Goin' down to South Park....

Yes, we do go down to—or, rather, more accurately, down through—Park County when we fly into Denver to get to "our mountains" some 150 miles away. It is where the witty but massively irreverent cartoon is supposedly set, and where its talented creators are from.

And it's a really interesting landscape, if a little bit on the bleak side, especially in the bleak midwinter.

On our drive back to Denver after our week in the mountains, we took a slightly different route through the huge valley, for a short stop in Colorado Springs instead of heading directly back to the airport.

The photo above was taken as we approached the summit of Wilkerson Pass, where you start to climb out of the giant faulted syncline* that makes up most of the county's area.

We found a very nice, new visitors center at the top of the pass and we stopped to take in the lovely views of the territory we'd just traversed.

It was really cold, though, and I didn't get out to take more pictures. The one on the right was taken through the car window.

Here are a couple more shots of Park County scenery, also taken out of the warm car, before we got to the pass.

looks a little cold, doesn't it? when this was taken our thermometer said -15° F.

the winter clouds were really beautiful as the sun added perhaps a degree or two to the ambient temp

Mountains, plains, neat little towns (especially Fairplay)...Park County has a bit of everything that makes Colorado special.

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*According to my Roadside Geology of Colorado, South Park is one of the state's "large intermontane valleys...a faulted syncline between the Front Range and the Sawatch Uplift." I believe in the past I have mistakenly told people that it was a caldera, but it is not. Although the ground in the valley is made up of several layers of lava flow, from distant eruptions, over the older Paleozoic rocks on the ancestral valley floor.

No volcanoes here, kids, sorry to have misled you.