8 quirky places to visit in Colorado this summer for newbies and natives alike

Sunday, May. 26, 2024

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Let’s start with an understatement: There’s a lot to do in Colorado. We’ve got four national parks, nine national monuments, 26 scenic byways, 28 historical landmarks and some nationally renowned cultural destinations, like Red Rocks Amphitheatre and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. 

And Coloradans take advantage of this abundance. A 2022 report by Longwoods International, the most recent annual data available, shows that the largest percentage of overnight travelers in Colorado came from — wait for it — other parts of Colorado. Same with the percentage of day trippers (defined as traveling to a destination 50 miles or farther from home) in Colorado, with close to 50% coming from elsewhere in the state.

And visiting all of these destinations is big business. According to a report by Dean Runyon Associates, tourism generated a record $27.7 billion in traveler spending in 2022, generating $1.7 billion in local and state tax revenue. 

These are not “COVID numbers,” said Hayes Norris, spokesperson for the Colorado Tourism Office. Meaning the effects of COVID — a drastic decline in revenue and then a sharp recovery as destinations opened back up — aren’t felt very strongly in the data. Though we’re technically still in recovery, Norris added, the numbers reflect an industry that has regained balance. 

Part of that delicate balance is making sure that as destinations become more popular they aren’t overrun, or “loved to death,” as some mountain towns can attest. Luckily for Coloradans, there are still plenty of places that don’t require timed entry slots, but are just as culturally intriguing, geologically spectacular or historically significant as some better-known counterparts. 

Below we’ve picked out eight sites to introduce you to the state you already know and love. 

TANK Sonic Arts

Rangely

A rusting steel water tank on the hillside above Rangely, the oil town on the western edge of Colorado, shouldn’t strike anyone as peculiar. Until you listen closely. 

The water tank was moved to Rangely in the 1960s by a utility company that needed it for fire suppression, but as the story goes, the shale beneath it couldn’t support the water meant to fill it. So it was sold off and conveniently abandoned, becoming a space where local musicians and curious townspeople wandered into to toss rocks, clang on the walls and shuffle their feet. 

The tank’s parabolic floor and 65-foot concave roof, wrapped in a cylinder of steel, creates a reverberation that lasts up to 40 seconds, Alex Ross would report in The New Yorker many decades later.

In 1976, composer and sound artist Bruce Odland was touring Colorado, creating a sonic collage of the places he visited. While recording ambient sounds outside of Rangely on his last stop, a pick-up truck with two oil workers pulled up beside him. “Get in” they deadpanned, and the traveling sound artist hesitantly complied. They took him to the water tank and demonstrated its sonic significance. 

The tank became and remained an unofficial stop for sound artists and musicians for decades. It wasn’t until 2012, when the threat of demolition loomed over the tank, that Odland and others formed Friends of the TANK and began renovating it to host concerts and sound camps. 

With a few coats of paint, a wider door to fit large instruments and a new city designation as a public assembly hall (not to mention over $100,000 in donations and lots of elbow grease by artists and locals), the tank became the TANK Center for Sonic Arts. Its title, beautifully and purposely ambiguous, reflects the open-ended manner in which people visiting the tank use its acoustics. 

Visitors can hum, bang and strum around the TANK on Saturday from 9 a.m.-1 p.m., but to really experience its sonic potential, check out their website for upcoming concerts, sound installations and the annual Summer Solstice Festival. 

More information at tanksounds.org.

Last Chance Module Array

Last Chance

The name alone is enough reason to stop in Last Chance, but a second, easy-to-miss reason sits 2 miles due south of the town’s main — and only — intersection. There you’ll find Last Chance Module Array, the third installment of Studio M12’s “Prairie Module” series, quietly awaiting your arrival. 

Like the Eastern Plains that surround it, the artwork is simple in structure but complex in its beauty. It’s a region that critic Madelyn Boyson, in her review of the artwork, describes as a place where “the sky is too close and everything else is unreachable.” 

Six wooden frames are spaced steps apart from one another, creating an exploded cube, meant to evoke the image of a barn raising. The structure is made of cedar finished in the Japanese tradition of “yakisugi,” a process of charring, cleaning, then painting the wood with natural oils. The process works double duty, giving the wood a polished finish and fortifying it against the elements, which can be exceedingly harsh in this part of the state. 

Pairing the beautiful with the practical is routine in the Eastern Plains. Here, the wide grasslands give way to crop fields, and both lifestyles and landscapes are dictated by the seasons. Reminiscent of this marriage is the Module’s alignment with the sun — its main structures perfectly frame sunrise and sunset during the summer and winter solstices. 

More information at m12studio.org.

Mishawaka Song Confessional

Bellvue

The funny thing about secrets is, the longer you hold them in, the more they become a story worth telling. Maybe you have a secret like this. An anecdote you’ve thought about so long it takes on a narrative arc. Maybe it has an overtone of humor, or guilt or gravity. If this triggers something in you, you might want to make a stop at the Mishawaka Song Confessional. 

The Song Confessional is a vintage phone booth on the Mishawaka Amphitheater grounds. It was set up by Zac Catanzaro and Walker Lukens, Texas-based musicians who co-host a podcast by the same name. 

Anyone can anonymously record a confession into an iPad app set up in the booth. The recording is sent to the Song Confessional studio, based in Austin, Texas, where they match musicians with a few compelling confessions. The musicians pick one and schedule a day in the studio to record the confessional song. Finally, the confession, the song and a little bit of behind-the-scenes commentary are broadcast on KUTX and the Song Confessional podcast.

The project was partially born from an experience that Lukens, a songwriter himself, had while touring. A woman approached him to tell him how much his latest album helped her sift through the grief of her mother’s recent passing. The album, Catanzaro recalled in an interview with The Colorado Sun, wasn’t made around any themes or overtones of grief. But that’s the magic in music: People will hear what they need to hear. 

So they reverse engineered the feeling. “What if we did make a song that was entirely about you?” Catanzaro asked. 

The hosts field a few hundred confessions every year, Catanzaro said, ranging from silly and embarrassing to deeply traumatic. The podcast also ranges from lighthearted and gossipy to thoughtful and reflective, often over the course of a single episode. 

Let someone else think about your secrets, for once. 

More information at themishawaka.com.

Dinosaur Print Tracks

Ouray

A 27-acre mining claim on the mountainside above Ouray is chock full of memories for the Charles kids, whose family has owned the land for three generations. But it wasn’t until 2021 that the family realized the land also contains moments etched in ancient history: A looping line of 134 dinosaur tracks, believed to be the longest continuous track on Earth. 

The Charles kids used to hike up to the mining claims every summer with their father, Jack, to make improvements to their hard-rock mine — including building a bunk bed shack to sleep in that they nicknamed the “Tiltin’ Hilton,” according to the Ouray County Plaindealer. The family used the dinosaur tracks as natural dog bowls, since their pups would drink water collected in the tracks during the hikes.

In 2021, a group of scientists and students from Fort Lewis College in Durango, tipped off by a Ouray geologist, asked the family for permission to study the tracks. Once their origin and significance were determined, the Charles sisters initiated talks with the Forest Service to research and protect the site.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Forest Service purchased the parcels from the Charles family for $135,000. The Forest Service intends to install interpretive signs along the tracks, which can be accessed via the Silvershield Trail. The agency will assess whether more infrastructure is needed based on the site’s popularity, though the fact that seeing the tracks requires a 1,600-foot ascent over 2 miles may keep the public at bay.

More information at fs.usda.gov.

Wheeler Geologic Area

Creede

While other natural landmarks around the state grapple with how to control increasingly large crowds, Wheeler Geologic Area in the La Garita Wilderness, east of Creede, is moving in the opposite direction. Colorado’s first national monument and, at one time, the second most popular attraction after Pikes Peak, had its National Monument status stripped in 1950 thanks in part to low visitation. And it hasn’t climbed out of that hole since. 

Part of the reason is its rugged approach. Depending on where you launch, the hike to the unusual hoodoo formations — made out of the ash of an ancient volcanic eruption, and sculpted by over 25 million years of erosion — can range between 7 and 14 miles one-way. There is one rugged road, Forest Road 600 from Hanson’s Mill, that is only recommended for high clearance, 4-wheel drive vehicles, side-by-sides or mountain bikes. 

But for those willing and able to put in the work, the payoff is in the quiet trails, dark nights and a geologic spectacle that rivals the state’s fourteeners. 

More information at fs.usda.gov.

El Santuario de los Pobladores

Conejos

Over a decade ago the will of a recently deceased woman left Our Lady of Guadalupe, Colorado’s oldest church, with a lump sum of money. The generous gift came with a stipulation: The church couldn’t blow it all on maintenance. It had to be used for something more generative. 

The church board got together and decided to create a prayer sanctuary that reflected their Catholic teachings. They commissioned Ronald Rael, an award-winning architect with deep family roots in the San Luis Valley, to design the structure. 

Rael envisioned a circular, handbuilt adobe labyrinth, divided into quadrants to reference the Catholic Church’s four sets of mysteries, known as the Mysteries of the Rosary. The structure took over a decade to build and was entirely resourced through donations and volunteer work — resulting in a 6-foot-high, 140-foot-diameter circular labyrinth known as El Santuario de los Pobladores.

To visit the labyrinth, visitors must call the church ahead of time and make sure someone is on site. The phone number is listed on their website. 

More information at ologo.com.

Pawnee National Grasslands

Weld County

There was a period between the 1880s and 1930s when the Pawnee National Grasslands had pretty much anything but grass. After the forced removal of the Lipan Apache, Arapaho and Cheyenne people native to that area, and following the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, thousands of farmers and cattle drivers moved to the area, laying down crops and kicking up dust. 

The Dust Bowl in the 1930s caused many to abandon the area, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Services began replanting native grasses and trees in an effort to restore the area’s soils, before transferring the land to the U.S. Forest Service in 1954.

These days, the Pawnee National Grasslands are made up of 193,000 acres of shortgrasses, situated in a 30-by-60 mile rectangle between Colorado 14 and the Wyoming border. A second swath of land is located to the west of Crow Creek. 

The grasslands are the antithesis of Colorado’s more iconic natural attraction: the Rocky Mountains (though you can see them from the grasslands on a clear day). Where the Rockies are full of sharp ridgelines stabbing the sky, the Pawnee grasslands roll on seemingly forever, in faded yellows, browns and greens that lay close to the earth. And where you’ll find big crowds and reservation requirements at some of Colorado’s more popular parks, the Pawnee grassland’s dirt roads provide miles of solitude, with dispersed camping for those who don’t mind windy nights. 

More information at fs.usda.gov.

Pueblo Levee Mural Project

Pueblo

The murals started illegally and at night. In 1978, a group of local Pueblo artists known as the TEE HEEs lowered themselves onto the 65-foot tall, 45-degree Pueblo levee to paint a massive blue fish. The illicit art act inspired others to dangle themselves over the Arkansas River, lashed to paint buckets and lamps. A bathtub was painted, containing the thrashing blue fish. Then a squad of rubber ducks showed up on the scene.

The following year local artist Dave Roberts started organizing a May paint-a-thon, providing paint and encouraging others to contribute to the otherwise blank or graffiti-covered concrete slab (it also became legal to paint the levee with a permit). 

In 1995, the murals covered close to 3 miles and the levee was declared the “World’s Longest Painting” by Guinness World Records. It has since undergone a reconstruction, wiping out some of the original murals, and lost its world record title to a painting in South Korea. But artists from all around Colorado, especially southern Colorado and the San Luis Valley, are working hard to help the levee reclaim its title. 

There are still miles of murals, with more being added during the warmer months, that can be viewed from across the river on the Pueblo River Trail. 

More information at pueblolevee.org.

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