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.
With overfarming and drought turning the once-fertile plains into desert, the federal government bought back large tracts, aiming to restore an ecosystem whose native grasses and succulents had evolved over eons to cope with long dry spells and the incessant, driving winds. In 1960, the federal government handed the land over to the U.S. Forest Service, and Comanche was born.
Comanche is part of a system of national grasslands comprising about four million acres in 12 states, including California, the Dakotas and Texas, all run by the U.S.F.S., which is part of the Department of Agriculture.
Not every landowner chose to sell to the government, so Comanche today looks like a checkerboard of public and private land, with two separate public areas, the Timpas Unit, near the town of La Junta, and the larger Carrizo Unit, near Springfield, not far from the borders of New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas. I spent five days in May crisscrossing southeastern Colorado, determined to see as much of both units as I possibly could.
Comanche, named for a Native American people who once lived in the area, offers visitors far more than solitude and lessons in Depression-era history. The grassland also features one of the largest known dinosaur track sites in North America; Indigenous pictographs and petroglyphs made anywhere between 4,500 and 400 years ago; the remnants of Spanish missions dating to the late 1800s; wagon ruts from the Santa Fe Trail; and more than 300 species of birds, including peregrine falcons and tropical-looking painted buntings. Tarantulas, slightly creepier denizens of the native prairies, migrate every fall, drawing arachnophiles to La Junta’s annual Tarantula Fest.
On my visit, just after the spring rains, the grass glowed green and the cactuses flaunted dazzling fuchsia blooms.
Painted Rocks and Puzzling Paths
After about 20 minutes of watching and waiting for more pronghorns, I gave up and resumed my drive to Carrizo Canyon, where I planned to hike and see Native rock art. But when I reached the canyon, I began to reassess my grand hiking plans after I discovered I was the only visitor, which was more than a little disconcerting considering that I had no cellphone service.
I followed a short trail and planted myself atop a sandstone cliff jutting out toward a creek that meandered some 40 feet below, a thread of water flanked by cottonwoods and junipers.
Then I followed another path that promised access to the petroglyphs on the other side of the canyon, only to find it overgrown to the point of being impassable. I contemplated trying to push through but worried that it might prove too easy to get lost, and who knew when the next visitor would arrive to help me?
I hurried back to my hotel in the town of Lamar, about 90 miles north.
Though my solo hike had been a bust, the photographer Nina Riggio and I drove out together early on a misty morning, two days after my trip to Carrizo Canyon, to check out the rock art at Picture Canyon, also part of the Carrizo Unit. There, we found the trails passable but poorly marked — we puzzled over fallen signs, twirling them around and trying to figure out where the arrows once pointed. We ended up amid hive-shaped formations that reminded me of an ancient, abandoned city. Nina, an advanced hiker who did the Colorado Trail solo, guessed them to be petrified sand dunes.
Following a loop that didn’t seem to be looping, we began to wonder about those signs. So we felt a sense of relief when we began to see familiar sights. There was the wall of rock where we’d admired pictographs and petroglyphs and I’d watched a giant bird of prey hovering overhead, as though suspended from a string. There was Crack Cave — a small crevice in a sandstone cliff that we’d scrambled into to see the Native American etchings that most archaeologists believe to be astronomical markings or records of the passage of time.
And there, visible in the distance, thank God, was the parking lot.
Counting Dinosaur Toes
If Comanche has a star attraction, it’s probably the Picket Wire Canyonlands, part of the slightly more developed Timpas Unit. Picket Wire offers rock art, the state’s largest herd of bighorn sheep and a set of fossilized dinosaur tracks. On a previous visit, in 2023, I made the 11.2-mile round-trip hike to the dinosaur tracks via well-marked trails. This time around, Nina and I joined the auto tour — adding my rented Jeep to a caravan of about 25 tourists, mostly from Colorado. The dinosaur tracks, the rangers told me, are the biggest draw for visitors of all ages.
The scent of juniper filled the air as we headed toward the canyon, approximately 250 feet deep, on dirt roads. We passed cholla cactus — which, from the corner of my eye, I mistook for people — along with carpets of black-eyed Susans, clumps of white wildflowers that reminded me of snowdrifts, and clusters of Indian paintbrush that looked like tiny flames.
Inside the canyon, we stopped at a spot known as the Picture Window, where a rock formation offered a frame for the vista of 100-million-year-old Dakota sandstone with multicolored stripes and white shale striations, accented with deep green pinyon pines and junipers.
At the bottom of the canyon, we parked our vehicles, had lunch, and then forged the Purgatoire River, the source of the name Picket Wire, on foot, using broken branches as walking sticks. Centuries ago, one legend goes, a group of Spanish treasure hunters died in the river without receiving a proper burial, trapping them in purgatory. French explorers later adopted the name Purgatoire, which American settlers misheard or misunderstood as Picket Wire.
On the other side of the Purgatoire, we reached the dinosaur tracks, which were filled with caked mud, an unfortunate effect of the recent rains. During my 2023 visit, I could count the three toes left by the carnivorous allosaurus, and the huge depressions left by the brontosaurus made it easy to imagine the animal lumbering through the area some 150 million years ago.
All those layers of overlapping history were compressed like the layered stone in this wild place: dinosaurs, Native Americans, treasure hunters, explorers, settlers, and now rangers and us, the visitors.
Alone Yet Together
On my last day in Comanche, I found myself following ruts left from wagons that had traversed this same terrain over a hundred years ago, a blink of the eye out here, under the same big sky that had watched dinosaurs roam the land.
I was following a path simply marked as Prairie Trail near the entrance to Vogel Canyon, just a few miles downriver from Picket Wire. A small set of stairs led up and over a pasture fence, guiding me toward an invisible destination on the horizon. What must it have felt like to be in a wagon heading toward some unknown point in the vastness?
Feeling small in the open prairie, I reflected on what it means to be alone. If anything, the Dust Bowl had taught us that one plot of intact grassland can help protect someone else’s farm. This terrain that seemed so unforgiving was actually a very fragile ecosystem. This place offered the impression of solitude, but so much depended on its connection to everything else.
I walked straight out onto the plain until I could no longer see the dirt road or my rental vehicle parked on the shoulder, keeping one eye out for the pronghorns I knew were out there somewhere.
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