Road Trip 2024: Aspen, Leadville and Fossils

Aspen is the worst place. We knew immediately by the amount of signage, the number of private jets in their airport and the perplexity of their municipal parking policy that we would not be fitting in. After walking by the Prada and Ralph Lauren stores we found a $200 pair of jeans outside another shop....and that looked like their sale rack...

The situation became absurd when we noticed that the town offers valet parking on the streets. We buckled over in laughter when we noticed a sign warning that winter conditions may exist on a playground. We skipped down the pedestrian mall after seeing a sign that instructed us to walk. It is apparent that the town is administered by those used to micro-managing individual's behavior. Sadly, what may have once been a nice skiing town has turned into a strip of glamour shopping for the one percent of the one percent.

On the positive side, we did find some delicious (and expensive) ice cream and headed for a forest service campground on the Independence Pass road. The campground was aptly named "Difficult."

We intended to explore Aspen but it seemed too difficult to get around without spending an entire offshore bank account so we decided to head east over Independence Pass, the highest paved pass in North America!

We met some geology majors from Dartmouth working at the ghost town of Independence for the summer. It was a picturesque community, which originally served as a silver mining town at 10,900 feet! Lisa was happy to see prairie dogs...or were they yellow-bellied marmots?

We continued over to the summit of the pass and stretched our legs at the 12,000 foot paths. Since we were above the treeline, we had ample opportunity to enjoy the view.

On the other side of the mountains, we arrived in Leadville and breathed a sigh of relief to be in a much more reasonable community. The architecture of the town reminded us of Port Henry, New York which also had a mining heyday around the turn of the 20th century. We parked on the street (for free) and wandered around the town, learning some tidbits of local history. In the evening, we visited the Silver Dollar Saloon, which has been a fixture in the town since 1879. Armed with our cribbage board, we spent the night playing cards and tickling the ivories (the few that were left) on the saloon piano.

We camped at the Silver Dollar campground, a forest service site which was fairly mosquito-infested so we hid in the tent and packed up quickly the next morning.

Since we didn't want to cook breakfast among the insects, we headed to the Golden Burro Diner for french toast. Holding our sides as we left, we meandered south along the Arkansas River Valley.

Crossing over two easy mountain passes, we arrived in Florissant, home of the Florissant Fossil Bed National Monument. We were surprised to see that the park contains some of the largest fossils that we have ever seen: fossilized redwood stumps. These were the result of volcanic mud flows which preserved the bottoms of the trees while the tops died and rotted away. This impressive petrified forest is not the main focus of scientists, for there are incredibly well-preserved insect, fish and plant fossils among the shale deposits in the area which date to the Eocene period (roughly 34 million years ago), when the climate was warmer and more humid.

Petrified Redwood Stump

Flutterby!

Continuing east, we stopped for a peek at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. We walked among the large vertical sandstone monoliths and admired Pikes Peak in the distance. Some of the area was bustling, but a short walk brought us to solitude (or duatude?).