The state of Colorado is known for a lot of things, most of the good variety. Lest we start a list, we’ll just get to the point: Colorado has incredible off-roading. There’s trail awesomeness everywhere. Many of these trails are the residue of history: leftover tracks and the wheelprints of activity from mining and regional exploratory adventures long since passed.

This glorious residue of mankind’s past stands as an aside from Colorado’s off-roading. This state is one of the gems of off-roading, plus trail and crawling action with old byways, mine trails and two-tracks that head all over the incredibly scenic high-mountain backlands. There are lumpy bits of terrain that are more rockfall than roadway. To use as short an expression as possible, it’s all excellrific.

Off-Road.com contributor and former editor Jaime Hernandez joined your author in the undying 4Runner dirt bus for a week of exploring Colorado the hard way (which we can all agree is the most interesting way). We started with one of the gold mines of off-road fun – the near endless trails in Colorado’s southwestern mountain ranges, centered on the history-drenched Alpine Loop (roughly between Lake City, Silverton, Telluride and Ouray). You can read about it here on Off-Road.com. After this ride, we headed eastward into central Colorado.

The Company You Keep
If you need an excuse to visit Colorado, there are a number of official and sort’a official summertime truck and trail gatherings that pop up in the state. For Toyota types, CO4RJ is a collection of primarily Toyota-based off-roaders that gathers in the central Colorado town of Buena Vista every summer, roughly at the end of July. You see some NAXJA guys (North American XJ Association – Jeepers) gather in the same place a week or two beforehand, as well as the FJ Cruiser folks who meet in the Ouray area for their annual panel-bending affair. This is aside from all the local club action, easily dredged up from sites like Off-Road.com or Pirate4x4.com.

While we bonked around in the Buena Vista/Fourmile/Collegiate Peaks area chasing rock rigs, the bipolar nature of this region was obvious. About 20 percent of the trails around here lean towards hard-core, necessitating radical crawlers and rock buggies that get dragged to an event on a trailer. About 80 percent of the trails are just that – trails, things that get you somewhere, perhaps with some difficulty. These are more friendly to the adventure-driven sort of trail-ready off-roaders, those who preferred to explore the Silver State’s most interesting niches and nooks in fully-kitted rigs that get to keep their plates. For the trail types, getting there is the best part, with a goodly dose of the challenge of rough-riding around the backroads the way we used to. Very Colorado.

With two different personalities to embrace in the neighborhood of Buena Vista, you need to make your plan in advance. For the adventure/exploration trail dogs who prefer more miles pass beneath their boots and their trails less ridiculous (with a thick slathering of history on top), Buena Vista’s centralized location provides lots of options.

Backwoods Exploration and Get-There Adventures
East and south of Buena Vista proper is the Alpine Tunnel area – the very central “Central” region of Colorado’s off-roading wilderness (also called the Headwaters Region) – and it offers an expansive network of relatively passable trails that roughly spread out from the neighborhood of St. Elmo. St. Elmo is called a ghost town, but it’s pretty and easily accessible up State Route 162. Most of these routes are doable in relatively stock rigs – stuff that ranks about 3 of 5 on the Tough-O-Meter at the worst. Notable moments of off-road excellence include Hancock Pass and Tomichi Pass trails (with the notably unsettle Annie Belle Mine along the Hancock Pass trail) which can be looped into other high-mountain trails such as Cumberland, Alpine Tunnel Road and Tincup Pass for a full day’s off-road madness, as well as the remnants of the historic Alpine Tunnel and the Mary Murphy Mine trail. History litters these routes, and you can’t not stop and poke around in it. These runs can be a tour of America’s most interesting used-to-bes.

Of course, these are only a few of the excellent trails in Colorado – books like the Massey/Wilson/Titus Backcountry Adventures Colorado and Charles Wells’ Guide to Backcountry & 4-Wheel Drive Trails do an expansive job of highlighting all of the options. Well, more of the options. It’s likely there’s no complete compendium of trails for this state because there’s so damn many.

Also off the 162 – before you get to St. Elmo and the most popular turnoffs – is the route to the top of Mt. Antero, Browns Lake, Baldwin Lake and Boulder Mountain trails. Keep company for tough off-roading, like the squad of fellow Toyoters who were in Buena Vista for the 2010 Colorado 4Runner Jamboree (CO4RJ). Antero was heavily prospected, but it primarily produced gemstones (with quartz crystals topping 50 lbs.) and beryllium, which is why the marginally workable access roads were constructed. The peak of Antero and the associated trails are not very developed, though, so you should enjoy the challenge. The views are ridiculously beautiful but can be interrupted by an occasional obstacle.
 
Big Rock Boys with Trailered Toys
The other side of the coin in the Buena Vista area includes some of the nastiest trails in Colorado – ultra-harsh stuff that requires nothing short of 100 percent rock buggies and trailered specials. The are “one-mile-in-ten-hours” sort of trails with names like Carnage, Iron Chest, Chinaman Gulch Loop, Holy Cross and French Creek, and all of the goodness nestled in the Fourmile, Buena Vista and Leadville off-road area. These are not get-there adventures, but survive-it-with-help sorts of trails – the type of trail that you judge not by making it through without dents, but how many hard parts were destroyed in the process of clearing the trail. This is hard-core buggy and advanced crawler territory. Find a local club and join an established run if you’re new, and that’s not bad advice even if you’ve run ‘em before.

You Can Off-Road Colorado Too
A key element of all but the most aggro off-roading and trail bonking is that you can enjoy it in a truck (or car, properly suited) that’s very nearly exactly what you drive to work every day. Your bone-stock four-wheel drive 4Runner, Exploder, Dakota or whatever, with a few mods – tires, tow-points, a little ground clearance, plus some good maintenance and a little training – can explore many high-mountain trails like those in Colorado very capably. It’s smart to travel in packs, of course, and keep the knowledge of those before you close at hand. Beyond that, you can do this with your family inexpensively and conveniently.

Off-Road.com has a good assortment of off-road adventures, but there’s so much information that you need to figure your plans. Take our help, then look deeply into region-specific sources for more details. There are groups that specialize in certain areas – TrailDamage.com does Colorado really well, for example. GPS is nice, but good map books are essential, because when the Web fails, you’ll want maps and charts to get you there and back out, like a DeLorme map book.

Heaps of history literally litter sections of this state, though lots of the best stuff has been carted off by plentiful others who’ve been there before you. Thankfully, much else of the history is of the can’t-haul-it-away sort – old buildings, foundations, bridges and boilers, rock walls and pipe, ducting and tumbled-down structures and hundreds of portals into the body of the mountain since abandoned. So many artifacts are still around, in fact, you occasionally have to stop and move them out of your way - old mines, cabins, scree and tailings piles. Mine machinery, mine structures, mine trams, dams, chutes. Crawl through history – Colorado makes it easy.