Quick—what do a former aerospace engineer, a computer tech industry entrepreneur, and a trained geologist who spent most of his career traversing the globe to find rare earth substances all have in common?
From the Denver/Boulder area, the Grand Valley AVA of Colorado is past the Continental Divide on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. The trip westward on Interstate 70, which winds through canyons that the word "pcturesque" struggles to describe, is rewarding if undertaken carefully to avoid notorious mountain traffic.