Famous for its high-flying ski havens and Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado has a lot to offer tourists.
But those looking for a hidden gem unspoiled by crowds should look no further than the Pawnee Buttes, a pair of 300-foot tall rock formations in the grassy plains of northern Colorado.
The striking buttes are named after the Pawnee, one of four Native American tribes that hunted bison in the area as far back as 12,000 years ago.
American homesteaders would later settle here during the 19th century, leaving behind the ghost town of Keota.
The town – now little more than a handful of rotting structures and a water tower – is a 22-minute car ride from the buttes, making it a worthy stop on a visit to the Pawnee National Grassland.
The Pawnee Buttes on Thursday, October 10, 2024. The 300-foot tall rock formations are located in the northeast corner of Weld County, Colorado, approximately 13 miles south of the Wyoming border
The ghost town of Keota, once home to American homesteaders, is about a 20-minute car ride from the buttes
In the historical novel ‘Centennial,’ which catalogues the beauties of northern Colorado, best-selling author James Michener said it likely took 200,000 years for the buttes to form.
‘They were extraordinary, these two sentinels of the plains,’ he wrote in the 1974 book. ‘Visible for miles in each direction, they guarded a bleak and silent empire.’
Michener also offered breathtaking descriptions of the formations – which he called by the fictional name ‘Rattlesnake Buttes.’
‘From the buttes at sunrise a man would be able to look east and see a hundred miles to unbroken horizons, stark meadow after meadow reaching beyond the human imagination,’ he wrote. ‘The colors were superb, but the uninitiated could look at them and not see them, for they were soft grays and delicate browns and azure purples.’
Today, the majesty of the buttes remains just as evident.
A person gazes out at the Pawnee Buttes, which are made of crumbling sandstone
One of the buttes is seen just before sunset
A map shows where the Pawnee Butts are are located in Colorado, about a 115-mile drive from Denver
Visitors can take in a scenic view of them from the Pawnee Buttes trailhead. Or they can hike approximately two miles up a nearby escarpment to get an even better look.
The Pawnee National Grassland, administered by the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests, is best to visit during the fall and spring to avoid crippling heat. Temperatures during the summer can top 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
As recently as 100 years ago, the prairie wasn’t so grassy thanks to a series of catastrophic dust storms that wreaked havoc on the agricultural potential of much of the Midwest.
This era came to be known as the Dust Bowl, and it coincided with Great Depression of the 1930s. This meant fleeing farmers fared hardly any better in the cities of California and other western states.
Dust Bowl storms were precisely why Keota is now a ghost town.
Pictured: A house in Keota that’s in stunningly good condition, complete with a relic of a fire hydrant
The striking buttes are named after the Pawnee, one of four Native American tribes that hunted bison in the area as far back as 12,000 years ago
Once, it was thriving place for homesteaders, settlers who were entitled to a 160-acre parcel of government land under the 1862 Homestead Act.
Among the stipulations required to get the land: building a home and farming on it.
The law, passed while Abraham Lincoln was president, has been credited with pushing Americans further westward.
Keota, though never reaching a population over 150 people, was a crucial town for the 1,250 homesteads in the area.
It also was situated on a rail line that ran between Sterling, Colorado, and Cheyenne, the capital city of Wyoming, allowing farmers to travel outside of the area.
There were plenty of businesses in Keota, according to Vernon Koehler, who has worked at the grasslands for 15 years as a program manager for mineral and lands.
The sun rises on the Pawnee Buttes
‘There were automobile dealerships, book stores, dry grocers, butchers, bakers,’ he told The Denver Post.
‘Across the prairie there were all these people who homesteaded. About a mile out in every direction, there would have been a house,’ Koehler continued. ‘You had thousands of people who were trying to make a go of it on their farms.
‘There would have been trains daily, or nearly daily, going between Sterling and Cheyenne. Along that route, they were little town sites sprinkled along it about every 10 to 15 miles.’
One of those would have included Sligo, another abandoned community 10 miles north of Keota.
All that’s left of the town is a graveyard, where headstones still remain.
‘If you wander around and look at the dates, you realize the very first people buried here were children who died in the Spanish flu pandemic’ from 1918 to 1920, Koehler told the Post. ‘They were a year or two old.’
Sligo Cemetery in northern Colorado. Many of the gravesites were for children who likely died from the Spanish flu in the early 1900s
Gravestones sparsely populate the cemetery
The US Forest Service instructs hikers not to disturb hawks, eagles and falcons from March 1 to June 30, the time they are nesting in the cliffs.
Those who have a penchant for thrill-seeking are advised not to climb the Pawnee Buttes, since they are made of crumbling sandstone.
The grassland is also perfect for bird-watchers, who can take advantage of a self-guided birding tour.
‘The best time to visit is in May and June, when migrants (birds) are passing through and resident breeders are arriving on their nesting grounds,’ according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
‘In late spring, the birds are bustling at the height of nesting season and the grasslands are in full bloom. With as many as 301 species of birds using these windswept plains, the Pawnee is a bird-watcher’s paradise.’
But most of all, the grasslands are a quiet place to contemplate history, while getting a glimpse of the environment past generations made their lives in.
‘Ideally we want folks to come out here and have a similar sense of stepping into a church in Paris that was built in 1100,’ Koehler said. ‘There have been humans out here doing things just as long. They just didn’t leave that sort of physical monument.’