Within the city limits of Colorado Springs there is a park called “Garden of the Gods”. It’s a very unique area containing vertical rocks sticking up out of the ground. Most are quite red but a couple are gray.

The park is owned by the city and admittance is free! The only cost is to watch a 15 minute movie that goes back 1 billion years to tell the story of how the area and the rocks were created.

The short story is that the rocks were originally horizontal bands of soil at the bottom of a shallow ocean that were very compressed over long periods of time. Then, when the sublimation that formed the Rockies occurred, the horizontal bands were pushed into vertical bands, and the harder bands have not eroded like the other bands did.

There are several hiking trails that go around the rock formations. We hike a 1-mile trail going to a formation called the “Siamese Twins” because there are two towers standing together and joined.

There’s also a very unique dinosaur fossil that was discovered in one of the rocks. It’s the only one of it’s kind in the world! It resides in a museum in the east, but there’s a cast of it at the park and a recreation of what the dinosaur might have looked like.

All in all, a very interesting and informative park! Here are some pictures: