Eastern Colorado is part of what early explorers called "The Great American Desert". It's actually a rolling part of the Great Plains but mostly dry enough to pass as a desert to those from greener locations. Then it became part of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Nowadays the farming that takes place is highly mechanized and several of Colorado’s eastern plains counties have populations only a fraction the size of what they were before the 1930s. That creates a rather scenic almost empty environment with some photogenic abandoned farmsteads and small settlements through the region.

I’ve passed through eastern Colorado many times on my way to somewhere else, usually the East Coast or towards Texas so it’s not new to me . I decided to break up the monotony of the drive this time with a stop at Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, an adobe fort established in 1833 as a trading post with the Indians. The fort was only in use for 16 years before it was abandoned but was the only settlement on the Santa Fe Trail during that time. The area around it is so empty that it isn’t hard to imagine what it might have been like in the era when the occasional wagon train passed by, the Plains Indian tribes were still pursuing buffalo for food on horseback, and the U.S. Army was just beginning to appear on the frontier.

I stopped at Bent’s Fort once before in Autumn 1993 with my grad school friend and roommate John. He decided on a whim he wanted to take a ride somewhere for a day, and a long ride it was from Boulder just to see Bent’s Old Fort.