Walk through clay hoodoos quarried for pigment for 9,000 years
Free, and 9,000 years deep
A 750-acre county park of eroded clay spires in banded colour, on the plains east of the city, with nine thousand years of human use behind the name.
Why it's unique
Seven hundred and fifty acres of spires and hoodoos cut into banded selenite clay and jasper, coloured red, yellow, orange and purple by oxidised iron running through the layers. The formations are unlike anything else on the Front Range, and they sit out on the plains rather than in the mountains.
The archaeology is the other half. Indigenous people quarried these clays for pigment and worked the selenite for tools across roughly nine thousand years of documented occupation, which is what gives the park its name and its listing as the Calhan Paint Mines Archeological District. It is free.
Before you go
Stay on the trail, genuinely. The formations are soft clay and the damage from people climbing them does not repair; it is cumulative and it is visible.
There is no shade anywhere in the park and it is out on open plains, so it is hot and exposed in summer and the colour is far better early or late anyway. Four miles of trail, toilets on site, dawn to dusk, no fee. It is about a 45 minute drive east of the city and is a trip in itself rather than something to fold into a morning.