Comanche Trail
What Southeast Colorado Is All About
There are places in the Comanche National Grasslands where you can stop your car by the side of the road, get out and spin 360 degrees, without seeing a single sign of human presence anywhere besides the road. And if you continue to stand there as night falls across the prairie, you likely won’t hear a single motor, nor see artificial light on the horizon. Come morning, with the Lesser Prairie-Chickens dancing and the Cassin’s Sparrows skylarking, you’ll think the shortgrass and yucca stretches on forever–until you get in your car and drive a mile down the road, to the edge of an unexpected cliff, where you’ll stand on the lip of a rimrock band and look three hundred feet down to the stream that carved this gorge out of the grasslands, where a herd of bighorn sheep might be watering. Some places on the plains are an acquired taste, but this is not one of them. This is what Southeast Colorado is all about.