Inspiring travel stories, tips, and guides from a couple exploring the world one destination at a time.
Steamboat Springs is in northern Colorado near the Wyoming border and is a winter ski resort destination. It has produced an incredible number of Olympic athletes. There are natural hot springs in the area. Early trappers thought the hot springs made a chugging sound similar to a steamboat, hence the name. From Saratoga, Wyoming it was only about a 1.5 hour drive to Steamboat Springs.
Last Updated: July 20, 2026
Dolores is a small but historically rich town tucked into the southwest corner of Colorado at an elevation of about 6,900 feet. Telluride and Durango are roughly an hour’s drive to the east, while Utah’s canyon country begins just to the west. What makes Dolores such a remarkable base is the sheer concentration of world-class archaeological sites within a short drive — Mesa Verde National Park, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, and Hovenweep National Monument are all within 30 minutes. We last visited southwestern Colorado about two years earlier in the spring, and returning in fall revealed a completely different side of this landscape. The area is steeped in the culture of the Ancestral Puebloans — known historically as the Anasazi — who built some of North America’s most extraordinary stone dwellings here centuries ago.
Last Updated: July 20, 2026
Pagosa Springs sits at about 7,000 feet in the southern San Juan Mountains, tucked just north of the New Mexico border on the west side of the Continental Divide. That position gives it a milder climate than most of Colorado — over 300 sunny days per year and winters that don’t punish the way they do at higher elevations to the north. The town’s name comes from the Ute word “Pagosah,” meaning “healing waters,” a reference to the remarkable geothermal hot springs that have drawn people here for centuries. The Mother Spring in Pagosa Springs holds a Guinness World Record as the deepest geothermal hot spring aquifer on Earth, at over 1,000 feet deep. Combine that with its position as a gateway to the San Juan Mountains and Durango’s high-altitude Jeep country, and you have one of the most rewarding stops in all of southwestern Colorado.
Last Updated: July 19, 2026
Ouray was established by gold and silver miners around 1875, when precious metals were extracted from these rugged and colorful San Juan Mountains. The mountainsides still show remnants of miners’ tailings and dilapidated structures — ghosts of a boom era that shaped this corner of Colorado. Today the area is all about tourism: ice climbing, hiking, mountain biking, and hundreds of miles of Jeep trails offer stunning views and a sense of genuine remoteness that’s hard to find anywhere else. Ouray sits about an hour’s drive south of Montrose, tucked into a dramatic box canyon in the San Juan Mountains — a setting so spectacular it’s earned the town the nickname “the Switzerland of America.”
Last Updated: July 18, 2026
Fruita was our first stop after leaving Flaming Gorge, Utah to see the Colorado National Monument. The area is desert on the high Colorado Plateau with steep walled canyons of rock and sandstone surrounded by juniper and pinyon forests.
Last Updated: May 24, 2026
From Colorado Springs we headed to the Denver area to visit family and get some work done on our Freightliner chassis. While there, we made time for Rocky Mountain National Park to get up close to the snow-covered peaks, springtime-swollen rivers, and wildlife.
