Weird day trips from Fort Collins

The strangest Fort Collins finds are often a short drive out. These 25 day trips — Antlers Cafe and Bar, Carpenter Ranch (The Nature Conservancy), Hahns Peak Village, Schoolhouse Museum & Bear Cage Jail 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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Antlers Cafe and Bar During Prohibition this 1903 saloon just swapped its sign for pool hall and kept pouring; the National Regist… Yampa
Carpenter Ranch (The Nature Conservancy) The Nature Conservancy bought this 906-acre spread in 1996 and kept the cattle — hay crews still cut the fiel… Hayden
Hahns Peak Village, Schoolhouse Museum & Bear Cage Jail This 1865 gold camp was somehow the seat of all Routt County — a county that once stretched to the Utah borde… Clark
Mt. Harris Memorial In 1920 the biggest town in Routt County wasn't Steamboat Springs — it was Mount Harris, a coal camp of 1,300… Hayden
North Park Pioneer Museum An 1883 log cabin the town kept feeding: it is now three stories and 27 themed rooms, and nearly every artifa… Walden
Oak Creek Tavern Twenty-five minutes from Steamboat's lift lines, the bar at 105 Main has poured since 1908, minus Prohibition… Oak Creek
Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School & Camp In 1913 two Smith College graduates — locals dubbed them "the mad ladies of Steamboat" — started teaching bar… Steamboat Springs
Steamboat Art Museum (Rehder Building) The 1905 First National Bank building is now a polished little art museum, but ask the docents about Helen. H… Steamboat Springs
Steamboat Spring & the Mineral Springs Walking Tour For thousands of years the Steamboat Spring chugged like a paddlewheeler—loud enough that trappers came down… Steamboat Springs
Strawberry Park Hot Springs Seven miles up a dirt road from Steamboat, the rules read like a secret society's bylaws: cash only, no pets,… Steamboat Springs
Sulphur Cave at Howelsen Hill The town ski hill has a cave that can kill you in two breaths. Sulphur Cave drops about fifteen feet into tra… Steamboat Springs
Sunpie's Bistro Two New Orleans transplants opened this Yampa Street dive in 2005, named it for zydeco great Sunpie Barnes, a… Steamboat Springs
Teller City Ghost Town In 1879 silver pulled 1,500 people into this lodgepole forest below the Never Summers — 27 saloons, a newspap… Walden
Aiden Sinclair's Underground (Illusions of the Mind) Accessed through a swinging bookcase in the basement of the Stanley Hotel's historic Carriage House, Aiden Si… Estes Park
Deadman Fire Lookout Tower Built by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in 1937–38 and replaced with the current 55-foot steel tower in 19… Red Feather Lakes
Dearfield Ghost Town In 1910, Oliver Toussaint Jackson filed a homestead claim on the Weld County plains and built the largest Bla… Orchard (Weld County)
Estes Park Memorial Observatory Sitting at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, the Estes Park Memorial Observatory runs volunteer-led p… Estes Park
Great Stupa of Dharmakaya Rising 108 feet at 8,000 feet elevation in the Rockies northwest of Fort Collins, the Great Stupa of Dharmaka… Red Feather Lakes
Lindenmeier Paleo Site at Soapstone Prairie One of the most significant Paleo-Indian sites in North America, the Lindenmeier Site preserves the largest k… Fort Collins
Manhattan Ghost Town & Cemetery In the 1880s, a gold rush drew hundreds of prospectors to a remote ridge above the Poudre Canyon, and by 1887… Red Feather Lakes
Seven Keys Lodge Key Collection What started as a guest tradition in the 1920s — Clarence Darrow left the first key in 1923 — has grown into… Estes Park
Gnome Road (Elf Lane) Somewhere between Lake Hiawatha and Lake Apache, a hand-lettered sign warns you not to take, break, or reloca… Red Feather Lakes
Howelsen Hill Ski Area While every visitor to Steamboat Springs drives past it on the way to the big resort, Howelsen Hill has been… Steamboat Springs
Crown Point B-17 Crash Site On June 13, 1944, a fully crewed Army Air Forces B-17 slammed into a snow-covered mountainside north of Crown… Bellvue
Virginia Dale Overland Trail Stage Station Jack Slade built this home station in 1862, then allegedly robbed a stage of $60,000 in gold that was never r… Virginia Dale