Highway 24 runs up the Arkansas Valley with the Sawatch Range standing shoulder to shoulder on the west side: fourteen of Colorado's highest peaks in one unbroken line. Strung along the road are three towns that share a river and not much else.
Salida
The southernmost and the warmest, in both senses. An old rail town turned river town, with a walkable core of galleries and bakeries and a surf wave in the middle of downtown. This is where our first Colorado cabin sits, in the pines just outside town.
Buena Vista
Twenty-five minutes north and a notch quieter. K's Burgers after a river day is a local sacrament. The Collegiate Peaks fill the western sky, and the hot springs south of town are the correct way to end a day that started at a trailhead.
Leadville
At ten thousand feet, the highest incorporated city in North America and proud of every foot. Victorian storefronts, mining museums, and morning air that tells you clearly you are not at sea level anymore. Acclimatize here before a Sawatch summit and the mountain will feel a size smaller.
Getting there
From Denver it is about two and a half hours to Buena Vista, up US 285 over Kenosha Pass and into South Park, where the Sawatch appears all at once on the horizon. Salida is another half hour south and Leadville forty minutes north, so the three towns string into an easy loop.
Drive it south to north: coffee in Salida, an afternoon on the river in Buena Vista, and Leadville for the last night, so your body meets the altitude on a gradient. Come home over Fremont Pass to I-70 and the loop closes in a weekend.
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