Schnip's Trips: Glenwood Springs vicinity and places along the way 🍽️🥾🦙🩳
Schnip's Trips: Glenwood Springs vicinity and places along the way 🍽️🥾🦙🩳
Where to play, eat, drink, soak, love on animals + more, year-round
I badly needed a long weekend respite from work. It was my partner’s birthday weekend, overlapping with a solar eclipse. We hit the road and she set the itinerary.
An idea for a new section for Side Dish was born: Schnip’s Trips, detailing anytime I leave the immediate area for anything from a day-trip or overnight to weekend or longer time away. (Or sometimes detailing a more distant journey I hope readers will still find interesting, like my writeup about Going Home last fall.) The goal: Photo-heavy spreads with actionable insight for readers seeking their own getaways. Food and drink will always be central to the mission, but planned around experiences.
So, to kick it off, I’m detailing a jaunt to the Glenwood Springs area and a little beyond. Everything we did can be done year-round, with one winter-month activity exception, and experiences will obviously differ slightly based on what season you go.
Where we stayed
Shop your desired price point. We opted to sleep in the tiny town of Silt, about 20 minutes down the road from downtown Glenwood Springs. We love animals, so we chose a simple farm stay via Airbnb. As described in the the listing, we easily got face-to-face with all the cute animals, including pigs, chickens, cows, horses and super affectionate barn kitties.
Where we played
For hiking and sightseeing, we hit three stunning spots: Hanging Lake/Spouting Rock (highly touristed of course, but I still hadn’t been, and it’s much quieter in colder months); Rifle Falls (which honestly rivals Hanging Lake, and it’s just minutes from a parking lot for those with accessibility needs); and Rifle Arch (part of an extensive mountain biking network, also outside the town of Rifle).
Quick takes: Spouting Rock, just minutes above Hanging Lake, stuns on its own and I’m surprised I never hear it mentioned in the same breath. Part of the waterfall gushes directly out of the rock face; something I haven’t seen elsewhere in the world. You can walk behind it inside a shallow crevice opening.
Rifle Falls’ main waterfall has equal (tremendous) force and you can also hike up behind it (find me in the photo for scale). The green, grassy earth mounds below it evoke Middle Earth (New Zealand) and there’s a series of small caves you can explore in on both sides of the falls.
Rifle Arch offers a modest then steep climb out of scrubby dessert brush and twisty juniper tree groves. The final ascent consists of climbing over a rock field with some sizable boulders. The reward is to sit up (lean, really) inside the hollow opening behind the thick arch and gaze back down at the valley floor and snow-dusted mountains on the far horizon. (Again, you can find me in the pic for scale.)
Where we ate/drank
While in Silt, do plan a meal at the Miner’s Claim, which is more gourmet than you’d expect thanks to the owner’s background in the Aspen dining scene as a chef. (You can read his story on their homepage.) The highlight for us was our entrée: boar shanks with chipotle-dijon barbecue. Think Carolina-style with a tasteful twist, perfectly cooked fork-tender and served with al dente asparagus and mixed mashed potatoes that include sweet potato for the win. James Wieker of Ascent Beverage (a Side Dish Dozen member) travels widely to rep his spirit portfolio and commented on a post of mine: “Love that place!”
In Glenwood Springs, options abound and we were tempted by a number of spots. Typically I try to bounce around and glean a broad perspective of a place but we became oddly obsessed with Slope & Hatch and stopped in daily. Again, this is totally unlike me, so let that speak for the quality. A food truck location in Grand Junction appears to have spun off in 2023 (a decade after the original opened and around an hour and 20 minutes away) and a new location is about to open in Eagle (30 minutes away back East on I-70).
The pairs of tacos arrive “mountain sized” — actually generous considering the fair $13 typical price point, which includes tortilla chips and access to bottles of perky house hot sauces. You can’t order single tacos to cover more ground (damn!), hence part of our reason to return multiple times to work through more of the menu, which includes classics like al pastor and barbacoa and oddballs like falafel, Cubano and a fried shrimp Poboy. Our favorites are the curried lamb (with tzatziki and toasted coconut) and Thai veggie stir fry (with shrimp added) due to the awesome curry sauces, and also the simple, elegant Cantina grilled fish taco with sweet jalapeño tartar. House cocktails are beautifully mixed (the Oaxacan Old Fashioned is a gem) and quality, local hazy IPAs drink more than easy with the tacos, chips and hot sauces.
You’re probably expecting to find at least one more food option here, but between focusing on Slope & Hatch and also making our own breakfasts and hiking snacks, we mostly only ate dinners out anyway. That said, I did hit a superb brewery you’ll want to check out, just around the corner from the tiny taqueria. (I didn’t mention how small and cramped Slope & Hatch’s dining room is, but food comes out surpassingly fast to keep tables flipping. And you can take tacos to-go to the brewery if you wish.)
Casey Brewing & Blending holds high craft beer esteem in the industry and with fans. It’s among the highest rated breweries internationally on Untapped. My tap&table cohost Ryan Hannigan tells me people used to camp out for monthly bottle releases back in the early days around a decade ago. Ryan is pals with owner/brewer Troy Casey, whose dad worked at Coors years ago. “They also were doing things that no one else was doing,” he says, “like open fermenting in oak and other things that got them attention from the craft nerds.”
From around 20 taps we pick a dandelion farmhouse sour (so good I brought a 750ml bottle home), a gorgeous merlot grape farmhouse sour, a cold IPA and a Nelson/Motueka Hazy IPA (both excellent) plus a pretty classic, ideally executed stout. All solid hits. If you’re a sour fan or hop head you’ll be particularly pleased at Casey.
Lastly in the drink category, we stopped into Color Coffee Roasters on our way through Eagle. The place is so hip it makes Loyal Coffee look shabby. (Okay it’s not that dramatic, and Loyal of course looks good as ever, but you get my point.) Bags of house-roasted retail beans are beautifully packaged (and relatively expensive) and everything else is expertly curated for all things stylish. Craft coffee nerds will feel more than at-home. The spot earned its way onto Food & Wine’s 100 best cafes, coffee shops and espresso bars in the U.S. in 2019. We try two Colombian varietals via a batch brewed sip of the day as well as an Americano; both are as good as you’ll find.
Where we found more animals
If you do make it to Silt, plan to stop (or even stay) at Sopris Alpaca Farm. You can hand-feed the perpetually happy- and goofy-looking alpacas without an entrance fee. Just buy $5 bags of grain kibble, which last a surprisingly long time, and try not to get spit on by them. I caught a little spray and had another narrow miss, but that was rare. Most of the time they grazed from our palms gently and welcomed attention. You can also support the farm via their cute gift shop, full of alpaca fleece products.
Where we soaked
We did one day pass at Glenwood Hot Springs Resort and the allowed three-hour soak session at Iron Mountain Hot Springs. I greatly prefer the latter, but let me be as diplomatic as possible so that I don’t end up calling the former a kid-infested (I mean, um, “family friendly”), party-people, shit-show of loud talkers, selfie-obsessed-wanna-be-influencer girls, and randos not on their best behavior (we witnessed a dispute). I mean, I guess I just did, and the place is overpriced at $43/person this season. But in fairness, that does allow you to come and go all day, so between meals and activities you can technically soak your money’s worth. They’re in the process of expanding so perhaps that will thin out the crowds a bit, and the water is good and hot in the hottest pool and pleasantly long-soak warm in the other main pool. It’s still scenic with mountain views and not all bad, just really busy and designed for a certain type of hot springs patron who’s not me.
Iron Mountain Hot Springs, by contrast, has my number. It’s similarly pricey but entirely worth it by our estimation. Access to 19 geothermal pools (mostly large hot tub-sized) is $40-$52 for three hours or $55-$67 if you want access to 13 more soak pools in a “World Springs” area that’s 21-and-up and features “inspired pools with mineral formulas designed to replicate hot springs from around the world, such as the Blue Lagoon in Iceland or Hokkaido in Japan.” There’s also a wider Dead Sea salt pool, freshwater pool and cold plunge pool. (And you can land a limited number of day passes for $100-$150.)
We enjoyed a round of drinks (a mid-day Michelada and Denver Beer Company seltzer) from the gourmet-enough on-site bar and grill and liked sampling the different waters and alternating between pool temperatures (from 92 up to 108). Our favorite ended up being modeled after hot springs in Vichy, France. (Having been to the Dead Sea, I can say this is significantly less salty as you can’t float, but by way of homage it’s salty enough to make a point.)
This was where my partner wisely chose to have us watch the solar eclipse from — so we were among the few Americans to view it from international waters (if you accept my playful terminology given the setting).
Honorable mentions
Quick shoutouts to three more things.
While in Glenwood Springs, take a short-ish hike directly out of downtown and up a steep trail to the very unique (read: chaotically laid out) Linwood Cemetery where Doc Holliday is buried. Somewhere. Likely in the Potter’s Field of unmarked graves. Though there’s an honorary headstone for him (or really, the tourists) today. Whether you quote Tombstone or not, it’s still pretty cool to visit.
As a rest stop along our drive, we caught one of the last days of the season at the Frisco Adventure Park for me to go snow tubing for the first time. That’s partly thanks to Jeremy Jones for drawing my attention to it in Springs Magazine. This is a snow activity that requires no skill other than holding onto some handles on the inner tubes. It’s mindless fun where you catch what feels like serious speed down the snow runs and get to go over a couple bumps that make your stomach think you caught a little air even if you don’t actually. Basically, it makes you feel like a kid for the hour you’re getting in as many runs as you can.
3. For all the times I’ve driven through Alma (tagline: North America’s Highest Incorporated Town) I don’t know how I never stopped at the awesome Al-Mart. It’s right on Main Street as you pass through town. And it’s like a convenience store/mini mart mixed with a health foods store, Western-wear and outdoor/gear shop. Hence “general store” but really much more than a typical one. Plus the staff’s nice as can be and knowledgeable about everything in store. We grab some CBD sparkling sodas and ostrich jerky for some road fuel.
I love this post! Not just because it’s a food and drink map of Glenwood, but because I love how you turned a vacation from work into work. I was a Hawaii-based food writer. Hubby and I went to the Big Island for my 50th birthday. I turned my vacation into work. Why not? Thanks! Now I want to head to the far reaches of 170 in Colorado.
welp, you just planned a summer vacay for us - thanks!!