1) Know that drivers will be in a hurry on treacherous, winding mountain roads. They will try to pass you a quarter mile before it opens up to two lanes for them to do so safely.
2) Know that there are hoards of pronghorn that will stare at you at the side of the road, eerily watching you enter their state, as you eerily watch them, trying to decipher if they are indeed pronghorn and not ordinary deer.
3) Everything is bigger in Colorado (not Texas, although it is true in Texas) in regards to animals. The deer are not lawn ornaments. They are real deer that are so big they actually look like elk. You can imagine what the elk look like. Also, the coyote you almost hit and mistook for a wolf, is indeed a large coyote, and not a large wolf.
4) It is freezing in Colorado at the peripheries of your waking hours. Mornings are frigid, as are nights. Yes, you can see your breath; you can see it as it freezes in mid-air and crystalizes like mini-sleet only to land on your lap, giving you the likeness of someone who skipped their crucial adolescent potty training.
5) You will forget things in your car, and you will debate leaving your heated abode for a thirty-second slog through the Arctic driveway in order to get your groceries bound for a fridge that is also not a vehicle.
6) Small-town Colorado will sneak flaming green chiles in your breakfast burrito. You think it’s cold outside, huh? Well, it’s a crematorium in your burrito. They’ll tell you it’s not that spicy until you’ve wasted every tissue in your place, and the moment you step outside, your running nose turns into a tranquil, frozen mini-waterfall of nasal purge.
7) The bison at the ranch along the highway will not hold their pose for your return trip to take photos. In fact, the herd will migrate several hundred feet away from the edge of the fence where they were situated earlier that day. You will be forced to take hazy long-distance photos of the beasts, eyeing you with a duping expression. The only good photos are ones snatched by the brother-in-law you are visiting, who snaps them of you walking back to the car with mountain silhouettes and a ranch in the background, making you appear to be a hybrid of the Marlboro Man dressed in catalog-fashion on the front of L.L. Bean’s seasonal quarterly.
8) You will go for a hike in the late afternoon and, once the chill temperature drops sweep down from the mountain passes at dusk, the hike will turn into a sprint for survival as you attempt to escape the freezing air and thaw out your frostbitten extremities in a helter-skelter break for your Prius.
9) At the small-town Colorado taco joint, you will hear local gossip. The customer before you leaves with her order and you proceed to hear the conversation between the cashier and the cook. Turns out the previous customer’s daughter accidentally ran over the cashier one night as he was walking home from work. It also turns out the driver was not driving her own car. The car actually belonged to a family friend who worked at the local McDonald’s. Moreover, the driver at fault only got off with a ticket, to the chagrin of the injured cashier, who has fully recovered by now. Somehow the cashier also knows the at-fault daughter has a brother who is in juvie. The cashier is hard of hearing, you opine to yourself, as you remember that you had to repeat your order several times, likely a result of the accident.
10) Did I mention the overly large deer? Yes, apparently the bucks like to duke it out with trees at three in the morning, colliding their antlers with branches and bark to produce an abnormal racket for such a late/early abysmally frigid hour.
11) When leaving Colorado, you will be sad, because in addition to the natural pulchritude, there are taprooms/pizza joints with bomb local brews and gourmet local sausage to make those calorie-eliminating, mountainous nature hikes a moot point. But seriously, Colorado is fucking majestic.
