Road Trip to the Grasslands

Today Gerard and I decided to do something a little different. We've been soaking up the mountains for two years, so we decided to see a little bit of the other Colorado, the grasslands to the east which make up some 40% of the state.

We meandered through a lot of small cow towns on our way out east, none of which were remarkably different from anything you'd find in the Texas Panhandle. Eastern Colorado has about as many stinky feedlots as Texas. If you know anything about a feedlot, you'll understand why we eat only 100% grass fed, locally raised meat. About the only other thing that turned my stomach was all the prime agricultural land north of Denver that had been covered by sprawl in the form of strip malls and cookie cutter houses. One thing that stood out to me on this trip was how rural properties tended to get smaller and trashier as they got closer to the big cities. But once we got beyond the Denver metro commutable region, the scenery changed markedly.

The first notable stop we made was the town of Fort Morgan in Northeastern Colorado. It was surprisingly nice, and it had a very nice history museum which we spent about an hour perusing. We learned about everything that happened on those soils from the roaming ice age animals and pre-historic people, to the bloody battles waged between Native Americans and the Federal Government, to the birth and career of Glenn Miller to the modern farming economy. Afterward we hand lunch at a picnic table in a white gazebo in the town square. It was a beautiful day.

After lunch we headed up to the Pawnee National Grasslands, specifically seeking the Pawnee Buttes. What a gorgeous drive. The rolling prairie seems to go forever and the wind never stops blowing. You can see thunderstorms rolling 100 miles off, and if you look really closely, you can see the Rocky Mountains 150 miles distant. We hiked the Pawnee Butte Trail and got some good shots, but pictures can never really do justice to landscapes like these. They can only hint at the beauty and do nothing to convey the spirit.

As we were approaching the buttes, a thunderstorm rolled over. We took shelter in a small canyon. There was no rain and it passed quickly, but it was amazing to watch it roll overhead and disappear on the horizon. We were even treated to a rainbow as the finale, stretched over relatively pristine prairie, in a scene that must've been little changed for thousands of years.

Dotted throughout the prairie was the occasional old house or barn, long abandoned. We stopped at a couple and poked around a bit. I wondered who built them, and thought about the good and bad times those families must have had as their lives unfolded within those walls. I wondered why they left. I stood next to one and looked around. In all directions as far as the eye can see there was nothing but short golden grasses and the sound of a lonely wind. Most of these fields didn't have fences around them, and the roads were dirt. Sometimes there would be a couple of large trees near the house, dead now from thirst without people to water them on these parched plains. Little seemed to move except the grasshoppers at our feet and herds of pronghorn on distant hills. Pretty cool.

Click here for some photos.

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