"There's More Than One Kind of Rich," Or: "One Person's Hole In The Ground Is Another Person's Hole In The Ground"

(By Tom)

I don’t really know if the stereotype about the Vail area (specifically, the town of Edwards and the “community” of Beaver Creek) being a hoity-toity haven for the super-rich ski set is accurate, because we visited in the summer, when there’s no snow (or obscenely wealthy people) on the slopes. I do know, however, that it seems to have about three times as many Starbucks per capita as the rest of the places we had seen to that point.

I can also say that the area is very pretty in the summertime, and provides an excellent backdrop for an invigorating bicycle ride (or, for my sisters Erika and Michelle, ziplining tour). Ultimately, though, at least in the summer, the place was about as remarkable as a hole in the ground.

Actually, I’d give a slight edge to the hole. For while the Vail area is, again, very pretty, it feels more like a higher-end outdoor shopping mall than anything, a little too heavy on the manufactured charm and a little too light on personality, with just the shuttered ski lifts and vacant, green ribbons of cleared land cutting through groves of pine trees to remind us of the region's true attractions.

The unmarked, unadorned natural hot spring we stopped at, on the other hand, had personality to spare. That was about all it had, but still.

Tracy’s parents had discovered the hot spring on a previous trip to Colorado, and after a stunningly dramatic jaunt down I-70 through Glenwood Canyon, we got off at Exit No. 345*, drove about half of a mile into the hills and pulled over to the side of the road, where we got out of our cars and plunged into the underbrush. After a hike of about 100 yards or so, we arrived at the hot spring, a six-by-six hole filled with murky, brown, bubbling hot water, complete with a sitting area made out of boulders, bleached-out, splintering plywood, and what looked to be a rubber floor mat from a car. A middle-aged man wearing an open, rainbow-colored shirt, canvas hat, and sunglasses sat cross-legged next to the spring, thumbing an iPhone and slouching in such a way that his hairy belly folded in on itself and spilled over the waistband of his swim trunks. As Tracy, her parents, and my sister Erika dipped their toes into the water, it occurred to me that we may have been disturbing the man’s solitude, but he just kept staring at his iPhone, maintaining eye contact with the machine through at least ten minutes of loud, boisterous hot-spring-oriented conversation among our party.

Though I declined to take off my shoes and socks and stick my own toes in, and though we were standing in the middle of nowhere in sweltering heat, and though the water was dotted with thick clumps of blackish-green algae, I couldn’t help but fall under the hot spring’s spell. Maybe it was the sulfur in the air, but there was something about this humble natural wonder, unfettered by modern amenities and almost untouched by commercial interests, an isolated little secret in the Colorado mountains.

The true hidden gem of the day, however, was even farther west, close to the Utah border: Rim Rock Drive, in the Colorado Monument National Park, just south of Grand Junction. The 23-mile-long road meanders through and over one of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful desert landscapes I’ve ever seen, rising and falling 2,000 feet through a collection of otherworldly rock formations and sparse, green shrubbery. I kept expecting to see Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner with an ill-fated, rocket-powered contraption strapped to his back. Instead of that, however, all we saw and heard was nature, along with the occasional flash of lightning and the low but faintly ominous rumble of thunder in the distance.

*Actual exit number redacted to protect the hot spring's hidden location, though I'm sure you can find it in a guidebook if you really want to.