Weird day trips from Durango

The strangest Durango finds are often a short drive out. These 42 day trips — Chimney Rock Night Sky & Lunar Standstill Programs, Christ of the Mines Shrine, Creations from Mufflers and more — are each hand-vetted and sourced: ghost towns, hot-spring soaks, roadside oddities, and odd small-town museums worth the gas. A weird day trip is its own kind of date.

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Chimney Rock Night Sky & Lunar Standstill Programs A thousand years ago, Ancestral Puebloans hauled stone up a 7,600-foot ridge and built a Chacoan great house… Chimney Rock
Christ of the Mines Shrine In 1959, Silverton hauled twelve tons of Carrara marble—cut from the same Italian quarries as Michelangelo’s… Silverton
Creations from Mufflers Three miles north of Cortez, a dirt-road corner becomes a town of white-painted metal people — Floyd has been… Cortez
Dave Sipe's Folk Art Dave Sipe has spent 35-plus years attacking dead county wood with a chainsaw and a Skilsaw, and somewhere alo… Mancos
Rio Grande Southern Railroad Museum (Galloping Goose No. 5) The broke Rio Grande Southern built seven Galloping Geese — half bus, half locomotive — because running a rea… Dolores
Giant Arrows at the Hogan Trading Post Somewhere, a giant missed. In 1981, trading post owner Bill Countess and a crew of local Native American arti… Mancos
Grand Imperial Hotel In 1890, Luigi Regalia shot himself in what is now Room 314, and he never checked out. When crews gutted the… Silverton
Hillside Cemetery Three thousand graves climb the lower slope of Boulder Mountain above 9,300 feet—no grid, no paths, just head… Silverton
Nathan's Hippy Dip Hot Spring On the town side of the San Juan, a hundred yards down the Riverwalk from the Hot Springs Boulevard bridge, a… Pagosa Springs
Notah-Dineh Trading Company & Museum Since 1961 the Leighton family — traders in the Four Corners for four generations — have run this Cortez post… Cortez
Ouray Alchemist Museum Curtis Haggar spent fifty years assembling Colorado's largest pharmacy museum, then installed it behind a Mai… Ouray
Piedra River Hot Springs Pagosa Springs charges resort prices to soak in the world's deepest hot spring. A half hour west, the same ge… Pagosa Springs
Telluride Free Box It started in 1975 as a box of clothes left outside a health-food store, and Telluride never let it die. When… Telluride
The Mother Spring The steaming aqua pool between The Springs Resort and the bank next door holds a Guinness record nobody can f… Pagosa Springs
Tomboy Ghost Town & the Social Tunnel At 11,509 feet in Savage Basin, the Rothschilds of London bought a gold camp for $2 million in 1897 and gave… Telluride
Wiesbaden Hot Springs Vapor Cave Take the stairs beneath the lodge and you are in a 108-degree chamber miners blasted out of the mountain whil… Ouray
Yankee Girl Mine Headframe John Robinson sank twenty feet of shaft here in 1882 and sold out a month later for $125,000—too early, becau… Ouray
Alta Ghost Town Perched at 11,800 feet above sea level in a tight alpine basin south of Telluride, Alta operated from 1877 un… Durango
Ames Hydroelectric Generating Station On June 19, 1891, a small stone powerhouse in a river canyon outside Ophir made electrical history: L.L. Nunn… Ophir / Telluride
Dennis Weaver Memorial Park Best known as Chester on Gunsmoke and the wisecracking New Mexico deputy in McCloud, Dennis Weaver left Holly… Ridgway
Fort Peabody Ruins (Imogene Pass) At 13,365 feet on the Ouray–San Miguel county line, a cluster of low stone walls is all that remains of Fort… Durango
Lone Cone Saloon The Lone Cone Saloon occupies a building that has stood on Norwood's Grand Avenue since 1889, but the real dr… Norwood
Lone Tree Cemetery Perched at nearly 9,000 feet on the east end of Telluride, Lone Tree Cemetery was dedicated in 1887 when the… Telluride
Ophir Town & Post Office Named after the biblical land of King Solomon's gold, Ophir clings to a narrow San Juan valley at 9,700 feet… Ophir
Orvis Hot Springs Tucked at the base of the San Juan Mountains just south of Ridgway, Orvis Hot Springs is one of Colorado's mo… Ridgway
Telluride Historical Museum Tucked inside a sturdy 1896 miners' hospital listed on the National Register of Historic Places, this Smithso… Telluride
Dunton Hot Springs The saloon bar at this restored 1885 ghost town still carries Butch Cassidy's carved signature, and the iron-… Dolores
Wheeler Geologic Area This was Colorado's very first national monument — designated by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 — then quietly strip… South Fork / Creede
Lowry Pueblo & the Great Kiva The painted murals inside this Great Kiva survived sealed underground for roughly nine centuries, then deteri… Cortez (Canyons of the Ancients NM)
Ouray Perimeter Trail (Tunnel, Troll & Four Waterfalls) Somewhere after the Box Canyon High Bridge, the trail dips into an old water tunnel blasted straight through… Ouray
Old Hundred Gold Mine Tour Three German brothers staked this claim in 1872, a mining company sank over a million dollars into it, a corp… Silverton
Ute Mountain Tribal Park The only way into this 125,000-acre park is a phone call to the tribe — no walk-ups, no ticket windows, no cr… Towaoc
Rico Mine Shaft Inn The hotel manager refuses to sleep here alone — and she lives in the third-floor apartment where Zach, a form… Rico
Crow Canyon Archaeological Center They'll hand you an actual 800-year-old potsherd and let you turn it over in your fingers — no glass case, no… Cortez
The Tunnel Supper Club You descend through a trap door after whispering a password pulled from that week's classifieds in Telluride'… Telluride
Wood Ear Whiskey Lounge & Noodle Bar The bar at the center of this basement room is hand-carved from walnut and extinct white tiger pine and hasn'… Telluride
Hinsdale County Museum Somewhere in this volunteer-run building at the corner of 2nd and Silver is a skull fragment from one of the… Lake City
Silverton Skijoring on Blair Street Every February, horses accelerate to 35–45 mph and tow skiers over jump obstacles down Blair Street — the sam… Silverton, CO
Yucca House National Monument This is a full US National Monument — same legal standing as Yellowstone — that looks like an overgrown field… Towaoc / Cortez
Geyser Spring Trail Colorado's only active geyser sits at the end of a 1.5-mile hike through San Juan National Forest, erupting e… Dolores
McElmo Canyon Roadside Boulder Petroglyphs Someone decided the best place for a thousand-year-old petroglyph boulder was directly on the shoulder of Cou… Cortez
Rainbow Hot Springs There are no fees, no attendants, and no address — just a set of rock-walled soaking pools that anonymous hik… Pagosa Springs