Leg 22 is done: I’ve arrived at the Colorado Air and Space Port (CASP).
First I had to arrive in Colorado. I did that only a couple of days after leaving Cheyenne, having spent 32 days in Wyoming. From there I headed south, to a point east of Denver.
CASP is… a general aviation airport. It has flying schools and clubs. It does not have a major rocket launching facility. Or a minor one. But in 2011 Colorado requested the airport be designated by the FAA as a spaceport, and the FAA agreed a mere seven years later. The intention was that it would become a facility for horizontally launched spaceplane operations — and maybe that will eventually happen; PD Aerospace and Dawn Aerospace, both working on spaceplanes, have some sorts of agreements with CASP to, maybe, do something at some point. Rather more concretely, Reaction Engines has built a test facility at CASP for technology to be used an an air-breathing rocket engine they’re developing.
Well, it’s not much, really. But CASP is officially a spaceport, and it’s my first on this EarthWalk. And it was pretty much on my way to the not particularly hard to guess and definitely not very distant destination for Leg 23, so here I am.
Bike rides for various reasons are down from last month, but I’ve been out walking or riding every day. I continue to accumulate unexpected creature sightings. A few days ago, a fox, casually walking across the trail in the middle of Onondaga Lake Park.

A fox in a suburb-adjacent park
And yesterday, an escaped goldfish? A large (40 or so cm), orange fish in the Erie Canal.

A big gold fish
A map showing my progress is here , a spreadsheet with progress detail is here , and a Google Earth KMZ file is in this Google Drive folder . Present coordinates: 39.740°N, 104.723°W .
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