The Rockies Road from Dublin to Colorado’s natural highs

I shall never look at the Sugarloaf out my bedroom window in the same way again. Five days of being shadowed by Colorado’s snow-capped Rockies and their sandstone siblings have spoiled me. American portions are so much bigger.

Colorado has the mountain lion’s share of the Rockies’ highest peaks, including 25 over 14,000ft - “fourteeners” in local lingo. Carrauntoohil, Ireland’s biggest mountain in Co Kerry, is 3,407ft. You can’t try this at home. The Rockies Road from Dublin used to be long and arduous but Aer Lingus’s new direct flight to Denver has made short work of it, chopping it to less than 10 hours.

There are several ways to get up close and personal. You can hire a car and negotiate the highest paved road in the US, Mount Blue Sky Road, which starts near the gold-rush town of Idaho Springs and rises to 14,130 feet above sea level. Heck, you could enter the Broadmoor Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, also known as the Race to the Clouds, a 14.5-mile time trial race running since 1916 with 156 bends and a finish line at 14,115ft. But if you’re not in a hurry, I’d recommend the Pikes Peak Cog railway.

A rack railway’s central cogged rail enables a train to climb inclines as steep as 20 per cent, handy if you’re heading up a mountain. Pikes Peak is the world’s highest elevation rack railway and at 8.9 miles the second longest in the world. There is an altitude warning sign on the platform: “You will be travelling to 14,115ft above sea level. Regardless of your age and fitness level, lightheadedness and disorientation can occur”. You can even buy a can of oxygen in the gift shop before you board, like a fever dream of late capitalism.

It’s an awe-inspiring journey, setting off in summer and ending up surrounded by snow. At first, you see boulders with pine trees growing between, then aspens like Twiglets, with the odd patch of snow, then the vista opens up and suddenly the views are Alpine-like, with the Rockies laid out before you, and you can see over plains as far as Kansas and Oklahoma, while up close treetops poke out of snowdrifts.

Then you rise above the tree line, passing a way station, Windy Point, at 12,129ft, until a recent snowfall stops our fire-engine red train in its tracks, 1,000ft shy of the summit and its cafe with doughnuts made to a special recipe so the dough rises at altitude. The first thing dawn lights up, locals say, is the doughnut shop on Pikes Peak. Katharine Lee Bates was inspired to write the unofficial anthem of the US, America the Beautiful, after climbing Pikes Peak. “For purple mountain majesties/ Above the fruited plain!”

Manitou Springs down below is unashamedly a tourist trap, complete with The Leprechaun Shoppe, and a hemp store with a Blazy Susan inflatable spliff in the window (cannabis is legal in Colorado, a state full of natural highs) but it’s a real community too. Each local high-school graduate has their own portrait poster on a lamp-post – can you imagine the mortification here? – and there are adverts in shop windows for a bluegrass festival just across the border in New Mexico, Wild Bill’s Mountain Man Retreat, a Buckskinners camp, and a muzzle-loading state shoot.

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The town’s mineral springs produced 20,000 bottles a day in its heyday and you can still sample its wares from drinking fountains, the water unchlorinated and high in manganese “flavoured by a billion years of geology”. The breakfast burritos and bagels in Red Dog Cafe are much more moreish.

A jeep tour (Adventures Out West, $105) with cowboy guide Sidewinder (enthusiastic teacher Tom Howes) is a great way to explore the beautiful red sandstone formations, large boulders balanced on impossibly slender bases, in the Garden of the Gods nature park, North Cheyenne Canyon, the 100-year-old short-lived Shortline Railroad and Old Colorado City.

We pass the Stanley Hotel. A stay there inspired Stephen King to write The Shining with its haunted hotel, the Overlook

As you drink in the big skies, with pine-clad red rocks in the foreground shadowed by the dark Rockies behind, their snowcaps glowing as if illuminated from within, Sidewinder fills you in on all the gossip, from the days when the Utes (who gave neighbouring Utah its name) used to meet and spin yarns to the Bill Rogers shrine to the sun; where a local bigshot is buried with his wife, accountant and lawyer; and George W Bush giving up the drink after one last bender in the Broadmoor Hotel, the 5,000-acre luxury resort in Colorado Springs where I am staying, whose wall of fame includes Harry Belafonte, Jimmy Stewart, who honeymooned there, and Marlene Dietrich.

There are no fussy safety barriers between the dirt road and the slightly terrifying vertiginous drop, so happily, when Sidewinder shows us how the Jeep handles a skid and a slide, it’s in the car park. To show how easy it is to tunnel through sandstone, he throws a chunk at the rock face and it leaves an indent and invites a tourist to crumble another piece in her hand. My neighbour whispers: take only photos; leave only memories.

As we pass through an old railway tunnel, he howls likes a wolf and it echoes over John Denver singing Colorado’s anthem, Rocky Mountain High – “He climbed cathedral mountains, he saw silver clouds below/ He saw everything as far as you can see”.

A drive and hike in the Rocky Mountain National Park (Aspire Tours, $147pp) bring you up close to nature, first herds of elk – “That’s a big rack,” says my guide Rico Martinez, admiringly, of the antlers on one grazing by the roadside – then turkeys and squirrels and finally after a 2.3-mile trail up to Cub Lake, the elusive moose, which we are careful not to distract but in truth seems to have eyes only for such amoose-bouches as clumps of grass and tree bark.

It is quite a trek, due to a combination of thin air and thick waist, but worth it to inhabit this western film-star landscape of snowmelt-powered streams, split boulders and spindly trees, a criss-cross of defiant verticals and felled trunks like skeletal remains. We shed our sun hats as we climb and flurries of snow fall playfully on our faces.

“The kids said to us last year they want to go to Disneyland,” a local tells me over lunch one day. “We live in Disneyland,” he told them, in true dad fashion. They have been to six of the state’s national parks and have 50 still to go.

We pass the Stanley Hotel. A stay there inspired Stephen King to write The Shining with its haunted hotel, the Overlook. The 1997 miniseries was filmed there and it has recently hosted an annual horror film festival.

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The Broadmoor-owned Seven Falls, where the South Cheyenne canyon creek cascades 181ft down a granite cliff, is another beauty, “the grandest miles of scenery in Colorado”, whether you climb 224 steps to the top or take the lift to a viewing point.

Denver is one of the few cities to win and then reject an Olympic bid, for the 1976 Winter Games, after citizens voted against the $5 million in public money required. But its climate – 300 days of sun each year – and altitude attracted various Olympic training camps, and the US Olympic committee followed, hence it is home to the US Olympics & Paralympics Museum.

Boston native James Brendan Connolly, I learn, was the first person in 1,500 years to be awarded an Olympic championship medal – at the Athens Games in 1896 – for the hop, step, jump (now known as the triple jump). On display is his first prize of a silver medal, laurel wreath and diploma, along with his Harvard sweater. Visitors can try various virtual sports. I try archery and, despite holding the bow at waist height like a gunslinger, I get a 9 out of 10 at 70ft.

Denver is a big sporting hub. Ice hockey team Colorado Avalanche won the Stanley Cup in 2022. The Denver Nuggets, last year’s NBA champions, are knocked out by Minnesota the evening I arrive, two rounds before the final. Later, in a Mexican bar, Ghost Donkey, a Nuggets fan drowns his sorrows with shots of tequila fired from the barman’s water pistol. A large sculpture of a donkey adorns the bar, a foal lying on its back necking a bottle of tequila held between its four hooves, surrounded by flowers and lit candles. My spirit animal.

My Brother’s Bar on the corner of 15th and Platte Streets is Denver’s oldest pub, famous in the Sixties when it was known as Paul’s Place as the watering hole for Neal Cassady, the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and also namechecked in Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl – “NC, secret hero of these poems”. It has a great selection of beers and a hotplate behind the bar where burgers are still being flipped late at night, reminding me of Grogan’s roaring trade in cheese toasties back home.

Cassady is one of Colorado’s most famous Irish Americans, the boxer Jack Dempsey is another. Davitt, de Valera and Wilde all spoke here. It is less of an Irish stronghold today, although Denver’s mayor Mike Johnston has roots in Ballybay and Listowel, his sons are called Seamus after the poet and Emmet after the patriot, and his memoir, In the Deep Heart’s Core, owes its title to Yeats.

The Nocturne jazz club, set in an industrial-styled building, offers fine dining while you listen to the best local talent. Denver is also home to some great craft breweries and great distilleries such as AD Laws, Denver Beer Company and Station 26, an old fire station turned into a brewery.

Union Station is at the heart of Denver’s revived downtown, its rooftop, red-neon sign saying Travel by train while inside the Beaux Arts building a sign promises “frippery, finery and fun” as well as tapas and gin and tonics, a few of my favourite things. High-end American dining leans into the model of the Italian feast, where a mere three courses are for wimps. Union Station’s Tavernetta and The Broadmoor’s Ristorante del Lago both deliver terrific if calorific dining experiences: cured meats and cheeses for the table to start, then a slice of pizza, a pasta dish, then meat or fish and dessert. But one of my most memorable bites was at the Cherry Cricket – a deep-fried macaroni cheese fritter with dipping sauce. Scottish chippers should send a fact-finding mission.

Linger eatuaries – it is based in a former mortuary that once had Buffalo Bill on a slab and menus resembled toe tags – is a smart casual restaurant doing a roaring trade in tapas-style world cuisine, from bao buns to Korean barbecue tacos, smashed Wagyu sliders and devils on horseback. Late into the evening, there is a long queue for ice-cream at a stall inside a giant milk churn outside. Great Mexican restaurants include Super Mega Bien and El Taco de Mexico, while Hop Alley is a great casual Chinese place. The Buckhorn Exchange is a local institution, dishing up everything from crocodile to rattlesnake and Rocky Mountain oysters (bull’s testicles) for more than 150 years to the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and JFK.

The Denver Centre for the Performing Arts is the largest theatre off Broadway in the US. Tickets to musicals such as Frozen start from $35, making theatre seats a much cheaper proposition than New York. Denver Art Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, does a great line in chairs. Andres Reisinger’s is covered in imitation hydrangeas. You can sit in Nacho Carbonell’s One-seater concrete tree, under a canopy of lights; the pop art Joe Sofa, inspired by Joe DiMaggio, is like a baseball glove.

Red Rocks, where U2′s Under a Blood Red Sky concert was filmed in 1983, is a must-see, just 20 minutes out of town

But its USP is its collection of art inspired by the American West. Photographic portraits of the Aultman Studio, which opened in Trinidad, Colorado, in 1890, reflect the remarkable ethnic diversity of the times. Native American art ranges from totem poles to a contemporary coat embroidered with Stars and Stripes, Sioux and US cavalry. Kent Monkman’s The Scream depicts Mounties, priests and nuns tearing indigenous children from their parents to send them to residential schools. In Nicholas Galanin’s God Complex, riot police armour is laid out like a crucifix.

If abstract expressionism is more your thing, next door is the Clyfford Still Museum. Still (1904-1980) had a unique artistic vision and was unwilling to compromise it for money or recognition, believing the best way to experience his art was to see it all in one place. The 28,500 sq ft museum is home to about 3,125 pieces representing more than 93 per cent of his lifetime’s work. Leven Deli round the corner does a great line in sandwiches with salads.

Red Rocks, where U2′s Under a Blood Red Sky concert was filmed in 1983, is a must-see, just 20 minutes out of town. As well as concerts, it screens classic films, and locals go there every day to walk and do yoga. South Park’s creators, locals Trey Parker and Matt Stone, staged a 25th-anniversary concert there in 2022. U2 brought the weather with them, a thunderstorm deterring half the ticket holders, but creative camerawork saved the day. The Beatles also failed to fill the venue back in 1965, Ringo Starr recalling being offered oxygen before going onstage.

It was the Sixties, man. Everyone was doing it.

Martin Doyle was a guest of Aer Lingus and Colorado Tourism.

Aer Lingus operates four weekly flights from Dublin to Denver. Economy fares start from €299. aerlingus.com. Colorado Tourism, colorado.com. The Broadmoor Hotel rooms start from $199, off season. Limelight Hotel Denver is next to Union Station. The average room rate is $350. limelighthotels.com

• Sep 21

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