Colorado: Colorado Springs – Garden of the Gods

🏜️ Garden of the Gods — Where the Rocks Put on a Show

We’d been thinking about Colorado Springs on and off for years. There’s something quietly compelling about the idea of living in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains — the outdoor lifestyle, the clean air, the sense that adventure is just round the corner rather than a three-hour motorway slog away. As these things tend to go, we’d never quite made up our minds. But one of the places that kept pulling us back to the idea was the Garden of the Gods, and eventually we went to have a look for ourselves.

The Garden of the Gods is a public park on the western edge of Colorado Springs, and it contains some of the most dramatic red sandstone rock formations you’re likely to see without booking a flight to Mars. These formations — some of them towering over 300 feet — were pushed up from the ground during a series of massive geological upheavals along a natural fault line somewhere in the region of 300 million years ago. The rock itself is considerably older than that. In short, the Earth was having a very bad day, and the results are spectacular.

Humans, it turns out, have been visiting the Garden of the Gods for a very long time and were considerably less impressed by it in a tourist sense than we were, since they were mainly trying not to get eaten. Archaeological evidence suggests that prehistoric people were using the area as far back as around 1330 BC — which, for a bit of perspective, is roughly when Egypt was in the middle of the New Kingdom and the Trojan War was still a few generations off.

By around 250 BC, Native American people had established regular encampments in the park. They were drawn by the rich wildlife and plant life in the area, and made practical use of the rocky overhangs as natural shelter — essentially the world’s oldest free camping, without even a Forestry Commission sign telling you where to park. Many native peoples have since spoken of a deep spiritual and cultural connection to the Garden of the Gods, including the Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Pawnee, Shoshone and Ute peoples. It’s worth pausing on that for a moment before you start snapping photos for Instagram.

🎩 The Generous Mr Perkins

Fast forward a good many centuries and we arrive at 1879, when a rather wealthy chap by the name of Charles Elliott Perkins came along and purchased 480 acres of land that included a large portion of what is now the park. Perkins was a railroad man — president of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, no less — and he had the good sense to recognise a remarkable piece of landscape when he saw one. He reportedly considered turning it into a private resort but thought better of it.

Upon his death, his family gifted the land to the City of Colorado Springs in 1909, with the very specific provision that it should remain a free public park in perpetuity. That’s a rather splendid piece of generosity by any measure, and the kind of thing that makes you think rather better of the Gilded Age than you might otherwise. General William Jackson Palmer, who founded Colorado Springs itself back in 1871, had also owned the nearby Rock Ledge Ranch, which was similarly donated to the city upon his death. The Americans, whatever else you might say about them, do occasionally do the right thing.

🥾 Getting Around — For the Adventurous and the Lazy Alike

Today, the Garden of the Gods is — and there’s no polite way to dress this up — absolutely heaving with visitors, which is entirely understandable. It’s free, it’s spectacular, and it’s only a few minutes from the city centre. Locals come out in droves, tourists arrive by the coachload, and everyone seems to be having a thoroughly good time, which is mildly infuriating if you were hoping for a peaceful wander.

The good news is that the park is genuinely accessible to almost everyone. Several of the walking paths are suitable for wheelchair access, which is a proper effort rather than the usual token gesture. For those who can walk but would rather not — and frankly, after a certain age, one understands the impulse entirely — there are Segways available for hire. There are 15 miles of trails in total, winding through and around the formations, so there’s no shortage of ground to cover if you’re feeling energetic.

For the more adventurous types, there are Jeep tours on offer, and the park is apparently rather well regarded among rock climbers, with a good number of established climbing routes up the formations. We did not attempt any of these. We are not, by any stretch of the imagination, rock climbers.

🪨 Our Visit — Proudly Sedentary

Our visit was, I’ll freely admit, rather more sedate than all of that suggests. We stuck to the winding paths among the rock formations, which is really all you need to do to feel as though you’ve had a proper adventure. The rock formations are extraordinary close up — towering, rust-red fins of stone leaning at improbable angles against an absurdly blue Colorado sky.

The most iconic of them all is Balance Rock, a great lump of sandstone perched on what appears to be a comically inadequate base, seemingly defying both gravity and common sense. It has been sitting there, more or less unmoved, for rather longer than any of us have been around, which puts one’s worries into some perspective.