Favorite Moments From Pagosa Springs

It’s amazing how the best moments in life can happen when you’re least expecting them.

Will has a timeshare that we trade in every year, usually for a week at a ski resort. This year we went to Powder Mountain, Utah (ingrained in our hearts as the epic site of his peak proposal!), but we ended up with extra points that we could put toward another week’s stay somewhere else. There weren’t enough points to send us to a fabulous destination like Hawaii or Mexico — in fact, the choices were embarrassingly limited. Did we really want seven days in Mesquite, Nevada? (Where? you say… Exactly.)

Out of the short list available to us, we randomly picked a town called Pagosa Springs, an unassuming little dot near the border of New Mexico. We figured that at least we’d be in Colorado and could drive to nearby Telluride if we got really bored. We had never heard of the place, none of our friends had ever been, and we had no expectations. We just didn’t want to throw away our points.

As it turned out, that one week in Pagosa Springs was enough to convince us to put Southern Colorado on our yearly road trip list. It was just that incredible.

It started with a beautiful drive through the Arizona high desert on Highway 40. With storm clouds over our heads and the sun waning on the horizon, the normally muted landscape was bathed in an extra rich golden glow. Just vast, wide openness everywhere.

We opted to drive straight through from Los Angeles, making it to our doorstep in the middle of the night in a surprisingly painless 15 hours. My man is a machine!

Our condo sat on this lovely lake, which glassed off to an amazing sheen in the evenings.

The next morning we explored this tiny town, best known in the area for its natural hot springs. The San Juan River meanders through a quiet “downtown” that can be walked in 30 leisurely minutes.

Parts of Pagosa Springs were pure and simple slices of Americana.

Other parts were pure and simple slices of country life.

This little glimpse into heaven made me realize that I’m really a country girl at heart, and I need acres of lush, green, mountainous, sprawling solitude in my future. Or at the very least, a small farm.

Ideally, a farm with the sweetest llamas grazing on it.

We happened upon other wildlife too, all equally sweet.

One afternoon, we found ourselves on a magical, rainy day drive through the Piedra Wilderness.

Pondered life up on a cliff overlooking the Piedra River Canyon.

(Meanwhile, the sun started to peek out from behind the clouds.)

We stopped on the side of the road to photograph some beautiful, gentle creatures.

Journeyed on endless dirt roads with lovely discoveries at every turn.

We thought this rainbow was pretty special.

And it turned out to be a double rainbow!

But at the end of those rainbows, we had a momentary setback as the one and only road was washed out by a rocky creek.

This creek… deep, cold, fast-moving.

Nothing that a few strategically rearranged stones couldn’t fix, and an all-wheel Subaru couldn’t ford.

At the end of that road, we went on a drizzly-weather hike to Piedra Falls. We love these types of drizzly, muddy hikes. The earth smelled musky and fresh, the air crisp and clean and scented with pine.

We listened to the leaves of quaking aspens rustle in the breeze.

The artist in Will was overwhelmed by how much there was to photograph.

Piedra Falls was nothing short of majestic. Fed by late-summer monsoons, the water thundered down a cliff into a narrow bouldery canyon. It is much more powerful in person than it looks in the photo.

And through it all, we saw not a single other person. Just surrounded by the trills and chirps of forest life, the white noise of the river flowing past us, but beyond that… beautiful silence.