Driving in Colorado's Surrounding States, Ranked

In the last six weeks I have flown to Utah for work and spent two nights there, flown to Tucson with my family and spent five nights there, road tripped to Utah (again) with some friends and spent three nights there, flown to Tucson (again), stayed there for one night and then road tripped back by myself over two days. This all ranges from fine to great, but it’s also a weird bit of synchronicity that deserves to be paid heed to.

Living in Denver is unique because you’re geographically isolated, which is why a lot of times food and beverage companies will use our city as a test market for new products. It’s easy to get pretty reliable data because Denver is 9 hours from Kansas City, 8 hours from Salt Lake City and like 12 hours from Phoenix. Any other cities within that range are too small to matter – hi, every city in Wyoming with your one precious little area code! – so if you’re looking to road trip, you’re looking at a lot of windshield time! I have driven through all of these states extensively, so I’m here to provide you rankings of the best and worst ones to drive through.

One caveat: I have omitted Colorado itself because that’s going to be ranked first no matter what because a) I’m a huge homer; b) I don’t feel like talking about how shitty our road conditions are due to the constant freeze/thaw irritation of hydrodynamics; c) I think we have the coolest shit to do which means our roads lead to dope places; and d) I’m (once again) a huge homer. So, ignoring Oklahoma, which touches Colorado for approximately 50 total yards, here is the handy-dandiest ranking of driving through big swaths of the rural American Midwest and Southwest that touch my home state.

1.      Utah

Utah fucking rules to drive through. Everything is gorgeous, the drivers are polite and generally competent, and the roads feel well-maintained. This is the one time Utah earns bonus points from me for its teetotaling because this feels like the state with the lowest odds of running into some dickweed drunk driver. Liquor laws in Utah are thoroughly goofy, but through the force of sheer annoyance, they have the effect of reducing drinking. Combine that with the strictures and general social politeness of Mormonism, and you’ve got a populace that makes your road experience just delightful.

There’s one stretch on I-70 where it says there are no services for like 60+ miles. Buddy, if you’re not testing the limits of how fast your car can drive in this environment, you’re missing an opportunity. I love very little driving-wise more than cranking music to eardrum-shattering volumes and blasting through southern Utah at 100+ mph for minutes on end. Makes you feel like you’re doing the Walmart version of the Gumball 3000 in Europe in your Civic. Great fun in Utah!

2.      New Mexico

Denver comedians The Grawlix shared a joke on their podcast about the State Flower of New Mexico, which, they posited, is not the yucca, but the drunk driving memorial bouquet. That joke made me laugh crazy hard the first time I heard it, but made me sad laugh even harder when I drove through this chile-brained state. Every ½ mile there’s a sign of how to report people for DWI. A quarter mile after that is an ad hoc roadside memorial with a giant bouquet (or in many cases bouquets – plural!) commemorating someone who died tragically. Yikes!

New Mexico earns second place on this list because there’s a stretch of I-25 south of Raton that is straight, flat, and largely uninhabited. If you want to find out how fast your car can actually go, buddy, this is your time. I’m not going to tell you my personal best here (which I set just last week), but suffice to say it’s faster than I’ve ever driven before, and based on sharing this anecdote with some friends, faster than many of them have ever driven either. Exhilarating! Also terrifying! I held my top speed for 3 seconds – like I was doing an Olympic style weightlifting event – and then backed it off to 100 because even with no discernable wind, no traffic, and no visible hazards, I was still uncomfortable with my margin for error.

3.      Arizona

A dull desert hellscape that will intermittently throw dumb shit like “Safety Corridor for the next 20 miles, turn your lights on – Fines doubled for speeding!” at you for reasons that are impenetrable to the average motorist. The dry desert air and lack of rainfall make most of the roads smooth enough, so you can blast down the highway with relative ease. Watch out for overheating, but overall, rural driving is generally fun.

Urban driving, which I recognize is not what this post is about, largely sucks shit in Arizona. Tucson is a town traveled almost exclusively at 35 mph and trips that feel like they should take 15 minutes invariably take double that and you find yourself annoyed that you’re in your car this much just to go to Ace Hardware and Jamba Juice. Phoenix is even worse because it’s like 6 godawful suburbs all smushed next to each other where every Trump voter (open about it) and every other Trump voter (socially closeted about it) drives their dorky, oversized SUV/truck like they’re in a rush to ban books at their child’s school even though the city has been in gridlock for two decades. I would rather drive in Los Angeles regularly than Phoenix.

4.      Nebraska

Full disclosure: I have driven through Nebraska exactly one time. We were coming home from South Dakota on a family road trip to check out Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, and a friend lived in Scottsbluff, so we met her for lunch. I have pretty much no opinion of driving in Nebraska. Further study is required.

5.      Kansas

Christ, here we go. These last two states, man. Kansas is a fortitude test. It’s the driving equivalent of enduring Chinese water torture. The highways are monotonous, but the unpredictability of the wind means you have to continuously pay attention. Anything that is boring, but that requires focus is like the worst of both worlds. I think of Mike Judge’s inspiration for Office Space where he had a job alphabetizing purchase orders that was both incredibly dull AND required him to be engaged. That energy will fucking kill you.

Driving through Kansas and you can’t help but crave change that never comes. The only amusing part of I-70 between Limon and, I think, Hays, is that one exit 100 miles from anything else that has neither food nor gas, but has an adult novelty (aka porn and sex toys) store. You can see it from the highway, and the mind boggles at who works there greeting lonely, horny truckers and whatever other deviants stop by this perverted, remote outpost.

You can buy yourself a good 30 minutes of daydreaming considering all of the possible angles of this smut palace – How long a commute is it to get there? What if you forget your lunch? How does this place stay open? How did it come to exist? Do they have good shit? Should we turn around and check it out? – but that wears off soon enough and then it’s just more fucking corn and wheat and you’re happy for Christian Braun that he won an NCAA title for Kansas and now gets to play alongside Nikola Jokic. You cannot leave Kansas fast enough.

6.      Wyoming

Look, I spent a lot of my early 2010s in Wyoming for professional reasons and found the people there mostly wonderful. I adored my time in Wyoming. Admittedly I haven’t been there since Trump got elected the first time so maybe it’s different now, but to assume that with no evidence is glib, reductive and shitty. Wyoming was a great place filled with terrific folks when I was going there a lot. With that said…

I fucking hate driving in Wyoming. Driving through Wyoming is like trying to drive through Jupiter. You cross the border from Colorado and the weather goes from normal to sci-fi movie. Hail, wind, lightning, dust storms, blizzards… everything is on the table when you enter Wyoming, weather-wise. It’s never just normal. It’s like whoever is writing the weather in Wyoming writes way too much fucking plot.

I-25 is pretty much a nightmare no matter what state you’re in – except for that Autobahn stretch in Northern New Mexico – I-80 is populated almost exclusively by suicidal methed-out truckers, and Highway 85 looks like a fucking Star Trek episode where Shatner is going to make out with a green-painted woman at some point, but to your disappointment, never does. Driving in Wyoming will test your patience and your will to live. Laramie is a fun college town. Jackson Hole is filled with dorky, rich poseurs. Cheyenne is about as whatever a state capital as it gets. And, based on positive memories from a segment of my career I spent there extensively, the people are helpful, friendly, and down-to-earth.

However, I would rather swallow a knife than have to drive through Wyoming ever again.