Buena Vista, Colorado

We came to Buena Vista because of the Collegiate Loop.

Slow and Steady, two friends we met while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, were hiking the Colorado Trail. We planned to meet them near Buena Vista, where I would join them for the Collegiate East and Collegiate West before they continued toward Durango.

Snowy Peaks RV Park gave us a base for the entire stretch. Sam could work, stay with the dogs, and help with trail logistics while I spent more than a week on trail.

The Collegiate Loop ended up becoming its own much larger story, with separate posts for the East and West routes. Buena Vista was the place holding everything together around it.

🧭 Lay of the Land

• Location: Buena Vista, Colorado · 38.8607, -106.1457 · [Google Maps]
• Official site: [Town of Buena Vista]
• Landscape: High mountain valley · Alpine peaks · River corridor
• Our visit: July–August 2026 · 16 nights · warm days · cool mornings · occasional late-July rain

🏕 Camp Setup

• Site types: Back-in/pull-through RV · tent camping
• Arrival & setup: Easy
• Hookups: 💧 / ⚡ / 🚽 | 🧻
• Connectivity: 📶 AT&T ⚠️ | 📶 Verizon ⚠️ | 📶 T-Mobile ⚠️ | 📡 Starlink 🟢 | 📶 Park Wi-Fi ⟂
• Facilities: Restrooms · Showers · Laundry · Clubhouse

Legend:
🚽 = sewer at site · 🧻 = dump station
🟢 = solid for work · ⚠️ = usable with limits · ❌ = unusable

The Upper Arkansas Valley

The mountains around Buena Vista looked different from what we had been hiking through in Montana and Wyoming.

The Bighorns and Snowy Range had sharp ridges, exposed walls, and more broken formations. The Sawatch felt heavier. Peaks like Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia rose as enormous masses of rock, with broad shoulders climbing thousands of feet above the Arkansas Valley.

Buena Vista sits within a fault-bounded basin at the northern end of the Rio Grande Rift, where the Earth's crust has been stretching for millions of years. As the basin dropped relative to the surrounding mountains, it left the Sawatch Range rising abruptly to the west and the Mosquito Range to the east.

The rocks exposed in the Sawatch are much older than the valley itself. Much of the range is built from crystalline rock more than a billion years old, later uplifted, faulted, eroded, and reshaped by glaciers.

From the valley floor, the result is a wall of mountains that looks almost oversized.

Buena Vista sits around 8,000 feet, which is already higher than many mountains elsewhere in the country, yet the western skyline rises another six thousand feet.

Mount Harvard and Mount Yale were named during an 1869 expedition associated with Harvard's School of Mining and Practical Geology. Princeton, Columbia, and Oxford followed, eventually giving the group its collective name: the Collegiate Peaks.

For much of our stay, those mountains were more than the western skyline. They were where I was walking. The Collegiate Loop crossed directly through them, first along the lower Collegiate East and then across the higher Continental Divide terrain of the Collegiate West.

Around Buena Vista

While I was on trail, Sam had a much different Buena Vista experience.

She worked during the week, took care of the dogs, found coffee shops and lunch spots, walked some of the trails near town, and made trips to Salida and Leadville. She also reconnected with Savage, another friend from our Appalachian Trail days.

Our campground neighbors added another small piece of town life. One of them was a musician, so after I got back from the loop we went into town for an open mic night to hear him play.

For a two-week base, Buena Vista worked well. Sam had enough nearby that the stretch never turned into ten days of sitting at the rig waiting for me to come back.

The Arkansas River runs through town, with local trails along the river and much larger hiking, biking, rafting, climbing, and fishing opportunities radiating out into the valley.

The town itself was harder for us to pin down.

Everyone we met was friendly, but the outdoor culture felt more polished than we expected. There seemed to be a uniform to it: the right technical clothes, the right outdoor brands, the right mountain-town aesthetic. It felt part outdoorsy and part bougie, but neither side completely landed for us.

Nothing about the town was unwelcoming. The vibe simply did not click as naturally as we expected it would.

As a base for the mountains, though, Buena Vista made a lot of sense.

🚴 On the Ground

• Activities available: ● 🥾 Hiking | ● 🚴 Biking | ● 🐕 Dogs | ● 🚣 Paddling | ● 🎣 Fishing | ● 🐦 Wildlife / Birding | ○ 🏊 Swimming | ● 📸 Photography | ● 🏕️ Camp-centric | ● 🧗 Climbing
• Crowd level: Steady

Legend: ● = available · ○ = not available

Mount Elbert

Two days after I finished the Collegiate Loop, Sam and I left the rig around 4 a.m. with Akela and Katahdin and drove toward Twin Lakes.

We have been slowly checking off state high points when our travels put them within reach. Mount Elbert, the highest point in Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, was an obvious one.

We chose the Black Cloud Trail and started hiking in the dark. About three-quarters of a mile in, I realized my camera was still in the truck.

There was no chance I was climbing Mount Elbert without it.

So I ran back down, grabbed it, and climbed the same section again. After nine days on the Collegiate Loop, apparently the best way to begin my first day back with Sam was to immediately add bonus mileage and elevation.

My legs still felt surprisingly good.

Two rest days had been enough to recover, and the elevation was not bothering me much. Black Cloud climbed steadily, but the terrain was less technical than we expected.

The trail rose through forest before opening onto the mountain. A large false summit hid much of the upper route, and once we worked around it, we gained the ridge and followed it toward Elbert.

There was some loose rock, boulder hopping, and light route finding higher up, but nothing particularly sketchy. The dogs had handled harder rock with us in Wyoming and moved through this without much trouble.

Black Cloud was relatively quiet. We passed only a handful of people on the climb, and even with hikers arriving from Elbert's other routes, the summit never felt crowded.

The weather stayed clear. Wildfire smoke softened the distant views, but we had blue sky and no afternoon storms to worry about.

Coming down was another matter.

The loose gravel became more noticeable, the mileage started working on our knees, and both dogs were clearly ready to be finished. They still handled the entire day well and slept hard when we got back to the rig.

Mount Elbert gave us a long, physical summit day without requiring technical climbing to reach the top.

🥾 Trail Snapshot

• Route: Black Cloud Trail · Mount Elbert
• Distance: 12.45 mi
• Elevation gain: ~5,700 ft
• Difficulty: Hard
• Our time: 8 hr 23 min

⚡ TL;DR

• Highlight: Direct access to the Upper Arkansas Valley and the Collegiate Peaks
• Best for: Hiking, rafting, trail running, and using one town as a base for the Sawatch Range
• Skip if: You prefer mountain towns with a more low-key outdoor culture
• Worth planning around?: Yes

Final Thoughts

Buena Vista started as a logistical choice. We needed somewhere Sam could stay put while I joined Slow and Steady for the Collegiate Loop.

By the time we left, that one stop had tied together nine days on trail, time with old trail friends, a couple weeks of normal life for Sam, and a final climb to the highest point in Colorado.

The town itself may not have been exactly our speed, but the Upper Arkansas Valley was.

There is simply a lot of mountain here. We spent more than two weeks looking at the Sawatch, crossed a large piece of it on foot, climbed Mount Elbert, and still left with the sense that we had barely gotten started.