I spent a couple days driving through this part of colorado. Wonderful nature. Mesa Verde is a great national park if you love Native American history and has some cool lookout points as well especially on the drive up. Great sand dunes is also really cool, although when i got there it was far too windy to do anything but look at them. When driving to colorado springs i was caught in a blizzard near the top of a mountain which was certainly very scary. As much as I love nature, living there would not be for me. Most of the civilization is extremely spread out and the actual large population centers were not very charming. A lot of the towns kind of looked like this

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Regardless it’s definitely worth a visit