Postcards from Colorado

by chuckofish

We made it to southeast Colorado and home again, exhausted now but having had a merry old time. We participated in the Santa Fe Trail Bicentennial Symposium, saw everything we set out to see, ate a lot of tasty Mexican food and enjoyed ourselves along the way. Daughter #1 demonstrated the navigational and driving prowess she has acquired while living in mid-MO. Today I’m just going to post some pics while I process it all.

Descendants of JS Hough, SFTA Hall of Fame 2020 inductee
Bent’s Old Fort
The Prowers House in Boggsville
Prowers family graves in Las Animas, CO
Fine dining in Las Animas
The Koshare Kiva
Michael Martin Murphey
The Courthouse in Las Animas
Bent’s New Fort site on the Arkansas River
Bent County Museum items of interest
The Picketwire running a little dry in Vogel Canyon
The Comanche National Grasslands

I must say I love this country–the wide open spaces and the big sky! The stars at night were insane! The weather was beautiful. We did not see any tarantulas–try as we might. Dusk was the prime time to do so and we were always on our way to one of the nightly events of the symposium.

We stopped in Denver on our way out of town and were shocked at how big it has gotten and how much traffic there was between Colorado Springs and Denver (there was a Broncos game which might account for some of that). We went to the Colorado History Museum, which has, of course, gotten quite woke since I was last there in 2013. Thankfully they still have Kit Carson’s hunting coat on display, which you will recall was donated to the state by JS Hough.

They also have John Wesley Prower’s branding iron on view in the Centennial State in 100 Objects display.

By the way, here I am with the great-great-great-grandson of Kit Carson who I ran into in Boggsville.

Small world.

We covered quite a bit of territory in Otero, Bent and Prowers counties and you’ll hear more about that in upcoming posts. When we returned our rented SUV at the airport it was insect encrusted and dirt covered–signs of a well spent four days.