunately, the gnats found us. I obtained at least thirty gnat bites that afternoon. Jason didn’t get nearly as many, but he got one inside his ear and couldn’t sleep that night because he was in so much pain. The origins of these gnats were a mystery as there didn’t seem to be any water or anything else of gnatty interest nearby.

Utah’s West Desert is a fantastic place to travel back in time 150 years or 550 million years. The oddities are plentiful in that parched expanse. If you have a curiosity about rocks or just an inquisitive mind, it might be time to take your own family on a West Desert, dirt-sleuthing experience.