Colorado Springs: red rocks against a blue sky

At the foot of Pikes Peak, one of the Rocky Mountains' most famous peaks, Colorado Springs preserves red rock formations that seem from another planet.

A car remains necessary to reach the various natural attractions around the city.

The Garden of the Gods, a free natural park with enormous red sandstone formations, offers panoramic trails with snow-capped Pikes Peak in the background.

Climbing aboard the cog railway to Pikes Peak, you reach the 4,300-meter elevation that inspired the patriotic song 'America the Beautiful'.

Moving towards downtown, you visit the United States Air Force Academy, whose Cadet Chapel, with its seventeen aluminum spires, remains a masterpiece of modernist architecture.

Towards evening, the Manitou Cliff Dwellings, reconstructed ancestral dwellings, closes the day between history and landscape.

Composer Katharine Lee Bates wrote the first verses of "America the Beautiful" shortly after climbing to the summit of Pikes Peak in 1893, inspired by the vista that unfolded across the plains below.

The red rocks of Garden of the Gods formed roughly three hundred million years ago and were thrust vertically upward by the tectonic movements that created the Rocky Mountains.