The REAL Colorado...

For most people, “Colorado” is synonymous with “Breckenridge” or “Vail” or “Aspen.” Rugged mountains, frigid air, lots of money. Nobody thinks unending plains, rippling grasslands and emptiness at its best. The “Amber Waves of Grain” belong in Kansas or Oklahoma, not where the skiers go to revel in their controlled descents of controlled mountains.

Most people miss out on the whole eastern side of Colorado, the very lonely parts that, if they were separated from the state and attached to Kansas, nobody would ever know the difference. The Might-As-Well-Be-Kansas half of Colorado.

When you head out toward Nebraska from ft. Collins, you start to feel very lonely. You can see the mountains, to the west, in the distance, if it’s a clear day. And to the east…. An unending shelf of browns and tans, broken only by a wayward windmill at a water trough or a beaten up and falling down water tower marking an old cemetery and an old foundation and the lost souls who have nowhere else to go, an old ghost town. What’s left of the oil hunters and homesteaders and miners, some remnants eerily new and abandoned, rusting not so much with age as with a depressed neglect, new toys left to rot in the sun.

The bustling town of Keota only lost its incorporated status in 1990, and the last real residents left in 1999, though stragglers who haven’t received the memo still haunt the dusty dirt roads near the old grocery store, people who hang on to the homesteader lifestyle. Homes looked to have been newly painted when abandonment took place, as if people left with little notice and little forethought. The newest grave in the cemetery dates to 2007, and the graves are cared for and marked and adorned with dollar store stuffed animals. It looks like people just one day up and left, instead of letting the town wither and die.

Windmill!

Fields of windmills! They completely surround several nuclear missile silos, too!
Courtesy of Jonmikel

Lonely roads in northeastern Colorado... loved how the colors turned out, too

Old-Fashioned Windmill! I think these guys are so much cooler than the big new ones, though probably not nearly as efficient... they're used to pull water up from the ground to fill water troughs for cows, sheep, and horses used to herd cows and sheep.

Lonely Keota Cemetery

Grave in Keota Cemetery

A beehive marking a grave in the Keota Cemetery

Jonmikel wearing clothes that are way too warm for this near-80 day in the cemetery at Keota; the kid couldn't take a hint when he saw I was wearing a tank top...

Someone maintains the graves as well as possible, marking this old one with a tire and a teddy bear... very sad and rather eerie, actually

Plants!

Ah yes, the bustling metropolis of Keota, CO... there's one other building in town, not pictured... yep, that's all of it!
Courtesy of Jonmikel