Weird day trips from Grand Junction

The strangest Grand Junction finds are often a short drive out. These 46 day trips — Captain Smith’s Cabin, Egyptian Theatre, Elsewhere Studios 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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Captain Smith’s Cabin In 1911, Captain Henry A. Smith — Civil War veteran, tombstone carver, sixty-five years old — leaned three st… Delta
Egyptian Theatre Tut-mania built more than a hundred Egyptian movie palaces in the 1920s; six of the Second Revival kind survi… Delta
Elsewhere Studios Paonia's hundred-year-old Elsewhere house — once a General Electric building, now the 'Temple of the Muse' —… Paonia
Hanging Flume Overlook In the late 1880s, St. Louis investors paid crews to dangle from ropes off a sheer Dolores Canyon wall and bo… Gateway
Marble Mill Site Park The marble that became the Lincoln Memorial got sawed and polished here, in a mill that ran from 1907 to 1941… Marble
Museum of the Mountain West Retired BLM archaeologist Richard Fike spent decades filling thirty-plus storage lockers, then built a fake t… Montrose
Phelanies Phil and Melanie Freismuth ran Horsefly Brewing for a decade before opening this place across the street in 2… Montrose
Pioneer Town Museum Twenty-four buildings of resurrected frontier town — the 1907 jail, the Lizard Head Saloon, a working blacksm… Cedaredge
Redstone Castle (Cleveholm Manor) Coal baron John Osgood spent $2.5 million in 1902 on Cleveholm — 42 rooms of Tiffany light fixtures, Stickley… Redstone
Redstone Coke Ovens Those mounds along Highway 133 aren't ruins of some lost civilization — they're 90 of the original 249 beehiv… Redstone
Rifle Mountain Park Ice Caves Every December, spring water seeping through the limestone of Rifle Creek's canyon freezes into four caves of… Rifle
Shavano Valley Rock Art Site Five and a half miles west of Montrose, a sandstone cliff on the Uncompahgre Plateau carries twenty-six panel… Montrose
Star Drive-In Theatre George and Elizabeth DeVries lit this screen on April 19, 1950 — The Younger Brothers on the bill — and their… Montrose
Tru Vu Drive-In Delta's single screen has been throwing light at the high desert since March 1955, when the opening bill pair… Delta
True Nature Healing Arts Peace Garden Just off Main Street in Carbondale, a free one-acre garden stares straight at Mt. Sopris. Walk the hand-cut s… Carbondale
Valley Curtain Site at Rifle Gap On August 10, 1972, Christo and Jeanne-Claude strung 200,000 square feet of orange nylon across this gap, 1,2… Rifle
Yampah Spa & Vapor Caves Twenty steps below an 1893 spa building, 125-degree mineral water runs through channels in the floor of three… Glenwood Springs
Ashcroft Ghost Town Eleven miles up Castle Creek Road from Aspen, Ashcroft once outpaced its neighbor. Silver was struck in 1880,… Aspen
Avalanche Ranch Hot Springs Tucked along the Crystal River about two miles south of Redstone's Victorian coal-camp streetscape, Avalanche… Redstone
Basalt Charcoal Kilns Seven beehive-shaped kilns built in 1884 by the Aspen Silver Company stand at the edge of Arbaney Park in eas… Basalt
Crested Butte Cemetery On the north edge of town along Gothic Road, Crested Butte's Victorian-era cemetery holds the evidence of a b… Crested Butte
Fat City Gallery On Aspen's pedestrian mall — where gallery real estate runs to the precious and the expensive — Fat City Gall… Aspen
Forest Queen Hotel The Forest Queen Hotel occupies a narrow, two-story Victorian wood-frame building at the center of Elk Avenue… Crested Butte
Gothic Townsite & Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory Gothic boomed in 1879 after the Jennings brothers struck wire silver at the Sylvanite lode, swelling to nearl… Gothic, CO
Gunnison Pioneer Museum Seven developed acres on the east edge of Gunnison hold 42 historic structures that form one of Colorado's mo… Gunnison
Independence Ghost Town Prospectors struck gold here on July 4, 1879, and within three years more than forty businesses — three saloo… Aspen
Kochevar's Saloon & Gaming Hall Jacob Kochevar finished building this timber-frame saloon in 1891 — the hand-hewn beams came from the surroun… Crested Butte
Montanya Distillers Rum and mountains don't usually share a sentence, but Montanya has been proving that wrong since it landed in… Crested Butte
Packer Saloon & Cannibal Grill In 1874, Alferd Packer led five prospectors into the San Juan Mountains during a brutal Colorado winter and e… Lake City
Powers Art Center A red sandstone cube rising out of an active cattle ranch two miles south of Carbondale, the Powers Art Cente… Carbondale, CO
Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies When Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke recruited Herbert Bayer to Aspen in 1946, he handed a Bauhaus-train… Aspen
Smuggler Mine Tour Aspen's wealth was dug out of this mountain. In June 1879, prospectors Edward Fuller and Con Allbright staked… Aspen
Tincup Cemetery Perched at 10,158 feet in Taylor Park, Tincup's 1879 cemetery occupies four separate treeless knolls, each as… Tincup
Two-Story Outhouse Tucked into the alley between Elk and Maroon Avenues, this hand-hewn wooden outhouse is one of Colorado's las… Crested Butte
Ute Cemetery Established in 1880 when a Texas prospector died of mountain fever before Aspen had any formal burial ground,… Aspen
Waunita Hot Springs Ranch Tucked 27 miles east of Gunnison at 8,946 feet, just below the Continental Divide, Waunita Hot Springs Ranch… Gunnison
Woody Creek Tavern A 1940s log-cabin former general store and filling station six miles down-valley from Aspen, the Woody Creek… Woody Creek (Aspen area)
Alfred Eames Cellars Buried beneath a working vineyard in Paonia is a concrete wine cave commissioned from an artist out of San Mi… Paonia
Redstone Coke Oven Historic District In the 1970s, countercultural youth actually moved into the hollow domes — 84 stone beehive coke ovens strung… Redstone
Blue Sage Center for the Arts In 1994, a pair of yoga teachers and dancers signed a lease on a Grand Avenue storefront in Paonia — a coal-c… Paonia
Gateway Canyons Resort — Curator of Curiosity Tours John Hendricks, the man who built the Discovery Channel, carved a resort into the Dolores River canyon and hi… Gateway
Calamity Camp Mining Site The BLM sign actually warns you about residual radiation before you get out of the truck — this mesa-top camp… Gateway
Cañon Pintado National Historic District Spanish missionaries named this canyon 'Painted Canyon' in 1776 after stumbling onto sandstone walls covered… Rangely
South Canyon Hot Springs Dump trucks rumble up the county road past the pullout roughly every ten minutes — the county landfill is jus… Glenwood Springs
Dogwood Cocktail Cabin The 60-odd miners killed in the 1884 Jokerville Mine explosion apparently never quite left this 1891 bunkhous… Crested Butte
Bad Harriet at Hotel Jerome The front door stays locked — you knock, a woman at a solitary desk looks you over, and then you're directed… Aspen