Camping and hiking in the Comanche National Grasslands, CO

We camped in two spots for a total of 8 days and nights.  Very quiet, isolated, peaceful, and beautiful. Full of interesting history.

The hikes were spectacular.  We hiked 45 miles.  The hikes had a terrific combination of beauty, variety, and history:

Balanced rock:

Arch rock:

There was a very old cemetery.  We couldn't find anything about it on line:

Died in 1910.

Died in 1884.

Many deep canyons.

One of our maps had this spot marked as a "mine."  Since we have crawled and sweated to dozens of mines in the past five years we wanted to find it.  Well worth our while.

What we found was a mining road to it:

And then a series of large, flat terraces.  What was "mined" here is a mystery.  Never seen anything like it. 

In a valley below this "mine" was a lovely stand of trees.

And along the cliffs were hundreds of what appeared to be swallow's nests.  There were several clusters like this one:

And an area along the cliffs where there appeared to be old etchings.  Not from Native Americans, but possible some from people who worked the "mine" above it.

This one made us wonder if J.S. was buried below it.  It sort of looks like a gravestone.  We are good at making up stuff, though.  But look at the other dates:  1902, 1938.

1861?

We could find nothing on-line about the history of this area.

There are remnants of several homesteads in this part of the Comanche Grasslands.  Apparently they are from well over 100 years old.  Here are photos of the ones we found (they are all different ones):

 
 One beautiful spot we found was called Sand Canyon.  Here are some photos from this area: