About 25 miles southwest of La Junta, Colorado, http://prdp2fs.ess.usda.gov/recarea/12434

Like the Rockies to the West, the Picket Wire Canyonlands are the product of the Purgatoire River. (Early settlers who didn’t speak French bastardized purgatoire into “picket wire”—it works especially good in your best redneck accent.) This network of interconnected canyons are a serene area where hikers and mountain bikers seldom bump into one another and the attractions cover both recent history (a century-old graveyard is the final resting place of many Mexican vaqueros who ranched the area) and ancient (a limestone bed alongside the Purgatoire contains the country’s largest dinosaur tracksite, with the astonishingly clear tootsie-prints of brontosauruses galore and many of their long-extinct brethren).

East of Wray, Colorado

Most extreme types like to brag about how many fourteeners they’ve bagged and their forays to the high point in Colorado, Mount Elbert at 14,433 feet above sea level. Whatever. Blah blah blah.

Personally, I’m more impressed by those who have ventured to the lowest point in Colorado—and the highest low point of any state in the country—where the Arikaree River drains into Kansas, about 3,315 feet above sea level.