On Colorado's Wild Prairies, the Rest of the World Disappears

New York Times

08-07-2025

For a moment, caught between sky and prairie, I felt like the only being on earth. Fields of undulating green wheat and grass extended from horizon to horizon. The wind whispered. Clouds gathered and darkened, shifting from light gray to deep cobalt. This was not the Colorado of snow-capped peaks and glitzy ski towns.
There, on the shoulder of County Road M, a stitch of dirt in the Comanche National Grassland, closer to Oklahoma than to Denver, the vastness filled me with a spine-tingling sense of awe. I had come all this way seeking solitude. I just hadn't planned for so much of it.
Suddenly, I caught movement in my peripheral vision. A pronghorn bounded across the prairie, leaped over a fence, then bounced across the road a mere 10 feet away — its white rump flashing as it rocketed across the grassland. Pronghorns, more closely related to giraffes than to antelope, are the fastest land mammals in North America, and by the time I grabbed my camera, the animal had faded back into the landscape. Alone again.
Legacy of the Dust Bowl
The Comanche National Grassland sprawls across 440,000 acres of southeastern Colorado about 300 miles from Denver. The grassland's roots go back to the 1930s when, during the Dust Bowl, this corner of Colorado — like much of the Great Plains — was blowing away. In 1935, an estimated 850 million tons of topsoil were lost.
20 miles
Denver
colorado
Colorado
Area of
detail
50
Lamar
La Junta
Vogel Canyon
Dinosaur Footprints Trailhead
Comanche
National
Grassland
Springfield
Purgatoire
River
385
160
Carrizo
Canyon
N.M.
okla.
By The New York Times
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.