Weird outdoor & roadside things to do in Colorado Springs
Weird outdoor and roadside things to do in Colorado Springs — 16 of them, from Rainbow Falls ("Graffiti Falls"), Green Mountain Falls Skyspace and Rita the Rock Planter. Folk-art environments, unexplained monuments and roadside oddities worth pulling over for, all outdoors and mostly free. They spread across Manitou Springs, Green Mountain Falls, Victor, Palmer Lake and 11 more areas, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. 14 of them cost nothing. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Rainbow Falls ("Graffiti Falls")
A 45-foot waterfall on Fountain Creek tucked under a road bridge off Serpentine Drive, its canyon walls coated in ever-changing, semi-sanctioned graffiti — locals just call it Graffiti Falls.
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Green Mountain Falls Skyspace
A permanent James Turrell "Skyspace" perched on Red Butte Mountain — a chamber with an oculus open to the sky that you reach on foot, where dawn and dusk light sequences turn the framed sky into slow, hallucinatory color.
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Rita the Rock Planter
A 21-foot troll built entirely from recycled wood by Danish artist Thomas Dambo, hidden up a short trail near the old mining town of Victor — she crouches in the hills patching holes in the scarred earth, a quarter-mile walk and a world away from the tourist trail.
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Palmer Lake Star
Hand-built by volunteers in 1935 to lift Depression-era spirits, the Palmer Lake Star is a 457-foot-wide, five-pointed star outlined in LED lights across a 58-percent slope of Sundance Mountain — listed on the Colorado State Register of Historic Properties and still lit every December plus special occasions, visible from I-25 for miles in either direction. A KKTV live broadcast confirmed it was lit for Memorial Day 2026, and a community Chili Supper lighting event ran November 29, 2025.
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A Sanctuary Center
A Sanctuary Center is a free, volunteer-maintained nonprofit sacred garden open sunrise to sunset daily, featuring a labyrinth, stone medicine wheel, Platonic-solid sculptures, Pa-Kua symbol, sundial, wishing trees hung with prayer streamers, and a small lending library — all tucked quietly off a rural road between Castle Rock and Sedalia. TripAdvisor reviewers consistently call it an "unadvertised treasure" and praise its unhurried, self-guided contemplative atmosphere.
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Devil's Head Lookout
Devil's Head is Colorado's last staffed fire lookout — a working ranger mans the historic 1912 tower from roughly mid-May through mid-September, and on a clear day the 143-stair climb to the cab rewards you with a jaw-dropping 360-degree panorama stretching 100 miles across the Front Range. The ranger typically welcomes small groups up into the cab and will point out landmarks and chat about how the fire-detection equipment still works.
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Cripple Creek Wild Donkey Herd
When the gold mines shut down around 1901, the miners just... left. Their pack burros stayed, and the descendants of those animals — a herd of 14-16 feral donkeys — still wander the streets, casino parking lots, and shop entrances of Cripple Creek to this day. A single volunteer nonprofit, the Two Mile High Club (founded 1931), releases them onto the streets every mid-May and rounds them back up every mid-October, so the whole town quietly shares its sidewalks with semi-wild animals for half the year. Most visitors come for the slot machines and never realize they're in the only gambling town in America where a donkey might block the entrance. The herd is a living footnote to Colorado's mining era, not a petting zoo or tourist installation — they go where they want.
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Horsethief Falls Trail
Almost everyone driving Hwy 67 toward the Cripple Creek casinos blows right past the old railroad tunnel that marks this trailhead. Their loss. A wide, forest-shaded path climbs steadily up into Horsethief Park, a quiet aspen-and-pine valley the maps mostly ignore, and delivers you to a slim cascade tumbling over granite. It is shorter and far less mobbed than the Pikes Peak-area falls everyone Instagrams, and the valley carries Old West lore: long told as a hideout for rustlers and horse thieves, with Butch Cassidy among the names that drift up. A real payoff with a story attached, minus the crowd.
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Pancake Rocks Trail
Everyone at this trailhead is going to Horsethief Falls — the easy mile-and-a-bit to a waterfall. Almost nobody keeps climbing. Bear right and you trade the crowd for switchbacks through pine and shimmering aspen, past meadow views of jagged Sentinel Rock, until the forest opens onto Pancake Rocks: enormous slabs of weathered granite stacked like a giant's short stack, perched at the edge of a drop with the whole Pikes Peak country rolling out below. It's a genuinely strange geological payoff that you earn — steeper and longer than the falls, which is exactly why it stays quiet while the waterfall fills up.
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Heizer Trail to Cascade Mountain
Everyone in this town hikes Barr Trail, then complains about the crowds. Almost nobody walks the Heizer — a steep, lightly trafficked cut that the president of the Cascade Town Co. carved up the mountain back in the 1880s, making it one of the oldest surviving trails in the Pikes Peak region. It climbs without apology through wooded switchbacks and loose gravel toward the 9,387-ft summit of Cascade Mountain, where the trees finally let go and you get the whole show: Pikes Peak, Ute Pass dropping away below, the Front Range, and ranges stacked to the horizon. It is a real climb. The view is the kind you have to earn, which is exactly why so few people have it.
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Paradise Cove / Guffey Gorge Swimming Hole
Most people blow right past the Guffey turnoff on the way to somewhere flashier, which is exactly why this works. A half-mile in, the pine-and-meadow trail tips over the lip of a hidden gorge and drops you into Paradise Cove: a deep green pool walled in by granite cliffs that climb close to 85 feet, fed by a small waterfall, with rock ledges that locals use as cliff-jumping platforms. The hike is almost comically short for the reward. You go from "are we even in the right place" to a secret swimming hole that feels like it was carved for a movie set, all in about fifteen minutes of walking.
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Red Rocks Trail Loop (Woodland Park)
Everyone within an hour of Colorado Springs has done Garden of the Gods. Almost nobody has done its quieter twin. Tucked into ponderosa forest north of Woodland Park, this cluster of red sandstone fins rises narrower and taller than the famous ones — and you'll likely have them to yourself. There's no grand trailhead sign, just power lines pointing the way. Within half a mile the trees open onto towering rust-colored rock you can wander behind, scramble into, and lose an afternoon among. The maintained path frays as the formations multiply, which is the charm: past the first set, the route becomes "pick a rock and go explore."
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Petrified Forest Loop at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument
Most people blow past Florissant on the way to a bigger peak, which is exactly why this works. Thirty-five million years ago a volcano buried a redwood forest in ash; the wood drank in mineral-rich water and slowly turned to stone. What's left are giant petrified stumps — the famous "Big Stump" is wide enough to park a car on — sitting in an open meadow at 8,400 feet, fossilized mid-life. It is one of the strangest things in Colorado and almost nobody talks about it. The loop is short, flat, and self-guided, so the weirdness-to-effort ratio is absurd: a fifteen-minute stroll past trees that have been dead, and standing, for the entire age of the Rockies.
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Paint Mines Interpretive Park (Hoodoos)
Most people picture hoodoos in Utah, not 45 minutes east of Colorado Springs on the high plains. But out past Calhan, hidden in a fold of otherwise ordinary grassland, sit Colorado's only badlands-style spires: clay-and-sandstone towers banded in yellow, lavender, rust, and gray, carved by 9,000 years of water and wind. Indigenous people quarried pigment here for millennia. You'd drive right past it on US-24 and never know. The interpretive loop stays nearly flat across open prairie, then drops you into a maze of striped gullies and otherworldly formations that look airlifted from another state entirely. Honest catch: no shade, no water, and zero cell-signal drama to distract you.
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Iscariot (Octo-Maid)
A 12-foot metal sculpture of a woman fused with an octopus-mermaid hybrid — gills, fins, and tentacles — perched atop the downtown Traffic Management Center, created by artist Trace O'Connor in 2008. Most locals walk right past without ever noticing the creature looming overhead.
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Van Briggle Memorial Pottery Building
Most people drive past this 1907 building near Monument Valley Park without realizing they're looking at one of the great Art Nouveau tile works in America. Artus Van Briggle was a brilliant young potter who died of TB at 35; his widow Anne built this as a working pottery and a memorial to him, sheathing the walls in more than 5,000 of her own glazed tiles and crowning it with two massive bottle-shaped kiln chimneys covered in terra-cotta flowers. Today it quietly houses Colorado College's facilities department — a gorgeous, half-secret monument to grief hiding in plain sight.
Weird outdoor & roadside things to do in Colorado Springs — FAQ
Which weird outdoor & roadside oddities in Colorado Springs are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: A Sanctuary Center, Green Mountain Falls Skyspace and Horsethief Falls Trail. A Sanctuary Center — A Sanctuary Center is a free, volunteer-maintained nonprofit sacred garden open sunrise to sunset daily, featuring a labyrinth, stone medicine wheel, Platonic-solid sculptures, Pa-Kua symbol, sundial, wishing trees hung with prayer streamers, and a small lending library — all tucked quietly off a rural road between Castle Rock and Sedalia.
Where in Colorado Springs are they?
Across Manitou Springs, Green Mountain Falls, Victor, Palmer Lake and Sedalia and 10 more. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Are any of the weird outdoor & roadside oddities in Colorado Springs free?
Yes — 14 are free to visit, including Green Mountain Falls Skyspace, Rita the Rock Planter and Palmer Lake Star. The rest are mostly low-cost.
Is this a good weird date in Colorado Springs?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at A Sanctuary Center, for instance: Arrive in the golden hour before sunset, walk the full labyrinth together in silence (one person enters, the other waits and enters when they're ready), then wander the grounds to read the handwritten prayers on the wishing trees and try to find all five Platonic-solid sculptures — finish by sitting at the sundial and watching the light fade over the meadow.
How were these weird outdoor & roadside oddities chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Colorado Springs guide.