Blog

For our next trip after the Big Bend Trip, we started out for Southeastern Utah/Western Colorado for a month. This post is focusing on our visits to Fort Larned NHS, in Larned, KS, Bent's Old Fort NHS, in La Junta, CO, and Montrose, CO

Fort Larned NHS, Larned, KS:

At Fort Larned NHS, we got to visit for about 45 minutes before the park closed and it was wonderful. The park is one of the best preserved western forts that we have been to (and we have been to 10+). The amazing things about it are that it hasn't really changed other than it being much quieter (unusual, because quite a few are right next to an interstate or a city surrounds it) and also unfortunately, a ton of past visitors have carved their names out into the sandstone walls (before it was bought by the NPS), but even that is still cool because most of them left the year on and I found one that was carved in 1895!

Bent's Old Fort NHS, La Junta, CO:

The next day after we went to Fort Larned NHS, we went to Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site for about an hour and a half. The fort was built by William Bent in 1833 as a trading post along the Santa Fe Trail which by that point had been open for approximately 11 years and was getting hundreds of fur traders, trappers, and quite a few other people from the East Coast going to Santa Fe, New Mexico (at the time, Mexico, and later the Republic of Texas). The name implies that it is a fort, but actually, it never was, it only was used as a trading post.

This "fort" actually was right on the border of Mexico, when it was built (if you can see the trees in the photo at the top of the post, then you would be looking at what was Mexico at the time!). The "fort" was made out of adobe and had to be upkept with a whole team of workers, whose sole job was repairing the adobe all day, 7 days a week! In 1849, the fort burnt down and it is believed that the owner and builder of the fort, William Bent was the one who burnt it down after the US Army tried to make it a military fort.

A few years later, Bent ended up building a new trading post which was know as Bent's New Fort which was about 15 miles away from the site of Bent's Old Fort. Around 1960 the NPS reconstructed the fort with at the exact same site based off of drawings made by travellers though the fort, with one major difference, instead of adobe, they used concrete, which they made look like adobe. Now if I were to guess, about 99% of the "fort" is now a replica that is very precise to the point that the only things that aren't correct for details is the visitor center, the gift shop, the alarm system, and the park headquarters.

Montrose, CO:

After La Junta, we went to Montrose, CO where we went on two bike rides, the first being eight miles and the second, being six miles of the first ride. These photos were taken on the second ride, but had both rides had the same views due to both rides being on the same trail. These bike rides were at Buzzard Gulch. Buzzard Gulch was super cool, because you started off in one spot, where it is just a wasteland-like feel and then you get up to to be in a desert tree-like environment with the mountains in the background (see photo)