We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming of shutdowns, violence and vitriol this week to take you on a Jeep ride through the aspen, a balm for the world’s recent run of bad news if ever there was one.

Let me say with great humility that the 12-hour ride I recently took is simply the greatest aspen viewing route I’ve experienced in the history of mankind.

And my well-respected colleague Mark Obmascik, who has climbed all of Colorado’s Fourteeners and written stirring, unmatched books about nature, believes this is the best year he’s ever seen for aspen.

So here we go: greatest drive in the greatest year.

But there are a couple things one must do to get the most out of a ride through this year’s tunnels of gold.

First, take a Jeep.

The open-air design — removable doors, fold-down windshields, soft tops, and retractable roofs – grants a 360-degree experience of the great groves of Colorado as you fly by, allowing you to open up to the sun, sky and trees and reconnect to the beauty of the world.

Rent one if you have to.

By letting you slip here and there onto intriguing sideroads, a Jeep opens up 10 times as much of Colorado to your wondering eyes. It is on these secret offroad roads that you can spy holy copses of aspen few humans have ever seen.

Second, if you’re serious about aspen, you must head straight to Kebler Pass out of Crested Butte. From Denver or Colorado Springs, that means first summiting Cottonwood Pass as your aspen appetizer. But Kebler is unquestionably your real destination — Colorado’s mother road of leaf peeping.

Aspens on Kebler Pass form one of the largest aspen groves on Earth, a single cloned root system that could possibly be the largest living thing on the planet. I’m talking 50 square miles of aspens whose leaves all turn simultaneously gold because they belong to one magnificent tree. That’s a tree twice the size of Manhattan.

Put it on your bucket list.

The 33-mile drive from Crested Butte to Paonia over the Kebler serpentines its way past East Beckwith Mountain, the single best spot in the state to view foliage. The graded gravel road climbs to over 10,000 feet, but 4WD isn’t necessary unless there is snow.

Our photo chief Christian Murdock just drove 650 miles chasing aspen, and he recommends a little side trip five miles or so up Ohio Pass at the top of Kebler Pass. He tells me Ohio Pass is a special treat this year because so many different colors are out – scarlets and ambers and oranges along with the gold. I like how Ralph Waldo Emerson put it: The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

Kebler is part of the West Elk Loop scenic byway that continues on through Paonia all the way to Carbondale over McClure Pass. There ain’t a bad view the whole way. The top of the pass gives you access to Ragged Mountain Road, one of my favorites to hike, Jeep or mountain bike. Here you will find wonderful understories of fledgling aspen, which are often the first responders after a fire. You know a forest is beginning to rejuvenate itself when young stems appear quickly after a disaster from aspen roots running just below the surface.

Never a bad idea to spin through the aspen’s namesake city to finish your drive, where the clusters of gold bookending Maroon Bells in autumn have become one of the most photographed scenes in the world. The abundance of great aspen drives that spider out of Aspen – Castle Creek Road, Maroon Creek Road and Independence Pass – is a bit ridiculous.

I like to grab dinner with the ghost of Hunter Thompson in Woody Creek Tavern before heading up Independence Pass for the grand finale of my 12-hour aspen extravaganza. As you rise higher and higher on Highway 82, the narrow switch-backing road that wends its way east out of Aspen, the panoramas become grander and grander. I try to crest Independence just before sunset so that I can park near the summit and look back toward Aspen to watch the fading light limn the trees down valley with a twilight gleam, a little like they’ve been touched by God.

At the end of such a drive during the slow fall of night, the wind whistling through the aspen begins to sound to me like bursts of applause. That image has stuck: the turning of the aspen each fall as Colorado’s standing ovation for itself.

That something close to dying can give off such a joyful sound and transcendent light has made me vaguely curious for my own so-called golden years, which are nearing rapidly. Maybe it’s in our penultimate chapter when we, too, shine brightest, fulfilled after a lifetime of work and finally able to give unstintingly of all we’ve learned and felt to those around us.

“We are all brothers and sisters, just like the aspen tree. We are all a part of something so much greater than our individual selves. We are connected by our roots.” – Anonymous