In the old days, ice climbing meant trespassing on mining company land to scale frozen waterfalls. Now ice climbers have a free ice park and their very own festival in the southwest Colorado town of Ouray.

Exploring Colorado by snowshoe is easy – just strap them on and start walking.

The Devil's Backbone may look - and sound - intimidating, but this unusual stretch of craggy rock offers Coloradans a heavenly time on the outskirts of Loveland.

Located south of Grand Junction and running southwest from Whitewater, the glorious Unaweep-Tabegauche Scenic and Historic Byway sweeps through unfathomably deep canyons and climbs skyscraper plateaus, taking us on a winding journey through an ancient and historied land.

By the time Charles Driesel left the golden wheat fields of Red Rock, Okla., in 1929 and traveled west into Colorado, the fluctuating flow of the Arkansas River had been slowly carving a canyon into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains for over 5 million years.

Colorado has more than 50 mountain peaks above 14,000 feet. These 14 are the most loved, appreciated, revered and feared.

“Like a sea in storm,” exclaimed Zebulon Pike Jr. in 1807 when he first witnessed the immense Great Sand Dunes nestled in a dogleg crook of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. From high above, in the toothed cirque of peaks surrounding the Crestone Needle, the dunes indeed appear as an unruly brown sea.