Shutterstock
A 34-million-year-old forest you can walk through
You can stand 35 miles west of Colorado Springs in a grassy mountain valley near Florissant and find one of the richest fossil deposits on Earth.
This place protects what other parks only wish they had, and almost nobody knows it. While crowds pack Colorado’s big-name parks, you can walk these trails in near silence.
You stand where a forest grew 34 million years ago. What buried that forest is the strangest part of the story.
Shutterstock
How a lost forest turned to stone
Picture towering redwoods growing beside an ancient lake, right where you stand. Then the nearby volcanoes erupted…