Colorado What To Do›Fun Things To Do
Not the polite list. Sandboarding 750-foot dunes, a castle one man has been building since 1969, the highest paved road on the continent, and the darkest skies in the lower 48.
What is fun to do in Colorado?
For a first trip, aim for the experiences that feel unlike anywhere else: riding a board down 750-foot dunes in the San Luis Valley, a warm soak at Glenwood or Strawberry Park, a guided raft trip through Browns Canyon on the Arkansas, the drive up Mount Blue Sky (North America's highest paved road) and a night under one of the state's 13 certified International Dark Sky Parks.
"Fun" is a different question from "impressive." Plenty of Colorado is impressive. Less of it is the thing you will still be talking about on the flight home.
So this page filters for the second thing. Everything here either gets your heart rate up, gets you somewhere you cannot get anywhere else, or is simply so odd that it becomes the story.
The fun finder
Filter by region, cost or the kind of day you want. Everything stays on the page.
Showing all 28
Estes Park & Grand Lake · High Country
The fun part is how fast it changes: pine valley at breakfast, wind-blasted tundra by lunch, and bugling elk on the drive out. Pick one alpine lake hike and earn the view.
Most of the season needs a timed entry booking, so lock that in before planning the rest of the day.
Colorado Springs · Front Range
Scramble-friendly red rock fins with Pikes Peak framed behind them. Walk the paved loop, then watch climbers working the walls overhead.
Early mornings are the most fun here: soft light on the rock and empty paths.
Mosca · San Luis Valley
Running full speed down a dune face that keeps going is one of the purest joys in the state. Climb toward the high ridges and the Sangre de Cristos fill the horizon.
The surface gets dangerously hot on summer afternoons, so play at sunrise or sunset.
Cortez · Western Slope
Climbing ladders into a cliff dwelling with a ranger is an experience you will be retelling for years. The mesa-top drive adds overlook after overlook of villages tucked under cliffs.
Tour tickets for the famous alcoves sell out fast; book the day they open.
Montrose · Western Slope
Peer over a railing into a slot so deep and dark that the river below looks like a thread. The overlooks are short walks, and each one is more unnerving than the last.
Morrison · Front Range
Seeing a show between the sandstone walls is a bucket-list night, and on off days you can climb the seating rows yourself for a sunrise workout with a skyline view.
Great Sand Dunes · San Luis Valley
Waxed board, steep face, long slide: sandboarding is skateboarding's sunnier cousin. Pick up gear in Alamosa or near the park and expect sand in places you did not know you had.
Denver · Front Range
Walk through a door and into another world, then another. Crawl, climb and press every button; the sci-fi storyline is optional, the fun is not. Give it a long afternoon.
Colorado Springs · Front Range
Reaching 14,115 feet by train, by car or on foot is a genuine thrill, and the summit view moved Katharine Lee Bates to write 'America the Beautiful' after her 1893 visit.
Rocky Mountain NP · High Country
A road trip that spends miles above the trees at more than 12,000 feet, with pullouts where marmots and pikas watch you back. Bring a jacket even in July.
Snow usually shuts it from late October to late May.
Idaho Springs · High Country
Drive from Idaho Springs to the clouds, passing mountain goats and bighorn sheep on the way to a summit parking lot above 14,000 feet.
Reservations are required in season; Denver Mountain Parks now handles them.
Durango, Silverton, Ouray · Western Slope
The best day of driving in Colorado: four passes, mining towns at every turn and the cliff-hugging Million Dollar Highway in the middle of it.
Aspen · High Country
The postcard view in person. Sunrise on the twin peaks over Maroon Lake, with aspens glowing in fall, is worth the alarm clock.
In season you need a shuttle seat or parking reservation to get there.
Glenwood Canyon · Western Slope
A steep, short climb to a lake that looks unreal: turquoise water held by travertine ledges, with a waterfall spilling in. Bring the camera, not the dog.
A permit is needed every day of the year, and the trailhead is reached from eastbound I-70 only.
Glenwood Springs · Western Slope
Float in a huge warm pool beside the Colorado River while snow falls on the canyon walls. It is the rainy-day rescue plan that ends up being the highlight.
Steamboat Springs · High Country
Steaming rock pools in a forest outside Steamboat, at their most magical on a snowy evening. Getting there in winter is part of the adventure.
Salida & Buena Vista · High Country
Splash through Browns Canyon with a guide, or go big in the harder rapids. Few Colorado days end with more laughing than a raft trip.
In low-snow years the big-water season is short; ask your outfitter about current flows.
Vail, Aspen, Breckenridge, Steamboat · High Country
Powder days, bluebird skies and après in a mountain town: Colorado skiing is why many visitors come back every winter.
National forests statewide · High Country
Strap on snowshoes and glide into a silent, snow-heavy forest. It costs little, you can learn in minutes, and you will often have the trail to yourself.
Estes Park · High Country
Hearing a bull elk bugle across a misty meadow at dawn is one of the eeriest, most thrilling sounds in the Rockies. Stay by the car and let the show come to you.
Cañon City · Front Range
Walk a plank-decked bridge with nearly a thousand feet of air beneath your shoes, then ride the gondola or zip line if your nerves allow.
Rye · Front Range
Climb a stone tower one man built by hand, cross wobbly iron walkways and look for the dragon's head. Wonderfully strange and entirely free.
Durango · Western Slope
Ride behind a smoking steam locomotive along a canyon ledge above the Animas River, then wander a mining town before the trip back.
San Luis Valley and statewide · San Luis Valley
Lie back under a sky so dark the Milky Way casts a glow. Colorado's certified dark sky places make backyard astronomy feel like a planetarium show.
Plan around a new moon and give your eyes half an hour to adjust.
La Junta · Eastern Plains
Walk where dinosaurs walked, literally: a canyon floor printed with tracks, far from any crowd. An adventure for people who like a long day out.
There is no shade or water on the way in; spring and fall are the seasons for it.
Calhan · Eastern Plains
Wander a maze of striped clay spires on the open prairie east of Colorado Springs. It feels like a secret, and it mostly is.
Statewide · High Country
Standing on a 14,000-foot summit at sunrise is the Colorado rite of passage. Start with a walk-up like Mount Elbert and an alpine start.
Plan to summit by noon; summer storms build almost every afternoon.
Denver · Front Range
A whole museum of one painter's huge, ragged canvases is a surprising jolt of color on a stormy afternoon in Denver.
Nothing matches those filters. Try clearing one.
The three that always win
Picture a 750-foot wall of sand leaning on the 13,000-foot Sangre de Cristos, with nobody telling you where to go. Pick up a board or sled in Alamosa, slog to the top and let gravity handle the rest.
It is harder than it looks. Climbing loose sand at 8,000 feet is genuinely tiring, and there is no shade anywhere. But it is the single most unusual thing you can do in this state, and it works equally well for adults and children.
Take the heat seriously: on summer afternoons the sand can top 150°F. Mornings and evenings are both cooler and better light, and shoes are not optional.
From Idaho Springs, Mount Blue Sky Scenic Byway gains over 7,000 feet in 28 miles and finishes just under a 14,000-foot summit. Up there, seeing mountain goats and bighorn sheep is the expectation, not a stroke of luck.
After close to two years of work on the upper road, it opened again for Memorial Day weekend 2026. You need a timed reservation, and Denver Mountain Parks, not the Forest Service, now runs the booking and collects the fee. Plenty of older guides still say otherwise.
The road is narrow, has minimal guardrail, and vehicles over 30 feet are not permitted. It is not technically difficult. It is psychologically memorable.
There are two ways to do it. The noisy way is a raft on the Arkansas, America's most-rafted river, where trips range from easy family floats to Class IV rapids in Browns Canyon.
The calm way is a hot spring. Glenwood's giant pool sits right beside I-70, and Strawberry Park near Steamboat is a set of stone terraces in a creek canyon. Soaking in 104-degree water while snow lands in your hair may be the single best part of a Colorado winter.
In a low-snow year like 2026, the big-water rafting window compresses. Ask the outfitter what the gauge is reading rather than what the brochure says.
The genuinely weird
Every state has scenery. Colorado has a surprising amount of eccentricity, and almost all of it is free.
Jim Bishop started stacking stone in 1969 and, more or less, kept going for the rest of his life. The result has towers, iron walkways and a metal dragon that breathes fire. Nobody charges you to climb it, and nothing about the railings meets a modern safety code. It is pure obstinacy turned into architecture, and it is a blast.
Out on the eastern plains, a remote canyon floor holds North America's biggest set of dinosaur tracks, hundreds of them. Getting there is long, hot and dry, which is precisely why you will probably have it to yourself. Save it for spring or fall.
Striped clay spires and hoodoos that could pass for a corner of southern Utah, set down in the grassland east of Colorado Springs. No fee, a short drive from the city, and reliably quiet.
Not somewhere to go, but the best fact to bring. Colorado's boundary has 697 sides rather than four, because nineteenth-century surveyors with compasses and chains made hundreds of small errors and the Supreme Court ruled in 1925 that the mistakes were the legal border. The Four Corners Monument sits roughly 1,800 feet from the mathematically correct point, and courts have consistently ruled the marker wins.
Timing
High passes are still gated and mountain trails are mud. However, the Western Slope is at its best — Colorado National Monument, Mesa Verde and the desert canyons are perfect before summer heat. Rafting season begins as runoff picks up, and mountain-town lodging bottoms out between ski season and summer.
Everything is open and everyone is here. Trail Ridge Road, the high passes, the alpine lakes, the fourteeners. Afternoon thunderstorms build almost daily from mid-July, so summit early and be below treeline by two.
If you can only pick one month, pick September. The weather settles, crowds drop once school is back, elk are bugling around Estes Park and the aspens start turning by mid-month. Color follows elevation, not the calendar: the high passes go gold first and the foothills last.
Skiing, obviously. But the underrated version is hot springs, snowshoeing and empty desert. Shelf Road near Cañon City has rock climbing in January. Colorado National Monument under snow is close to deserted.
The constraint is driving. Westbound I-70 on a Friday and eastbound on a Sunday are genuinely brutal during ski season, and CDOT activates traction and chain restrictions during storms. Check road conditions or dial 511 before you leave.
Denver has Colorado's only two-Michelin-star restaurant and eight Bib Gourmands. Best Restaurant Denver puts every recognised room in one searchable directory — with addresses and neighborhoods.
Common questions
For a first trip, aim for the experiences that feel unlike anywhere else: riding a board down 750-foot dunes in the San Luis Valley, a warm soak at Glenwood or Strawberry Park, a guided raft trip through Browns Canyon on the Arkansas, the drive up Mount Blue Sky (North America's highest paved road) and a night under one of the state's 13 certified International Dark Sky Parks.
Ask around and sandboarding at Great Sand Dunes usually wins. Grab a board or sled in Alamosa, hike up North America's tallest dunes and ride back down. It is hard work, nothing else in Colorado feels like it, and adults enjoy it as much as kids. Avoid the midday heat in summer.
Yes, and it is the season when almost everything is open — Trail Ridge Road, the high passes, the rivers and the fourteeners. The catch is afternoon thunderstorms, which become near-daily from mid-July into early September. The rule is to be off any summit by noon and below treeline by two. Mornings are reliably clear.
A great deal. Rafting, hot springs, sandboarding, scenic driving on 26 designated byways, stargazing, mountain biking, hot air ballooning, and four national parks. Denver alone has immersive art at Meow Wolf, dinosaur footprints at Dinosaur Ridge twenty minutes away, and a museum holding roughly 95% of one major painter's entire life output.
Plenty. Glenwood Hot Springs, beside I-70, is among the biggest geothermal pools in the world. Strawberry Park near Steamboat Springs offers stone-terraced natural pools in a creek canyon, though in winter the access road often calls for four-wheel drive or a shuttle. Ouray and Pagosa Springs also have major developed springs.
Start with Bishop Castle near Rye, a stone fortress one man began by hand in 1969 and kept adding to, complete with towers, iron walkways and a fire-breathing metal dragon; entry is free and the railings are not what you would call modern. Then there is Picketwire Canyonlands, home to North America's largest dinosaur trackway, and the Paint Mines near Calhan, whose striped hoodoos look lifted from Utah.
Yes. Mount Blue Sky Scenic Byway, North America's highest paved road, gains more than 7,000 feet over 28 miles. It opened again for Memorial Day weekend 2026 after almost two years of construction, and a timed reservation, handled by Denver Mountain Parks, is required. Pikes Peak is another option, with both a highway and a cog railway to the top.
With 13 International Dark Sky Parks, eight Dark Sky Communities and more than 30 further sites working toward certification, Colorado leads the world in the program. Around Great Sand Dunes, the San Luis Valley has some of the darkest skies in the lower 48. Time your trip for a new moon and let your eyes adjust for half an hour.
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