The label says pass, but you will not find one here. Greeley sits on the high plains of northern Colorado, a little over fifty kilometres east of the foothills, where the land is flat or gently rolling and the Rockies rise as a long, jagged wall on the western horizon. On a clear morning, Longs Peak and the peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park stand out sharp and white, and on the ride back from Guanella Pass, they are a reminder of where you have been.
Greeley has an unusual story. It was founded in 1870 as the Union Colony, a planned settlement organised by Nathan Meeker, the agricultural editor of the New York Tribune, and named after Horace Greeley, the newspaper's famous editor, who is linked with the advice "Go West, young man". The colonists dug irrigation canals from the Cache la Poudre River, turned the dry plains into farmland, and banned alcohol, a rule that lasted in one form or another for nearly a century. The novelist James Michener studied and taught here, and his huge novel Centennial, about the history of the plains, was inspired by this region.
The landscape is big and open, with fields, feedlots and grain elevators, and east of town the Pawnee National Grassland stretches towards the Nebraska border, with the Pawnee Buttes rising from the prairie like lonely towers. It is a place of huge skies, thunderstorms that build over the mountains in summer afternoons, and wind that blows hard and often. Watch for crosswinds on the open roads, and for hail in summer storms.
The ride back from Guanella Pass, near Georgetown, takes you across Denver and up the Front Range, either on the interstate or on smaller roads through the farming towns. Guanella Pass itself is a beautiful paved road over the mountains between Georgetown and Grant, at over 3,500 metres, with views of Mount Bierstadt and alpine lakes, and it is usually closed in winter.
Greeley is a city of about a hundred thousand people, home to the University of Northern Colorado, and it has fuel, food and every service. Stop for a coffee downtown, where old brick buildings line the streets, and watch the sun set behind the mountains.