First Southwest Colorado Road Trip

Andy Rose opens the article "National park visitors surge as Covid-19 pandemic restrictions wane" with this statement, "After more than a year of pandemic-related restrictions and limited travel, surging attendance figures across US national parks show Americans are eager to get back on the road and explore." Not only do the national parks provide significant outdoor activities, but their presence across the nation means that one or mose is readily reached through via automobiles and road trips for many residents of the United States.

We love visiting Rocky Mountain National Park and its bookend towns (Estes Park and Grand Lake), but we wanted to visit a nearby national park that is not as busy and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park appeared to be just that. We designed a simple southwest Colorado road trip based on Black Canyon of the Gunnison and will use a series of blog posts to describe our experiences on that road trip that provided our first experiences with several southwest Colorado towns.

This five-nights road trip in southwest Colorado occurred during the second week of June and that turned out to be a great time of year for it. The early summer weather was warm during the day but not nearly as hot as it would be a week or two later. We also traveled Monday through Saturday, which meant that most of our activities were during the week and that helped reduce crowd sizes.

Perhaps best of all, Black Canyon of the Gunnison and most of the towns we traveled through were new to us. As much as we love Estes Park, Grand Lake, Georgetown, Idaho Springs, Breckenridge, and other Colorado mountain towns we have visited multiple times, it was nice to experience some other fun mountain towns in Colorado. While planning this road trip, we learned that "Colorado contains more land area over 10000 feet than all the other states combined" and this road trip allowed us to see some parts of that we had not seen before.

Here are posts with additional details and photographs related to specific locations and activities in southwest Colorado:

• Lodging
• Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
  • North Rim
  • South Rim
    • Oak Flat Loop Trail
    • Warner Point Nature Trail
• Ridgway State Park's Overlook Point Trail
• Ouray
  • Cascade Falls
  • Box Cañon Falls
  • Ouray Hot Springs
  • Bachelor Syracuse Mine Tour
  • Bear Creek Falls
• "Million Dollar Highway"
• Silverton
  • Old Hundred Gold Mine Tour
  • San Juan Backcountry Half-Day UTV Tour
• Monarch Crest Scenic Tramway and Monarch Pass Continental Divide
• St. Elmo (Ghost Town)
• Buena Vista

Kicking off the Road Trip

We started our road trip with one of the longest segments that took us from the Denver metropolitan area to Black Canyon of the Gunnison's North Rim and to Paonia.

To get there, we drove I-70 west from the Denver area to Glenwood Springs and then drove into nearby town Carbondale.

We planned to stop in Carbondale to eat lunch (it's about 3.5 hours drive from Denver) and were surprised that there was more to this town than we had expected.

We ended up eating lunch outdoors at the Village Smithy restaurant where we tried the Asian salad and Smithy Club sandwich. The side selected for the club sandwhich was the chickpea salad, which was an excellent combination of chickpeas, tomatoes, cucumbers, feta cheese, and green olives.

After lunch, we left Carbondale to head to Black Canyon of the Gunnison's North Rim for our first major attraction of this roadtrip.

The route from Carbondale to Paonia was new to us and is gorgeous.

We did not have time on this southwest Colorado roadtrip to see some other well-known southwest Colorado attractions (including Mesa Verde National Park and Canyons of the Ancients National Monument) and towns (including Telluride and Durango), but plan to visit and experience them in the near future. We were fortunate on this road trip to experience four of the towns on Travel + Leisure's list of "10 Best Small Towns in Colorado" (Carbondale, Paonia, Silverton, and Salida).