A stunning collection of towering crimson sandstone formations set against the iconic silhouette of Pikes Peak the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs is a free National Natural Landmark offering hiking climbing and utterly unforgettable high-altitude scenery.
Colorado: The spectacular Royal Gorge
🪑 The Road to Royal Gorge – Rocking Chairs, Prison Museums, and Karen’s Questionable Hobbies
As part of our exploration of central Colorado, we headed south towards the Royal Gorge Park, which sits about 50 miles south of Colorado Springs — or, if you’re feeling dramatic about distances as Americans tend to be, “just under an hour, depending on traffic, weather, and whether the Lord is willing.”
The route took us through a place called Cañon City — and before you ask, yes, that little squiggle under the “n” is called a tilde, and no, it doesn’t mean you pronounce it “Can-yon” like you’re doing a Spanish GCSE. Locals simply say “Canyon City,” as though the whole spelling business was a mild misunderstanding that nobody could be bothered to correct. The city itself sits at around 5,300 feet above sea level in the Arkansas River valley, nestled between the Wet Mountains to the south and the dramatic rise of the Rockies to the west. It was formally incorporated back in 1872, just a few years after the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad arrived and decided this was a perfectly sensible place to stop a train.
The town had a fairly unremarkable early life as a agricultural and mining supply point, until someone realised that the jaw-dropping canyon carved by the Arkansas River just to the west of town was, in fact, rather spectacular and people might pay money to look at it. Clever lot.
The drive itself was pleasant enough — big skies, scrubby high-desert vegetation, the occasional pickup truck doing approximately the speed of a low-flying aircraft. And then, just as we were rolling through the outskirts of town, we stumbled upon it.
The largest rocking chair in the world.
There it was, sitting outside a furniture shop, because of course it was. A genuinely enormous rocking chair — and I mean enormous in the sense that a normal adult human standing next to it looks like a garden gnome auditioning for a role in a documentary about scale. According to the signage, the thing stands somewhere in the region of 26 to 28 feet tall and weighs several tons. It was built as a promotional stunt by a furniture retailer, which is exactly the sort of inspired marketing lunacy that only really works in America. You wouldn’t see this outside DFS in Croydon. You’d get a sale banner and a car park with three spaces.
Naturally, we stopped. Naturally, photos were taken. This is what you do when you encounter the largest rocking chair in the world — you don’t simply drive past it and say “oh, there’s a large chair” and get on with your day. That would be inhuman. The chair has actually been something of a local landmark for years, drawing in passing motorists who, like us, found themselves thinking “well, I didn’t expect that.”
We got back in the car and pressed on into town, feeling quietly enriched by the experience. Cañon City itself is a pleasant, mid-sized Colorado community of around 16,000 souls, with a historic downtown and the sort of wide streets that were clearly laid out by people who had no idea how many cars would one day be using them. The surrounding landscape is genuinely dramatic — the Royal Gorge itself was carved over millions of years by the Arkansas River cutting through ancient Precambrian granite, creating walls that drop nearly 1,000 feet straight down. The Spanish explorer Juan de Oñate passed through the broader region in 1598, and the area was later visited by Zebulon Pike during his famous 1806 expedition. Pike, incidentally, also failed to summit the peak named after him, which is a minor historical footnote that pleases me enormously.
But it was at this point that things took a turn — and by “a turn,” I mean Karen’s eyes lit up in a way that suggested she had spotted something of personal significance.
Cañon City, you see, is famous for something rather specific. It is home to an extraordinary concentration of correctional facilities — somewhere in the region of nine to thirteen prisons and detention centres, depending on how you count them and how many have opened or closed since you last checked. This is not a coincidence. The city made a deliberate and pragmatic decision in the late nineteenth century to attract state prisons as an economic strategy, beginning with the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, which was established in 1871 and is still operational today, making it one of the oldest continuously operating prisons in the American West. There are federal institutions, state institutions, minimum security facilities, maximum security facilities — you name it. It has been described, without much exaggeration, as the prison capital of Colorado.
And there is, naturally, a prison museum.
The Colorado Territorial Prison Museum is housed in the old women’s prison building, which closed in 1935, and it covers the full and somewhat grim history of incarceration in Colorado from territorial days through to the present. There are restored cells, execution equipment (the gas chamber, charmingly, is one of the highlights), artefacts, uniforms, and enough authentic grimness to satisfy even the most dedicated enthusiast of correctional history.
Karen is, to put it gently, such an enthusiast.
I genuinely cannot fully explain this. She is an entirely normal, cheerful, law-abiding person in all other respects, and yet the words “prison museum” produce in her the kind of excitement that most people reserve for spotting a celebrity or finding a twenty-pound note in an old jacket. She has, over the years, visited more prisons — voluntarily, I should stress — than seems strictly reasonable for someone with no criminal record. It is a hobby. A niche hobby, yes, but a hobby nonetheless.
Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on your perspective and whether you had any particular desire to look at a gas chamber that afternoon — we had a schedule to keep. The Royal Gorge was waiting, and it would not wait indefinitely. So we drove past the museum with Karen pressing her face against the passenger window like a child being driven past a toy shop on Christmas Eve, and I made sympathetic noises while quietly accelerating.
Some sacrifices must be made in the name of itinerary management
🏔️ Royal Gorge – A Mile Deep, a Bridge Too High, and a Cage Going Straight Down
Royal Gorge is, without any exaggeration whatsoever, a genuinely spectacular piece of the natural world. The Arkansas River, which clearly had nothing better to do over the past several million years, has carved itself a canyon through the Precambrian granite of the Rocky Mountains that drops over 1,000 feet from rim to river. To put that in perspective, if you took St Paul’s Cathedral and stacked three of them on top of each other, you’d still be looking up at the canyon walls. It is, by any reasonable measure, an impressive hole in the ground.
The gorge stretches for roughly ten miles, but its narrowest and most dramatic section — the bit that makes you instinctively take a step back from the edge — is only about 50 feet wide at the bottom. The Arkansas River rushes through this slot with considerable enthusiasm, the sort of white-water energy that kayakers apparently find thrilling and the rest of us find absolutely terrifying to watch from a safe distance.
Early settlers and explorers who passed through the region in the nineteenth century recognised two things simultaneously: first, that it was extraordinarily beautiful, and second, that it offered one of the very few viable routes through the mountains for a railway. This led, in the late 1870s, to one of the more colourful episodes in American railroad history — the so-called Royal Gorge War of 1878 to 1879, in which the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway had a full-scale commercial and occasionally physical dispute over who got to build a line through the canyon. There were hired gunmen, court injunctions, fortifications built across the gorge entrance, and a great deal of aggressive legal manoeuvring. The Denver and Rio Grande eventually won the right to the route, which they exercised by laying track along the canyon floor in conditions that must have been genuinely miserable — blasting through rock, working in the spray of the river, with barely enough room to swing a pickaxe without hitting something. The line through the gorge opened in 1880, and passenger excursion trains were running through it shortly thereafter, because Americans have always understood that spectacular scenery and ticket sales go together rather well.
The railway still runs through the gorge today, the tracks pressed right up against the riverbank, with perhaps a few feet of clearance between the rails and the churning rapids of the Arkansas. It is, by any sensible assessment, a completely mad place to put a railway, which is precisely why it’s so impressive that they did it.
But the railway, remarkable as it is, is not what drew us here. We had read about the bridge.
In 1929, someone — and I’d love to have been in that meeting — decided that what the Royal Gorge really needed was a suspension bridge slung across it at a height of 1,053 feet above the river below. This was not a bridge built out of necessity in any conventional sense. There was no great pressing need to get from one side of the gorge to the other at that particular point. It was built, essentially, as an attraction — a feat of engineering for its own sake, a declaration that human beings could, if sufficiently motivated, hang a bridge over absolutely anything. Construction was completed in 1929, remarkably quickly given what they were working with, and for decades afterwards it held the title of the highest suspension bridge in the world. Depending on which source you consult and how precisely you measure these things, it may still hold that title today, though various newer bridges around the world have made competing claims. What is not in dispute is that standing on it and looking down is an experience that reorganises your internal organs somewhat.
We had read about all of this before we arrived, and the bridge alone was sufficient reason to visit. But the park, it turned out, had rather more to offer in the engineering-marvel department. And so, in the spirit of getting our money’s worth, we decided to work through the attractions methodically, starting at the bottom.
Literally.
⚠️ World’s Steepest Funicular Railway — (Permanently Closed)
The Royal Gorge Incline Railway, to give it its proper name, had been operating since 1931 and held the distinction of being the world’s steepest funicular. The track descended at a gradient that the park’s literature described with some enthusiasm and that the laws of physics described with some concern — it was essentially vertical, dropping 1,550 feet down a shaft that had been cut into the canyon wall along the path of an ancient waterfall. The cars themselves were, and there is really no more accurate way to put this, cages. Open-sided, standing-room-only cages, in which you and several other people who had also made questionable decisions that morning were transported downwards at an angle that rendered the word “steep” rather inadequate.
We should note at this point that this attraction is now permanently closed — casualty of the catastrophic wildfire that tore through the Royal Gorge Park in June 2013, which burned around 3,000 acres and destroyed a significant portion of the park’s infrastructure, including the incline railway. The fire was started by a discarded cigarette, which tells you everything you need to know about the importance of not being an idiot near dry vegetation at altitude. The park has since been substantially rebuilt, but the funicular has not been restored.
When we visited, however, it was still very much in operation, and we queued up with what I can only describe as cautious optimism.
Now, Emily — and I say this with great affection — is not, shall we say, a natural enthusiast for enclosed spaces that are also suspended at extreme angles above a canyon floor. There was, on the platform, a brief period of what I would diplomatically call recalibration, during which she assessed the cage, assessed the drop, assessed her own life choices, and arrived at the conclusion that she was going to get in anyway because we hadn’t driven all this way to stand on the platform like sensible people. This is, I think, a very admirable quality.
Once you were actually moving, it was — and this surprised everyone including Emily — not as bad as it looked. The descent was smooth enough, the views through the open sides were extraordinary, and the sheer novelty of the thing carried you through the moments when your brain tried to remind you of how high up you’d been thirty seconds ago. Down at the bottom, the scale of the gorge became immediately, viscerally apparent in a way that standing at the top simply doesn’t convey. The walls soared up on either side, the river churned and frothed just feet away, and the railway tracks — the actual working railway tracks of the Royal Gorge Route Railroad — passed within touching distance. Not that you’d want to touch them when a train was going past, obviously.
Looking up from the canyon floor is the sort of experience that recalibrates your sense of scale in a fairly permanent way. The suspension bridge, which had looked impressively large from the rim, now appeared as a thin line of ironwork suspended at what seemed like an impossible height — a gossamer thread connecting two walls of rock with a thousand feet of nothing in between. It is one thing to read that something is 1,053 feet above you. It is another thing entirely to stand at the bottom and look up at it.
We spent a few minutes at the bottom in a state of quiet appreciation — the river, the rock, the railway, the implausible bridge above — and then caught the next car back up. Emily remained entirely composed for the ascent, which was probably easier psychologically, as going up feels considerably more normal than going down in a cage. Probably.
🚡 Crossing the Gorge – One Cable, One Thousand Feet, and Absolutely No Refunds
Having successfully survived the descent to the canyon floor and made it back up again with our nerves only slightly reordered, we were now faced with what the park presented as a choice, but which was, in practice, a foregone conclusion the moment we read the brochure.
There were two ways to cross the Royal Gorge. Option one was the suspension bridge — the 1929 engineering marvel, the 1,053-foot-high masterpiece of early twentieth century ambition, the thing we’d come specifically to see. A perfectly reasonable choice. A sensible choice, even. You walk across, you look down through the wooden planking at the river far below, you try not to think too hard about the fact that the whole structure sways slightly in the wind because that is what suspension bridges do, and you arrive on the other side with a story to tell.
Option two was the aerial tramway.
The Royal Gorge aerial tramway has been in operation since 1969 and holds the distinction of being the longest single-span tramway in the world — the cable stretches 2,200 feet across the gorge in one continuous run, with no supporting towers in the middle, because apparently the engineers looked at the canyon and decided that the concept of “intermediate support” was for people with less confidence. The gondola is suspended from this single cable and travels across at a height of approximately 1,000 feet above the Arkansas River, taking around four minutes to complete the crossing. Four minutes. Roughly the same amount of time it takes to make a cup of tea, but considerably less relaxing.
The correct and rational choice was clearly the bridge.
We chose the tramway, obviously.
To be entirely honest with you — and I think at this point in the day honesty was the least we owed each other — with the exception of Jack, who approached the whole proposition with the cheerful enthusiasm of someone who has either no imagination or extraordinary courage (the line between the two being thinner than you might think), none of us was what you’d call keen. There was a period of collective consideration on the platform that I would generously describe as “building resolve” and less generously describe as “looking for a reasonable excuse to do the bridge instead.” No such excuse materialised, and so we got in.
The gondola itself is a perfectly sturdy enclosed cabin, which helps. You are not dangling in the open air. There are windows. There are other passengers, all of whom are also pretending to be more relaxed than they are, which creates a useful atmosphere of collective denial. For the first thirty seconds or so, as you pull away from the platform and the ground drops away beneath you, there is a very specific quality of silence in a tramway gondola — the silence of several adults simultaneously deciding not to look down and not mentioning this decision to each other.
And then, inevitably, you look down.
A thousand feet is an interesting distance. It is far enough that the river below looks almost peaceful from up here — a silver thread winding through a narrow channel of ancient rock. The gorge walls, which felt overwhelming from the bottom, now frame a view that is, objectively, quite breathtaking. The suspension bridge is visible slightly upstream, and from the tramway you can appreciate for the first time just how extraordinary it is — a thin line of Victorian-era engineering courage stretched between two canyon rims, doing something that in 1929 must have seemed almost incomprehensible.
All of this took approximately four minutes to process.
I will say this: if you are the sort of person who found the funicular a challenge, do not get on the tramway. The funicular at least has the psychological advantage of a shaft around it. The tramway offers no such comfort. You are in a box, on a cable, over a very large drop, and there is nothing between you and the canyon floor but air and the engineering judgment of people you have never met. This is fine. This is completely fine. Everything is fine.
The disembarkation at the far side was conducted with a dignity and composure that I thought reflected very well on all of us, though I did notice that nearly every single passenger stepped off with the slightly too-casual manner of someone who has just done something they are very glad to have finished. Jack, naturally, looked as though he could have gone straight back across.
On the far side of the gorge, the park has laid on a small animal enclosure — home to bison, elk, and bighorn sheep, which are all genuinely magnificent animals and native to precisely this sort of high-country Colorado landscape. The bighorn sheep in particular are extraordinary creatures, built like someone designed a mountain goat by committee and somehow got it exactly right — stocky, sure-footed, with those great curved horns that look too heavy to carry and apparently aren’t.
Emily was delighted. The rest of us were, in all honesty, a little less so — not because the animals weren’t wonderful, but because the enclosures were on the modest side, which is perhaps an inevitable consequence of being a roadside attraction at the edge of a canyon rather than a proper wildlife reserve. Bison are animals that were once estimated to number sixty million on the North American continent before nineteenth century hunting reduced them to a few hundred by the 1880s — a conservation catastrophe of staggering proportions that took decades of careful management to begin to reverse. Seeing one in a smallish pen at a tourist park, looking mildly put-upon, is a slightly melancholy experience when you know that context. They deserved bigger skies than this.
But they were alive, and healthy enough, and the bighorn sheep at least had the good grace to look entirely unbothered by the whole situation, which is very much in keeping with their character. We spent a few minutes with them, took the requisite photographs, and then turned our attention to the matter of crossing back — which, this time, we did via the bridge
🌉 The Bridge — Wood, Gaps, and a River a Very Long Way Down
To get back to the car park, we needed to cross the gorge. There was, as far as we could tell, no way around this. The Royal Gorge Suspension Bridge is the crossing point, and crossing it you shall, whether you fancy it or not.
Most people, quite sensibly, choose to walk it. The bridge is 1,260 feet long and spans the gorge at that now-familiar height of 1,053 feet above the Arkansas River, which by this point in the day felt like an old acquaintance we kept running into at increasingly uncomfortable angles. The bridge was constructed in 1929 in a frankly astonishing 37 days — a pace of construction that suggests either extraordinary organisational efficiency or a complete disregard for the sort of checks and balances that modern health and safety legislation would later have some strong opinions about. It was, at the time of its completion, the highest suspension bridge in the world, and it held that record for over 70 years, which is a remarkable achievement for something that was essentially built as a tourist attraction during the same decade that produced the Wall Street Crash.
The engineering itself is, on the face of it, reassuring. The main cables are thick, multi-stranded affairs, each one anchored into steel plates embedded in the granite bedrock on either side of the gorge with the sort of firm conviction that suggests the engineers were not messing about. The towers rise 150 feet above the deck. There are handrails. There are safety cables along the sides. From a structural standpoint, the bridge has been carrying visitors across the Royal Gorge for nearly a century without incident, and there is every rational reason to feel perfectly confident walking across it.
The floor, however, does not help matters.
The deck of the Royal Gorge Bridge is made of wooden planks. Individual, separate, wooden planks, each one laid across the bridge’s steel framework with gaps between them — gaps that are, to put it charitably, generously proportioned. Not enormous gaps, you understand. Not the sort of gaps through which a person could fall. But absolutely the sort of gaps through which you can see, with complete clarity, the Arkansas River threading its way along the canyon floor 1,053 feet below you.
This is not a minor detail.
There is a very particular psychological experience that occurs when you are standing on a surface that your feet know is solid, your brain knows is safe, and your eyes are absolutely refusing to accept as anything other than a series of loosely arranged planks with the void visible between each one. Your rational mind says: the bridge has carried vehicles weighing several tons across this gorge for decades, you will be fine. Your eyes say: I can see the river. Through the floor. Underneath your feet. Right now. These two pieces of information do not sit together comfortably, and the walk across — roughly a quarter of a mile — gives you plenty of time to work through the conflict between them.
The cables, at least, look magnificently trustworthy. Each time your nerve began to wobble, a quick glance sideways at the great sweeping arcs of braided steel cable, taut and purposeful against the blue Colorado sky, was enough to remind you that this structure was not going anywhere. It has survived blizzards, high winds, earthquakes, and several decades of American tourism, which is arguably the most demanding test of all. We crossed on foot without incident, walking at the measured, deliberate pace of people who were absolutely fine and definitely not thinking about the gaps in the floor.
And then we looked at the van.
Now, the bridge is — and this is not something you fully appreciate until you are standing on it — open to vehicles. Not lorries, obviously, but cars and vans can drive across the Royal Gorge Bridge, and indeed this is how you retrieve your vehicle if you have, as we had, parked on the other side. The bridge is wide enough for one lane of traffic, give or take a reasonable degree of confidence in the measurements, with pedestrians sharing the space alongside.
We climbed in, shut the doors, and drove onto the bridge.
The noise was immediate and extraordinary. Wooden planks, when driven over by a vehicle of any meaningful weight, do not sit quietly and take the experience philosophically. They flex. They bounce. They clatter and bang against the steel framework beneath them with a sound that, inside a van with the windows up, can only be described as what I imagine it would sound like if someone had filled a tumble dryer with loose timber and set it to express cycle. It was less a driving experience and more a percussion performance, and we were both the audience and, unwillingly, the performers.
This was simultaneously deafening and — there is no more precise word for it — disconcerting. Not because we were in any danger. We weren’t. But because every instinct accumulated over a lifetime of driving on sensible roads made the combination of noise, movement, and the visible river below insist that something was very wrong, even as the rational part of the brain continued patiently explaining that it wasn’t.
We made it across.
The good news — and I use that phrase loosely — is that once you reach the far side, there is nowhere to go. The road simply ends. There is no great network of Colorado highways waiting on the other side of the Royal Gorge Bridge; there is a small car park, a gift shop, and the dawning realisation that you now have to drive back across the bridge to get anywhere at all. Which we did. Same planks. Same noise. Same view through the floor on the way back.
Perfectly safe, obviously. Barely thought about it.
Planning your visit to Royal Bridge Gorge
📍 Location
Royal Gorge Bridge & Park is situated near Cañon City in southern Colorado, approximately 45 miles west of Pueblo and around 50 miles south-west of Colorado Springs. The park lies roughly 6 miles west of Cañon City along the Arkansas River Valley. It is reachable by car via U.S. Highway 50 West, then south on County Road 3A (the North Gate). Please note that the South Gate is permanently closed. There is no public transport serving the park directly, so a car or hired vehicle is essential.
🌉 About the Park
Royal Gorge Bridge & Park is one of Colorado’s most celebrated visitor attractions, built in 1929 and perched above one of the most dramatic river gorges in the American West. The suspension bridge spans 1,260 feet across the Arkansas River and is suspended 956 feet above the canyon floor, making it the highest suspension bridge in the United States. The gorge itself stretches approximately 10 miles in length, its walls of red granite towering over 1,000 feet on either side.
The park offers far more than the bridge alone. Visitors can ride the Aerial Gondolas across the gorge for sweeping 360-degree panoramic views, tackle the guided Via Ferrata climbing course bolted into the granite canyon walls, or take on the Cloudscraper Zip Line, which the Travel Channel has rated as Colorado’s number one bucket-list experience. The Royal Rush Skycoaster swings harnessed riders at speeds of up to 50 mph over the canyon edge. For younger visitors and families, Howard’s Hangout children’s playland and the Plaza Theatre — which screens a documentary on the park’s history — are included in general admission. A water clock, dining venues, and a gift shop complete the offer.
The park is also pet-friendly, with well-behaved dogs on leads welcome throughout most areas, and is ADA-compliant, with the Visitor Centre, gondolas, theatre, and bridge all wheelchair-accessible. Free parking is available on site for cars, motorhomes, and coaches.
🌐 Website
royalgorgebridge.com
📞 Contact Phone Number
(719) 275-7507
Toll-free: (888) 333-5597
Contact via the enquiry form on the official website. Email responses are typically provided within 24–48 hours of submission.
🎟️ Entry Fees
General admission includes access to the bridge, unlimited Aerial Gondola rides, the Plaza Theatre, Tommy Knocker Playland, and the Visitor Centre.
Adults (aged 12 and over): from approximately $25 per person Children (aged 3–11): from approximately $22 per person Children aged 2 and under: Free (ticket still required)
Prices vary by date and season; it is advisable to check the official website for the most up-to-date pricing before your visit, as peak and off-peak rates differ.
Extra-pay attractions — the Cloudscraper Zip Line, Royal Rush Skycoaster, and Via Ferrata tours — carry an additional fee on top of general admission. Adventure Passes and Season Passes are also available, bundling unlimited general admission with one or more of these premium experiences at a reduced rate.
🕘 Opening Times
The park is open 365 days a year, weather permitting, including all public holidays. The Visitor Centre and ticketing open at 9:00 am daily. Rides, the gift shop, café, and dining open at 10:00 am. Visitors purchasing ride tickets online are advised to arrive no later than two hours before the closing time.
Seasonal closing times for 2026:
1 January – 8 March: 4:00 pm 9 March – 30 April: 5:00 pm 1 May – 24 May: 6:00 pm 25 May – 7 September: 7:00 pm 8 September – 31 October: 5:00 pm 1 November – 31 December: 4:00 pm
Special events, including the annual Boo at the Bridge (October) and the Bridge of Lights (winter season), may operate under different hours. Always check the official website before travelling in case of weather-related closures or event schedule changes
Best time to visit Colorado
🌨️ Winter (December – February)
Colorado’s winters transform the state into a world-class ski destination. Resorts such as Vail, Aspen, Breckenridge, and Telluride receive abundant snowfall, making this the premier season for skiing, snowboarding, and snowshoeing. Temperatures in the mountains regularly drop well below freezing, whilst Denver and the Front Range remain milder, often enjoying sunny spells between storms. Accommodation prices at ski resorts peak during this period, so booking well in advance is essential. Non-skiers will find charm in the cosy mountain towns, festive après-ski culture, and dramatic snow-dusted scenery.
What to pack: Heavy insulated ski jacket and salopettes, thermal base layers (merino wool recommended), waterproof ski gloves and goggles, wool-lined snow boots, fleece mid-layers, neck gaiter, warm hat, sunscreen (UV is intense at altitude), and hand warmers.
🌸 Spring (March – May)
Spring in Colorado is a season of dramatic contrasts. March can still deliver heavy mountain snowfall — excellent for late-season skiing — whilst April and May bring wildflower blooms, rushing rivers swollen with snowmelt, and the awakening of hiking trails at lower elevations. Crowds are noticeably thinner than in summer or winter, and prices dip accordingly. Weather is unpredictable, swinging between warm, sunny afternoons and surprise snowstorms, particularly at altitude. It is arguably the most underrated season for visitors who enjoy solitude and transition landscapes.
What to pack: Waterproof layering system (rain jacket plus fleece), sturdy hiking boots, light thermal underlayers, quick-dry trousers, sun hat and sunglasses, sunscreen, compact umbrella, and a lightweight down gilet for cool evenings.
☀️ Summer (June – August)
Summer is Colorado’s busiest and most celebrated season. Temperatures in the mountains are pleasantly warm — typically 18–25°C — making it ideal for hiking, mountain biking, white-water rafting, camping, and wildlife spotting. Colorado’s 58 fourteeners (peaks exceeding 14,000 feet) are most accessible during this period. Afternoon thunderstorms are a near-daily occurrence in the mountains, so early starts are advisable on high trails. National and state parks such as Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde, and Great Sand Dunes attract significant visitor numbers; popular sites should be booked months ahead.
What to pack: Moisture-wicking hiking shirts, durable hiking trousers and shorts, lightweight waterproof jacket (for afternoon storms), sturdy trail or hiking boots, sun hat, high-SPF sunscreen, insect repellent, hydration pack or water bottles, and a mid-layer fleece for evenings.
🍂 Autumn (September – November)
Autumn is widely regarded as Colorado’s most visually spectacular season. From mid-September through mid-October, the aspen forests ignite in vivid gold and amber, drawing photographers and leaf-peepers to areas such as Kebler Pass, Last Dollar Road, and the San Juan Skyway. Temperatures are crisp and pleasant, crowds have thinned after the summer rush, and accommodation is easier to secure. Early snowfall can arrive in October at higher elevations, offering the tantalising prospect of golden aspens dusted with fresh snow. Hunting season is also active in autumn, so hikers should wear bright colours in backcountry areas.
What to pack: Layered clothing system (base layer, fleece, wind-resistant outer shell), sturdy hiking boots, warm hat and gloves (for higher elevations and October onwards), sunscreen, bright-coloured outer layer for backcountry hiking, and a lightweight packable down jacket.
🏆 Overall Best Time to Visit
For most travellers, late summer to early autumn (August to mid-October) represents Colorado’s sweet spot. The weather is reliably warm and settled in August, the fourteeners and high alpine trails are fully accessible, and by September the crowds ease considerably as the aspen foliage begins its golden transformation — offering the rare combination of spectacular scenery, comfortable conditions, and manageable visitor numbers. That said, Colorado is genuinely a year-round destination: winter delivers world-class skiing that is difficult to match anywhere outside of the Alps, spring rewards the adventurous traveller with lower prices and dramatic snowmelt landscapes, and summer provides the greatest breadth of outdoor pursuits. The right time to visit ultimately depends on what you are hoping to experience — but if forced to choose a single window, the golden weeks of mid-September stand apart as something truly extraordinary.
Other places to visit close by
Pikes Peak Cog Railway
The Cog has been climbing Pikes Peak since 1891. We are proud to be one of the most unique experiences in the country. Recognized as the world’s highest cog railroad, The Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway is an important part of the heritage of the Western United States. Taking this journey is like walking the footsteps of history, and now the adventure is even more iconic and inspiring.
2. Garden of the Gods
Comprising 1,300 acres of sandstone formations the Garden of the Gods, close to Colorado Springs, is a wonderful place to explore on foot, by bike or even try out some rock climbing. Come to see what has drawn human beings to this wonderful place for millennia.
Cliff Dwelling Museum
The 40 room site was originally located in McElmo Canyon, which is in the southwest corner of Colorado near Mesa Verde and Dolores. The process of relocating these cliff dwellings began in 1904 and was completed in 1907 when the preserve was opened to the public. Virginia McClurg, the original founder of the Colorado Cliff Dwellers Association, hired William Crosby and the Manitou Cliff Dwellings Ruins Company to begin this process. They wanted to preserve and protect these dwellings from looters and relic pot-hunters.
Where to stay near the Royal Garden Bridge
1. Cliff House at Pikes Peak
Experience the Victorian splendour of The Cliff House at Pikes Peak. Built back in 1874, the Cliff House has been serving guests for over 145 years now, longer than the number of years Colorado has been a state.
It was originally built as a stagecoach stop. They called it “The Inn.” When the gold strikes in the Pikes Peaks region played out, travellers started to surge and that’s when they decided to open their doors to guests. The interest in the ancient mineral springs also began to rise.
The Cliff House is now a part of the National Registry of Historic Places. They have 54 elegant guest rooms and luxury suites that are packed with modern amenities.
2. Kinship Landing
Kinship Landing was specifically designed not just to welcome travellers, but to serve as a hub for locals, naturally mingling the two crowds that have plenty to share with each other, given the opportunity. The 80-bed boutique certainly offers lux options with suites that include fully-opening garage door windows, LED fireplaces and extravagant soaking tubs, but it’s the other end of the spectrum that makes this property seriously special. Co-founded by world travellers on a budget, Kinship Landing offers high-quality hostel accommodations in a full-service hotel with bunk rooms so chill you may want to stay there no matter your budget.
3. Blue Skies Inn
If you need privacy and a little bit of pampering, then Blue Skies Inn could be the best place for you while staying in Manitou Springs. This friendly and charming B&B is located at the base of Pikes Peak. They have three separate houses with guests rooms that have an average size of 450 square feet. The suites have a bedroom, sitting room and bathroom.
What makes Blue Skies a special retreat are its unique rooms. Every suite has a theme and offers special views of the surrounding forests. This is also perfect for family reunions and small occasions
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