Review by Ed Quillen
Guidebook – September 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Colorado: Off the Beaten Path – An Insider’s Guide to Unique Places
by Curtis Casewit
Revised and updated by Eric Lindberg
Published in 2007 by Globe Pequot Press
ISBN 0762750243
IF YOU HAVE SOME of your own “unique places” in Colorado that are “off the beaten path,” you might well groan upon hearing of a book like this one. After all, crowds of visitors can change what you like about those places, and publicity from books can inspire plenty of visitation.
But despair not; in this revised edition of Colorado: Off the Beaten Path, most of Central Colorado doesn’t get much attention. This makes me wonder: Are our paths so beaten that we don’t qualify? Have our places become so generic that they’re no longer “unique” ?
For instance, I can enjoy a summer day in Fairplay. There’s the excellent South Park City museum. There’s the “Fairplay Beach” park for picnicking or a stroll. There’s a fairly easy “Limber Grove Trail” above town, leading through some thousand-year-old limber pines. I don’t know about fine dining in Fairplay, because I’ve never looked for any, because their burgers and fries suit me fine.
But there’s not a word about Fairplay in this book. I couldn’t even find it on the section maps; Fairplay seems to be in some lost limbo land between “Colorado Foothills” and “Southern Colorado.” The latter, which extends from southwest of the metro area to the Four Corners, covers Central Colorado.
And will you find the Turner Farm, or indeed anything else in or near Buena Vista in this guidebook? No, although there is a bit about St. Elmo.
Salida does manage to get an entire paragraph, most of it devoted to the Tudor Rose Bed & Breakfast. And that’s a paragraph more than Saguache or Crestone gets, and hey, Crestone certainly qualifies as a place that’s unique and off the beaten path.
Alamosa gets a paragraph, too, which is mostly about how you may want to stay at the Cottonwood Inn Bed-and-Breakfast after visiting the dunes, “Because of the long distance between this and other attractions.”
And according to this book, the distance is indeed long, since it ignores the Monte Vista Wildlife Refuge and Crane Festival, Crestone’s Music Festival, San Luis’s shrine, Ft. Garland, several state parks, and entire towns like Creede and South Fork that are tourist-oriented and feature numerous summer attractions.
Granted, Leadville gets a fair share of attention, with four whole pages, but most of it is yet another recounting of the Tabor saga, complete with the “Hang on to the Matchless” legend fabricated by Carolyn Bancroft.
Although Leadville must be a world leader in “museums per capita,” only one, the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum, is featured here. The book also mentions the Leadville, Colorado & Southern Railroad in a sidebar of attractions. But it doesn’t include the Cumbres and Toltec in Antonito, or the new scenic excursion train from Alamosa to La Veta, nor the Royal Gorge Route out of Canon City.
Could Central Colorado have been slighted because it has paved roads and thus isn’t really “off the beaten path”?
Probably not, given that the Royal Gorge always ranks among the top five Colorado tourist attractions, and it gets two pages, and another major tourist attraction, the U.S. Air Force Academy, also gets two pages.
And talk about definitely not “off the beaten path,” Denver gets twenty pages, and its attractions include Coors Field, Invesco Field, the Pepsi Center, the Denver Symphony Orchestra, Denver Civic Center Park, the Governor’s mansion, Sixteenth Street Mall, and Larimer Square.
So I have no idea what criteria the author used in selecting places to write about. There’s no logic to it at all.
As “Top Annual Events in Southern Colorado” this book lists Donkey Derby in Creede, Boom Days in Leadville, and the Royal Gorge Rodeo, and the Blossom Festival, which are both in Canon City, but it doesn’t include Gold Rush Days in Buena Vista or FIBArk in Salida.
And many places with notable attractions — such as Florissant with its famed fossil beds; and South Park with its historic sites and rendezvous; and Custer County, home of numerous festivals and historic places — were deleted altogether. In fact, if you put the maps in this book together, there are appreciable holes left in our fair state.
FOR THE MOST PART, this is a guide to very select commercial enterprises and well-known tourist attractions. Although I was relieved to see that this particular “Insider’s Guide” doesn’t direct visitors toward our fragile tundra or favorite fishing holes, its choices seem way too arbitrary — especially its habit of giving whole paragraphs to specific inns and restaurants while ignoring entire regions. And many (or perhaps even most) of Casewit’s choices are neither unique or “off the beaten path.”
Off the Beaten Path does, however, offer some good general advice, aimed at out-of-state visitors, about our mercurial weather and driving our roads. It also offers interesting bits of trivia, many of them factual. As for the others, consider this Leadville item: “Tents were once pitched on Main Street.” Leadville doesn’t have a Main Street; the main street is Harrison Avenue. An “Insider” would know that, don’t you think?
Maybe that’s just nitpicking, but it happened often, and I found it annoying. Indeed, I found the whole book rather annoying because it doesn’t deliver on what it promises. Of course, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. But it only seems fair to judge a book on whether it lives up to its cover, and this one doesn’t come within a day’s ride.
