Weird day trips from Pueblo

The strangest Pueblo finds are often a short drive out. These 34 day trips — Cano's Castle, Cokedale Coke Ovens, Colorado Gators Reptile Park 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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Cano's Castle Dominic "Cano" Espinoza came home from Vietnam, thanked God for his survival, and spent the next four decades… Antonito
Cokedale Coke Ovens ASARCO built 350 beehive coke ovens here in 1906, and when the mine quit in 1947 nobody bothered to tear them… Cokedale (7 mi west of Trinidad, Hwy 12)
Colorado Gators Reptile Park In 1977 the Youngs drilled into 87-degree geothermal water to farm tilapia in the San Luis Valley. In 1987 th… Mosca (between Hooper and Alamosa)
Crestone Ziggurat The man who ran Pan Am and the FAA — and whose daughter became Queen Noor of Jordan — built himself a Babylon… Crestone
Devil's Stairsteps Around 25 million years ago, magma from the West Spanish Peak intrusion shot into cracks radiating through th… La Veta
Indiana Jones Bed & Breakfast The two-story Victorian at Front and 5th is the house River Phoenix crashes into at the start of The Last Cru… Antonito
Louden-Henritze Archaeology Museum Downtown Trinidad sits on 80-million-year-old ocean mud — Pierre Shale, the floor of the inland sea that once… Trinidad
Ludlow Massacre Memorial On April 20, 1914, Colorado National Guardsmen and company gunmen machine-gunned and torched a tent colony of… Ludlow (15 mi NW of Trinidad)
Mission: Wolf Kent Weber started rescuing captive-born wolves in 1986; around 30 wolves and wolf-dogs now live at 9,300 fee… Gardner (45 min from Westcliffe)
Museum of Colorado Prisons The 1935 women’s cellhouse shares a stone wall and gun towers with Old Max, the Territorial prison running ne… Cañon City
Museum of Friends Painters Brendt Berger and Maria Cocchiarelli-Berger spent decades trading canvases with friends instead of s… Walsenburg
Owl Cigar Store Opened in 1903, the Owl has been a pool hall, a gambling den, and a cigar-and-fishing-tackle counter — the to… Cañon City
Shrine of the Stations of the Cross (La Mesa de la Piedad y de la Misericordia) San Luis has been Colorado's oldest town since 1851, and the mesa behind Main Street carries the Passion in b… San Luis
Silver Cliff Cemetery The blue-white orbs here first hit print in 1956, when the Wet Mountain Tribune reported ghosts carrying thei… Silver Cliff (adjacent to Westcliffe)
Simpson's Rest The giant lit-up TRINIDAD sign looks like standard hillside boosterism until you learn what's underneath it:… Trinidad
Skyline Drive Dinosaur Tracks For 94 years, drivers inched along this one-lane 1905 prisoner-built ridge road without noticing the wall bes… Cañon City
Skyline Drive Sixty prisoners from the Territorial Prison carved this one-lane road along a razorback hogback in 1905, earn… Cañon City
Smokey Jack Observatory At the west end of Main Street, across from the bowling alley, sits a 12-by-12-foot shed in Bluff Park whose… Westcliffe
Tarabino Inn The Tarabino brothers built this U-shaped Italianate in 1907, and Barney apparently never checked out — he's… Trinidad
Tashi Gomang Stupa Drive Camino Baca Grande until the pavement quits and the washboard starts; the road dead-ends at a 42-foot T… Crestone
The Greenhouse at Sand Dunes Recreation In the 1930s, oil drillers punched a mile into the San Luis Valley floor and hit 118-degree artesian water in… Hooper
UFO Watchtower Judy Messoline went bust running cattle in the San Luis Valley — “cows don't eat sand” — so in 2000 she put u… Hooper
Uptop Ghost Town In 1877 the Denver & Rio Grande crested Old La Veta Pass at 9,382 feet — the “Railroad Above the Clouds,” hig… La Veta (Old La Veta Pass)
Valley View Hot Springs (Orient Land Trust) A nonprofit land trust runs this one: seven soaking ponds strung up a hillside at the foot of the Sangre de C… Villa Grove (north of Crestone)
Valley View Hot Springs & Orient Mine Bat Flight The nonprofit Orient Land Trust runs this off-grid, clothing-optional spread at the foot of the Sangre de Cri… Villa Grove (north of Crestone)
Desert Reef Hot Springs Each private Airstream trailer here sits directly over its own geothermal pool — you soak in the dark while t… Florence
Haidakhandi Universal Ashram Crestone has fewer than 150 permanent residents and more than 20 functioning spiritual centers — and this ash… Crestone
A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art The building itself tips you off: a 1906 dry-goods store on Trinidad's Main Street, pressed-tin ceiling intac… Trinidad
FAROUT Murals of Walsenburg Nationally-known muralists — including Navajo artist Chip Thomas, who has painted in Monument Valley and on t… Walsenburg
Phantom Canyon Road The road doesn't pave over history here — it is the history. Thirty miles of gravel trace the exact grade whe… Florence
Walsenburg Mining Museum When 80-year-old labor firebrand Mary "Mother" Jones was arrested during the 1913 coal miners' strike, they l… Walsenburg
Ludlow Massacre Site On April 20, 1914, Colorado National Guard soldiers machine-gunned and torched a tent city of striking coal m… Ludlow
Crestone Spiritual Centers Cluster A single foundation donated land outside a mountain town of roughly 150 people, and somehow 24 active ashrams… Crestone
Joyful Journey Hot Springs The water here has no sulfur smell — it surfaces odorless and laced with lithium, which locals will tell you… Moffat