Colorado Towns

Ramblin’ through the small towns of Colorado, I am, of course, captured first by the extraordinary beauty of nature: the colorful aspens, the vast sky and the rhythm of rivers carving through the landscape. But what holds me the longest is not the landscape itself, but the traces of people who came before and the moments when I can walk in the footsteps of a town’s history, to touch what a community chose to remember and elevate. In places like Lyons and Hygiene, history doesn’t shout, it whispers.

In Lyons, that history is built from stone: the same red sandstone that glows at sunset and shaped the town’s destiny. Once a booming quarry town, Lyons still wears its origins proudly. Along Main Street, the sturdy 19th-century buildings stand shoulder to shoulder, their hand-cut stone blocks a testament to craftsmanship and endurance

I had to stop by the Old Lyons Saloon with its brick facade. This place has seen generations gather workers from the quarries and travelers from the mountains. 

Just a short ride down the road, past the rolling river at Black Bear Hole, the landscape opens into farmland. There sits the small hamlet of Hygiene, a name and place born from hope. This town grew from a 19th century tuberculosis sanitarium, when people came to these high plains seeking healing in the pure air. There is no longer a trace of the sanitarium, but its legacy lives on in the town’s name.

At the center of Hygiene stands the Hygiene United Methodist Church, built in the early 1900s from the deep red sandstone quarried in nearby Lyons. Its sturdy brick-red walls and soft yellow stained-glass windows glow warmly in the afternoon sun.

What makes Lyons and Hygiene special is not grandeur. They are the quiet places that have held onto their identity through time and change. In a world where the most famous sites grow crowded with cameras and lines, I find myself content to walk where others may not have discovered yet. To linger in towns that still breathe slowly, where the stories live in the very walls and pathways of everyday life.

Thanks for ramblin with me!