How to Survive...A Summer Road Trip

Food is another story. Find out what the locals eat when they're on a drinking binge. The spicier the better, and the cuddlier the source animal, the better. Throw caution to the wind with your culinary choices. Keep caution close at hand when it comes to water, however.

The final key to surviving a summer road trip: survive. Go nuts, but drive safely. At the end of it all, drag yourself back home in one piece so you can reboot that humdrum everyday reality, fine-tune it for the better part of a year and then blow it to bits once again with another deranged odyssey on the American highway.

City Escapes

Picket Wire Canyonlands,
Comanche National Grassland
225 miles southeast of Denver
www.fs.fed.us/r2/psicc/coma

If you really want to get away from it all, don't go to the mountains. Embark on the road far less taken and head down to Picket Wire Canyonlands, one of the few geological anomalies on the Colorado plains. Accessed via a trailhead about 25 miles southwest of La Junta, Picket Wire Canyonlands got its name from uncouth settlers who bastardized the name of French Purgatoire, the river that carved this piñon-and-mesquite-dotted revelation. About four miles into the wide, sandstone-crusted gash, there's a cemetery that dates back to the nineteenth century, when the area was part of a ranching empire. Two miles farther is another sign of former inhabitants: the largest dinosaur-track site in the United States. You can hike, bike or giddyap, but pick a mild day and bring your sunscreen.

Salida
140 miles southwest of Denver
www.salidachamber.org

With a gallery-laden downtown that is Colorado's largest historic district and an enviable, low-lying position amid 14,000-foot peaks, Salida can satiate impulses both civilized and wild. Under the gaze of the Collegiate Peaks, the Sangre de Cristos and the Sawatch Range, the area is rafting and mountain-biking central. Thanks to Salida's cozy elevation (about 7,000 feet), it's one of the few places in the country where you can conveniently spend the afternoon in the crisp air above the timberline and the night combing the bars below in a T-shirt and shorts.

San Luis Valley
200 miles southwest of Denver
www.sanluisvalley.org

The largest alpine valley on the planet, the San Luis is the only flat expanse of any note in the Colorado Rockies. In this 8,500-square-mile space is the state's oldest town (San Luis) and some of its most enigmatic attractions: Beyond the natural (the Great Sand Dunes), there's the historic (the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railway), the unnatural (the Colorado Alligator Farm), and the downright odd (the UFO Watchtower). Within that one sentence is a week of exploration, easy.

Snowy Range Pass
200 miles northwest of Denver
www.fs.fed.us/r2/mbr

Drifts dominate the landscape atop Snowy Range Pass well into the Colorado summer -- which would be more surprising if this weren't Wyoming. The top of the Medicine Bows doesn't see the traffic of some of Colorado's mountain destinations, but its position west of Laramie is just a few hours from Denver. Frontier-turned-tourist towns like Centennial, Saratoga and Woods Landing sit at the range's feet. The latter of the three looks like a town on a road map, but it probably wouldn't be on the map at all if it weren't for its centerpiece: an authentic backwoods roadhouse built on 24 giant boxcar springs. When the place is rocking on a weekend night, it bounces -- literally.

Yellowstone National Park
About 600 miles northwest of Denver
www.nps.gov/yell

Whenever road-trip season approaches, I think of the tale of Truman Everts, the first person to get lost in what is now Yellowstone National Park. Everts was an accountant from Vermont who volunteered for a Yellowstone expedition in 1870 -- despite the fact that he was 54 and had no outdoor experience. Inevitably, Truman got lost and, almost needless to say, nearly perished during the 37 days he spent alone in the Yellowstone wilderness. The guy who saved Everts almost shot him, because the dirt-caked creature crawling up the hill looked so much like a bear. Avoid his fate, and try the Yellowstone Association Institute's guided forty-mile backpacking trip along the Nez Perce Trail.