Paint Mines Interpretive Park near Calhan, Colorado, about 35 miles east of Colorado Springs 

Paint mines are a rarity on the Colorado Plains, badlands where Native American sourced their colorful ink. Here near Calhan, Paint Mines Interpretive Park offers  the psychedelic hues of pink and purple alongside white and gold amid the otherwise featureless sea of grassland.

Denver to Durango, www.coloradotrail.org

By paved road, the route from Denver to Durango is 336 miles—you can make it there in six or seven hours. But if you’ve got more time (a lot more time), take the Colorado Trail, which runs about 480 miles between the two cities. By foot, the trip usually takes more than a month, although one especially energetic fellow zipped over it in just two weeks, sustaining himself on a diet of vegetable oil and multivitamins. The trail starts at Waterton Canyon southwest of Denver at about 6,000 feet above sea level and ends near Durango at and elevation of about 7,000 feet, but it climbs a mind-boggling 77,690 feet (and drops 76,210 feet) in the process.

But don’t feel compelled to undertake the entire journey (I haven’t). There are a number of access points near mountain towns that allow for great day hikes on the trail. And if you are feeling like a week of hard but rewarding labor in the backcountry, you can sign up for a volunteer trail crew and help reverse the ravages of snowmelt. Some volunteers sign up for multiple crews, which is one of the cheapest ways to sustain yourself in the Rockies for a summer: One $60 fee covers all of your meals for every day you volunteer, all summer long.

Aspen and vicinity, 970/927-9239, www.ultimatetaxi.com

One of the few appropriate uses of the world ‘ultimate,’ Jon Barnes’ Ultimate Taxi is a 1978 Checker cab done up in, um, ultimate style. For your listening pleasure, the taxi also an incredible sound system and Jon plays a synthesizer and a crazy computerized woodwind en route to your destination. For the passengers’ visual pleasure, there are miles of fiber-optic filaments, laser-lights, and complimentary 3-D glasses. For good measure, the taxi has a roller coaster simulator on the dash that can induce motion sickness among drunks at a mere 5 miles per hour, and it also has webcams that immortalize its buzzed riders online. (The best of the site’s archives might jest be a video of Hunter S. Thompson in 1990, philosophically waxing, “Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.”) The fare isn’t cheap—$200—but Barnes is the best person to call for a lift if you don’t have a destination in mind and are in no hurry to get there.

4199 Trough Rd., near the headwaters of the Colorado River, Bond, 970/653-4431, www.ranchodelrio.com

One of the last of a breed of ramshackle rafting communities, Rancho Del Rio is a river rat’s paradise, a place where you can paddle all day and party all night, then sleep in your car in the parking lot. A half-dozen operations offer guided rafting trips, and the Colorado River Center offers guided kayaking excursions as well as rentals of all kinds. Shuttles are available to pick you up and carry you and your craft back to Rancho, where you can meditate over your amazing day on the river over a cold beer and a burger at K.K.’s BBQ, aptly known as "The Center of the Universe."

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.