Last year, I wrote a series of posts that began with a dead cat prompting me to buy a motorhome, proceeded to the road trip that changed my life, and ended with my return to the Western US. That saga fills the month of April, 2022 posts on this substack. This post, at the beginning of 2023, begins my main purpose for writing this substack: My years roaming the American West in my motorhome.
We first settled in Golden.
Golden is a very special town and a piece of my heart is still there. It’s a small burg west of Denver, right up against the uplift of the Rocky Mountains (see the background in the photo), that still retains a little bit of the Old West. It is where Coors beer is brewed, and contains the campus of Colorado School of Mines, one of the top three engineering schools in the United States (the other two are MIT and Stanford). It’s a laid-back town where people have fun.
Golden began as a mining town, supplying the prospectors up Clear Creek in Colorado’s first gold strike in 1859. There is still gold in that creek, which flows through town. I myself have recovered gold from one of its tributaries.
Golden has statues around town of its historical figures. There’s one of Adolph Coors, one of “Buffalo Bill” Cody (who is buried on the mountain above town), one that I presume is Sacajawea, and my favorite, the Old Prospector holding a large nugget:
Adolph Coors was a German who had learned the brewing craft there. “Other men came West looking for gold,” the tour guide at the Coors brewery begins. “Coors came looking for water.”
He found it, an aquifer fed by underground streams believed to originate under the Rocky Mountains, in 1873. This is the only place in the world where Coors’ “Banquet” beer is made, and none of the water from Clear Creek is used in making it (Clear Creek water is, however, used for industrial cooling).
The original Coors brew is called “Banquet” beer because the gold miners up Clear Creek used to have what they jokingly called “Miner’s banquets,” which probably consisted of beans around a communal campfire. Coors would haul barrels of his beer up the mountain to those “banquets” and sell it. And now you know the rest of the story.
If you are of age, you get three free beers at the end of the brewery tour. You are allowed one tour per day. Some locals take the tour every day.
Here’s a view of the heart of Golden, as seen from a hiking trail that goes up Lookout Mountain:
The track and fields of Colorado School of Mines is in the foreground, the Coors brewery is in the middle left, downtown is on the left in front of the brewery, and Castle Rock, which might be the town’s logo, towers over all in the center.
Here’s a nice evening shot I took:
This is a view from Ulysses Park, up on a little bench in a new part of town on the south side, looking north-northeast. The edge of the Rocky Mountains is on the left, South Table Mountain (which is not part of the Rockies) is on the right. Downtown is down below, behind the trees.
I loved Golden, and still do. We spent a couple of months there in a City-owned RV park right on Clear Creek. It was a great start to my eight years in the Centennial State.
I grew up in Colorado Springs and I don't think I ever spent any time in Golden other than driving through. This makes me want to check it out, and of course do the brewery tour!