Colorado Springs is a far bigger town than Flagstaff - the only really notable thing about Flagstaff was it was the northern Arizona gateway to the Grand Canyon. Colorado Springs has some industry, including one really interesting one that due to Covid was useless - the home of the US Olympic Committee and training grounds. Pre pandemic there used to be a tour but for now those aren't given as they use the pandemic to also do some new construction.
But there are a lot of similarities in the energy in both places. Both cities quickly go from downtown (Colorado Springs's downtown being a bit more expansive) to rural trees and green very quickly. Both places we were going out on Sunday and Monday nights, where the only other people at its watering holes were locals and a few transient tourists. Colorado Springs didn't have the nice beer bar that Flagstaff did, but in its place had a couiple excellent cocktail spots, one being Japanese themed (including with Japanese food, though we didn't partake) and one more of a speakeasy style.
The food in Colorado Springs is good, similar to Flagstaff with a few more notable restaurants and a lot of solid options below. We had trouble finding places with space on Sunday Night, finally settling on The Wobbly Olive, which was a perfectly fine restaurant with a very wide ranging menu - the food was good, the location was sleepy, with it being in a strip mall on one end of town.
The lunch's were better. The first lunch was our entry into the town - at a spot called Four by Brother Luck, the chef being Brother Luck who was on Top Chef in a fairly recent season. I think I've eaten at only a couple restaurants run or opened by Top Chef contestants that I've seen, and this one was good - but good enough we coudln't get dinner reservations. The lunch menu is pared back but even then the couple items I got hinted at a place that wouild be great for dinner. The rabbit confit green chili was fanstastic (and is a dish I definitely want to try to recreate) and the grilled striped bass over couscous was great. That was a good start in Colorado Springs.
Lunch on our second day was one of the more unexpected joys of the trip - the place was called Shuga's a bar/restaurant that had a lovely hipster-ish decor. As it isn't New York, I'm more ok with places leaning into the hipster view - but the food (and to be fair, the patrons) were not. They had a truly great soup that they called 'Brazilian' but was more like a Thai shrimp soup, but it was amazing. They have some great sandwhiches, with me taking a Cuban pulled pork sandwhich which was great and provided enough sustenance to sustain the hikes. And yes, let's get to the hikes....
There's no Grand Canyon equivalent, but there ais some fantastic scenery within an hours drive of Colorado Springs in every direction, and it perfectly combines both some similarities to Sonoma with red rocks abound, and Salt Lake, with proper forested, mountainious hikes. Now, it probably isn't as strong at either (though the hiking is close), and the forest-fire related haze was still very much there impacting visibility. Monday was better than Sunday, as haunting shadows of mountains became a bit clearer. The setting is beautiful, whether its the far background of the city, to when you start driving into the wilderness.
The first day we did the Garden of the Gods, a sprawling area of red rocks reminiscent of Sedona but at a smaller, less toursity scale. The park gets crowded and it was about a 10 minute wait in their all too small parking lot hopiung for someone to leave at the right time. When that eventually happened we're met with great big, slender, beautiful rock formations right at the start, and throughout the entire walk the views mixed between similar rock formations, some with nice little names like 'The Twins' and 'Kissing Camels' etc. There were also parts with clear eyelines aroudn the expanse of The Garden of the Gods park, and the peaks behind it (still somewhat shrouded).
The next day was our main hike, called the Crags Trail, which is on one side of Pikes Peak - the main mountain that calls Colorado Springs it's home. Pikes Peak itself is a 14,000 foot mountain that you can drive up, but that gets really backed up and the somewhat limited lack of visibility we chose not to do that and focus on the Crag trail. The trail was long (5 miles roundtrip), and tough given its starts at about a 10,000 ft elevation adn goes up to about 11,000 at the top. The trail starts out quite foresty but then goes through open fields, with good sightlinbes, to a rocky peak at the top. It's well worth it, and as the haze probably limits what you would see at the top of Pikes Peak, was a great outcome for our main hike.
We did enjoy a bit else of what makes Colorado Springs fun: the beer. We went to three craft breweries, picking the three we did off of location mostly. They were all excellent. Goat Patch was the first, which has a lovely indoor/outdoor setting. Fossil Craft was technically outside of the city but on our way back from Pikes Peak, and was more homey - the type of place where the bartender knew every customer. The final one was my favorite, called Mash Mechanix Brewing, which ahd great beer, a $1 popcorn machine, a really nice layout and a great music playlist of old hard rock and heavy metal. It was a really nice setting before our last meal.
Overall, Colorado Springs was a perfect nice little town. Though I really shouldn't call it a town, it is a city of about 700,000 people in the metro area, putting it just a bit smaller than Denver. It's very drivable but also sprawling. It is very well set up for tourists and the sites were more than worth the trip out here.
