Beth and I had started the day in Colorado Springs and a quickie visit to the Elbert County highpoint southeast of the Denver metro area. The plan today was to visit Denver and its environs, notably Boulder. After leaving the Elbert highpoint we proceeded through downtown Denver's freeway system and up to Boulder, where we spent about 3 hours walking the Pearl Street Mall and getting a nice breakfast in the process. The weather was quite nice- almost in the 80s, which is downright toasty for these parts in March. We much enjoyed Boulder. Next up was a visit to "LoDo", lower downtown Denver, mainly along the 16th Street pedestrian mall area. We managed the road net just fine and found parking without a problem.

Along the way from Boulder to Denver we visited the highpoint of Broomfield County. Broomfield County is the newest county in the United States, formed just in 2001. It was formerly just the city of Broomfield, which spread out across four counties: Weld, Jefferson, Adams and Arapahoe. I guess this made it confusing on occasion, so the voters decided to split and form a city-county, similar to what nearby Denver did 99 years earlier. In any case, the new county's boundaries follow the old city's boundaries. It's a bizarrely-shaped region, with narrow bands of land connecting some outlying areas into the main part of Broomfield. It is in one of the outliers where the county reaches its highest point. We came to this from the north, exiting the US-36 freeway in Superior and following a boulevard whose name I forget south a few miles to highway CO-128. There, we turned left (east) and about a quarter-mile later, came to its junction with Indiana Street. The southeast corner of this intersection is the highpoint. Beth thought I was nuts but that is nothing new. She was content to stick her legs out the car (we'd parked a few feet past the intersection), but I walked up to the corner, where I was quite surprised to find a tiny rock cairn and a pill-bottle with a sign-in log! So I dutifully signed in. How crazy! The whole time there are cars whizzing by and the hum of a motorcycle stopped at the light serving as a backdrop noise.

From here we went into Denver and did more sane things.