Genoa's See Six States Tower Reopens After 13 Years Dark

Two-headed calf. Eight-legged pig. Fifty thousand glass bottles crammed into a concrete tower off I-70. This is the kind of place your grandparents pulled off the highway for, and honestly, it is coming back.

The World's Wonder View Tower sits just outside Genoa, a near-ghost town out in Lincoln County about 85 miles northeast of Colorado Springs. Address is 30121 Old Hwy 24, Genoa, CO 80818, if you want to punch it into your phone right now. Most people fly past this exit doing 80 on their way to somewhere else. That is the part that is about to change.

Colorado's own P.T. Barnum

Here is the origin story, and it is a good one.

Back in 1926, a guy named Charles Gregory opened a gas station and cafe on Highway 24. People called him "Colorado's P.T. Barnum," which tells you exactly the kind of operator we are dealing with. By 1930 he had bigger ideas. He built out a whole tourist complex, six stories of concrete standing 65 feet tall, and he hand-painted signs promising travelers they could "See Six States" from the top.

Six states. From eastern Colorado. I know how that sounds.

But Gregory doubled down. In 1933 the tower claimed the view was "Confirmed by Ripley's Believe It or Not." And it works, because Genoa is billed as the highest point between Denver and New York, sitting at about 5,741 feet. So the pitch was not totally crazy. It was just, you know, aggressively marketed.

Over the years the place became a proper roadside museum. The two-headed calf. The eight-legged pig. Those 50,000-plus glass bottles. Arrowheads, Old West artifacts, fossils, the whole strange collection. It was the kind of genuinely weird Americana that does not get built anymore.

Then it went quiet

The longtime owner and curator was a man named Jerry Chubbuck. He kept the tower running for decades, and when he died on August 4, 2013, the place closed with him. The next year, 2014, the contents got auctioned off. The two-headed calf, the bottles, all of it, scattered.

And that could have been the end. A boarded-up curiosity slowly falling apart in the wind out on the plains. We have all seen that movie in small-town Colorado.

The people who would not let it die

But a group of fans bought the property in 2016. They were not ready to watch it rot. In 2020 they formalized things and created the nonprofit Friends of the Genoa Tower, Inc., a 501(c)(3), specifically to restore and reopen the place.

Then came the hard part. The restoration ran roughly $3 million, funded largely through Colorado's historic preservation funds. That is real money for a concrete tower in a town most folks cannot find on a map.

The board reads like a mix of local and Denver names. Troy McCue, executive director of Lincoln County Economic Development, is on it, and he remembers climbing to the top as a boy. That is the whole thing right there, if you ask me. This is somebody restoring his own childhood. Other board members include Denver's Patricia Calhoun, Kevin Kearney of Englewood, Chandler Romeo, and Reed Weimer.

CBS Colorado framed the reopening as a milestone lining up with Colorado's 150th year of statehood in 2026. And that timing is not an accident. What better way to mark 150 years than bringing back one of the strangest, most stubbornly Colorado things ever built.

How to actually go

The tower reopens to the public with an opening weekend on May 1 and 2, 2026. This is timed-entry with reserved tickets, so this is not a roll-up-whenever situation. You book a slot. Lincoln County residents get in free, which is a classy move and exactly right.

There is more on the calendar too. The events page lists a gravel bike ride kicking off at 8 a.m. right at the tower. Registration is $75, and the list of hosts is long: Great Outdoors Colorado, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the Eastern Colorado Grasslands Coalition, the State Land Board, Colorado Preservation Inc., and Friends of the Genoa Tower. So if you want to earn your view, there is your excuse.

Why this matters if you live on the Front Range

Look, I am not going to pretend Genoa is about to become a boomtown. Lincoln County real estate is not what is driving this story. But there is something worth paying attention to here about how eastern Colorado gets tourists to tap the brakes.

The whole eastern plains economy runs on people passing through. The exits, the gas, the diners, the little museums. When a landmark like this comes back, it gives road-trippers an actual reason to pull off I-70 instead of white-knuckling it straight to Denver or straight to Kansas. That is real dollars for a county that does not get many chances at them.

And for the rest of us, it is just a great day trip. Drive out, climb 65 feet of Depression-era concrete, squint hard toward six states, and decide for yourself whether Ripley's got it right in 1933.

Hayley and I have a running list of Colorado places that only exist because somebody refused to let them disappear. The Genoa tower just went to the top of it.

So book the timed ticket. Take the exit this time.