My first full day in Colorado, we packed ourselves into the car and headed south on the I-25 from Denver to Colorado Springs. Our destination: The Garden of the Gods. I’d seen red rock formations peppered around Denver in the few hours I’d been in town, and was anxious to get up close and see them in person so was thrilled to discover that where we were headed was a US Natural National Landmark precisely because of these rocks.

The park is absolutely free and open to hikers, technical rock climbers, horseback riding, mountain biking — you name it, and it seems to be done here. We saw young kids clamouring over specially designated rocks, climbing fearlessly feet above the ground without a harness (I was convinced one little girl was part mountain goat, and would have kept climbing had her dad not called her back to the ground), families with dogs of all shapes and sizes (including a lovely Corgi named Tank!), women in flip-flops and maxi-dresses out for a stroll, two guys climbing one of the higher peaks then sitting at the summit watching us all go by like ants, and park rangers who were there to answer any question you had about the rocks and their history. It’s an amazing public space, and fantastic to photograph!

The one thing that is forbidden, and you would think this to be a no-brainer, is to NOT carve on the soft sandstone rocks. There are signs everywhere, yet we hadn’t even been in the park five minutes when we came across a woman leaning over a wooden fence to carve a her initials onto a boulder formation. “Are you sure you’re supposed to be doing that?” I asked, ever the polite Canadian. “There are signs everywhere telling you not to do this!”, my friend snapped at her; we were all appalled and pretty pissed off. As for the woman, she seemed stunned that anyone would have spoken to her, preventing her from doing whatever she wanted. As my other friend said, what a great lesson she was teaching her children. While I would have liked to have hoped that other folks would have said something to her had we not come along, there were other adults milling around her to wait their turn to deface a rock that had been there for millions of years, or passing her by without saying a word.

I’m not certain if we lucked out, or if this was the norm, but we were able to enjoy the park without feeling as though we were being suffocated by thousands of people. The park receives over 2 million visitors annually, but it sure didn’t seem to be busy when we were there. Sure, there were small pockets of people around the more accessible formations such as the one we climbed a top of and sat until the altitude started to make me dizzy (or my altitude-paranoia did anyway; after Peru I’ve been understandably twitchy about going anywhere higher than sea-level!), or near cluster points at corners or near the washrooms. Other than that though, I feel blessed to have been able to take so many fantastic photographs of the landscape.

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