In college my girl friends and I convinced a huge group of people from our dorm to go out to this place called the Pawnee Buttes to watch the sunrise. No one had heard of these buttes (and some seemed a little suspicious of their existence), so it was pretty surprising when we were able to get everyone in the car and on the road well before the (it's the buttes--have to say it!) buttcrack of dawn. I can't blame the skepticism--to get to the buttes from Fort Collins, we had to drive east into the middle of nowhere (if you haven't been to Colorado, much of the eastern half feels like the middle of nowhere) and pull into a grasslands area that was, well, just a whole lot of flat, grassy land. The only reason the girls and I even knew these buttes existed was because our ecology professor offered extra credit for going (and we were a little skeptical ourselves about taking him up on it, to be honest).
After entering the grasslands, it takes a good bit of driving along gravel roads and past slightly sketchy old buildings amidst seemingly endless stretches of grass and dirt (see the picture above)... but then, out of nowhere, there is this:
It's hard to express our surprise through photos--but seeing these formations in the middle of those flat grasslands was pretty spectacular. And so we returned on a dark October morning, with a whole troop of dorm friends in tow, to watch the sunrise.
And after this spectacular display, we of course had to take some pictures jumping over a yucca:
It might have helped that we were a bunch of nerds from the science dorm. At some point someone even thought to pull the backseat out of our friend's old Suburban.
So sacrificing some early morning sleep on a college weekend to visit the middle of nowhere... completely worth it.
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