Prepare your eyes for the visual feast of the Colorado South Central Region. It offers up a smorgasbord of pointed peaks, deep canyons, and dazzling wildflowers. Sunlight streams down warm and pure, draping aspens in gold and throwing sharp shadows across the mountainscape. Thunderheads twice the size of a 14er unleash furious lightning-and-hail assaults.

In this unpredictable terrain, the scenery undergoes kaleidoscopic changes. One moment, an unremarkable brown plain, a moment later, a silver lake. Then a hillside covered in thick stand of aspen or pine and finally a line of snow capped mountains stretching across the horizon. The ranges are never ending and constantly comes into view.

Against these towering, formidable backdrops, hardy towns nestle in wooded valleys. Leadville, the highest city in America, is so far up it seems to rest on a cloud.

The Collegiate Peaks cluster around Buena Vista, and the Sangre de Cristos soar over the sweeping Great Sand Dunes. Colorado Springs offers a touch of urban class beneath the eminent heights of Pikes Peak.

In the San Luis Valley the land lies flat, as if to rest from the rolls and headstands it performs elsewhere. Here farmers raise crops in the rich soil, and glistening streams snake through marshy meadows. At Royal Gorge the earth slips even lower, nosediving a thousand feet to the Arkansas River. Rafters, kayakers, and fishermen ply their skills here and on dozens of other pristine lakes and streams.