Colorado Springs to Santa Fe

We left Colorado Springs on August 22 enroute to Santa Fe, New Mexico. We went south on Rt. 155, planning to go through Cañon City and Florence in order to pass "Supermax." It's amazing to find such a large area of a state where prisons are the major "industy."

Cañon City (pronounced Canyon) is the county seat and the most populous city of Fremont County, Colorado The United States Census Bureau estimates that the city population was 16,000 in 2005. Cañon City (in cooperation with Florence) is the site of 9 state and 4 federal prisons. It straddles the Arkansas River, and is a popular tourist destination for whitewater rafting and rock climbing.

Florence is located in Fremont County, CO. The population is 3,653. Florence contains ADX Florence, the only federal Supermax prison in the United States.

We made our way east from Florence on Rt. 50 to Pueblo, where we turned south again on I25. We made our way south and crossed into New Mexico at Raton Pass, part of the Santa Fe Trail.

Raton Pass (7834 feet or 2388 meters elevation) is a mountain pass on the Santa Fe Trail along the Colorado-New Mexico border. Raton Pass is a federally designated National Historic Landmark. (Ratón is Spanish for "mouse.") The pass is located on the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains between Trinidad, Colorado and Raton, New Mexico, approximately 100 miles (160 km) northeast of Santa Fe. The pass furnishes the most direct land route between the valley of the Arkansas River to the north and the valley of the Cimarron River to the south.

From there, we made our way to Santa Fe. Another story.