Mer ended up talking with a woman at the wedding on Sunday about the area, and they got to talking about Mer’s plans to go to the Garden of the Gods park. The woman was very enthusiastic, but warned Mer that “it’s not very big – it won’t take you too long to see it.” On Monday we spent six hours there.

The Garden of the Gods is a park full of dramatic and unusual red rock formations. According to the park, the name came from two surveyors who came across the formations in 1859, and one proclaimed, “This would be a great place for a beer garden.” (Hold your judgement.) His companion replied something to the effect of, “It would make a great garden of the gods!” When the park was donated to the city by the landowners around 1900, it was on the condition that the park be free and be called “The Garden of the Gods.” And so it is.

As you could guess, on a beautiful holiday Monday, the park was mobbed. We parked at the visitors’ center, and the woman at the info desk recommended walking into the park from the center, a walk of about fifteen minutes. Since the road to the small parking lots of the park was backed up at least that much, it was an easy decision. We walked in.

Which is the best way to go anyway. It allows the park slowly to reveal itself. The main features of the park are three huge rock monoliths, and as you walk in and around them, the features change. That is true for walking close up and getting far away. They are fascinating regardless of where you see them.

We wandered in and around the large stones, covering all the paths we saw on our map. By the time we had finished with the main northern area, I was out of water and getting hungry, so we walked part-way back and happened to catch the shuttle bus back to the visitors’ center, where we ate and filled our water bottles.

We wanted to see the southern end of the park, which has more, if smaller, stone features, but I didn’t want to walk the almost two miles there to start the hiking. I decided to risk moving the car. The southern end has several small parking lots and is far away from the visitors’ center and large crowd-drawing formations, so I banked on being able to find a parking spot. I was right, but there were only a couple of open spots. Nonetheless, it worked, and we started hiking the southern end of things. We saw a huge balanced rock and the companion rock that looks like a steamboat. We swung by an enormous trading post to use the bathroom and then got out of there. We hiked up to two towers of rock joined together with a window in the rock that looks over to Pikes Peak. And we got all the way up to a stone tower that looks like a Scotsman standing there, complete with a tam (the beret thingy).

All in all, our “not much to see” tour of the Garden of the Gods took ten miles of hiking and six hours of time (including lunch). It’s a magnificent place to wander.

From there, we made a quick refueling stop at the hotel room and then went back north to the Air Force Academy. Mer wanted to see more of the campus, and we both wanted to see their free student production of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. We saw a B-52 memorial with a retired B-52, the Academy cemetery (which will take any member from any of the military academies), overlooks for the campus and sports fields, and the outsides of a couple of buildings. By then it was time for the musical.

The students did a great job. There were about thirty actors on stage for the production. One thing that surprised me was they used a recorded score for the music. Military academies have a long history of great musicians, so that was a bit strange. Maybe the end of the year is too busy for the bands and musicians on campus.

The three leads (the protagonist, the lead woman, and the antagonist) were all superb. They were a joy to watch. I wasn’t familiar with the story or music from the play, so that was fun for me to discover. It is a play poking fun at big businesses, and also how women were treated in 1960s business culture, and it worked in that way. We enjoyed ourselves, even if the play was three hours long, including a ten-minute intermission. And if you’re wondering if a military academy play starts on time (most theater productions start five to ten minutes late), let me advise you to be prompt.

Today (Tuesday) was “my” day, and so I drove us about an hour east of Colorado Springs to the small town of Calhan. Or, to be more specific, down a dirt road a fair bit outside of the small town of Calhan, to a parking lot in the middle of a high plains scrub-grass prairie. Mer said she trusted me, but wasn’t sure why we were there. We hiked up a small rise and got a glimpse of some white bare rock formations. Down the hill and along the path further, we started to see some colors in the rock. I had brought her to see the Paint Mines Interpretive Park.

The Paint Mines is an area where rock covered up variously colored clays, producing these colorful and fantastically shaped columns and mounds. They are very fragile since they are largely made of clay and soft stones, but there are paths back in among the shapes and miniature canyons. We walked along most of the trails that wound through the “mines” and spent a good two hours there.

The “mines” are more like open pits. Native Americans used the clays for pigments, and as recently as the early 1900s, the area was used to mine colors for bricks. What remains doesn’t look like a mine or a pit, and the colors and whites are vivid. We had a blast.

Back to the hotel room for more water. I have found the mile-high air to be very dry and drink about twice as much as I normally do. From the hotel, we went back to the cute “crunchy” neighborhood we had been in on Sunday morning, to go to the Michael Garman Museum and Gallery.

Michael Garman was a sculptor of 1/6-scale miniatures of people and urban settings. He passed away in 2021. I expected a few large doll-house sorts of things, but I was happily very wrong. Garman’s work was exceptionally detailed, with peeling wallpapers in rooms and trash in trash cans and individual bottles in bars. He loved using mirrors to create depth and even used them to change scenes in rooms, so that if you looked in a window of a building, you would see one room, and then a light would come on nearby and a different room would replace it. He used angled glass to project holograms of people into rooms and alleys, and his attention to detail even went as far as having Casablanca showing in the town’s movie theater (visible if you looked in through the door). We were overwhelmed by the museum and went through it three times (it’s not terribly big). We also had fun with provided scavenger hunts that asked us to look for very specific details in the town, like looking for one sports pennant or for the location of one birdcage.

By the time we got done with the museum, it was too late for me to stick to my plan to go back to the WW II aircraft museum, so I changed my plan and went to the nearby Red Rock Canyon Open Space (a large park inside the city limits). This park has rock formations like those in the Garden of the Gods, but on a smaller scale and with very few crowds on a work day. Sadly, we only got to hike there for about twenty minutes before a storm threatened, so we went back to the cute neighborhood for supper, hoping the park area would clear up. It didn’t, and so we called it a night after walking around a few blocks looking at the shops in the area. I would have loved to hike in the park more, but it seemed wise to play things safe to keep us from encountering lightning and possibly getting soaked. The area around our hotel (the north side of town) was fine – the storms seemed to be coming through in a narrow band.

And so ends a good, if short, trip to Colorado. Tomorrow we fly home, and since it took us three and a half hours to get here on Saturday, we’re going to leave about four hours before we have to get the to airport since we don’t know what morning rush hour looks like. It will be good to get home and see family, friends, and felines.