Chapter 2: Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs in Depth

Colorado’s Front Range—with Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs being its core municipal components—contains a good two-thirds of the Centennial State’s population. The people of this booming area occupy a precarious space between modern industrialized American life and the imposing high-elevation wild lands of the Rocky Mountains to the west. Each city has its own distinct dominant culture, from Denver’s professionals and unshaven youths, to the college and hippie crowds in Boulder, to the more conservative and technical communities in Colorado Springs, but they all share the commonality of an enviable position on the cusp of the great outdoors.

Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs Today

Colorado’s major cities retain much of the casual atmosphere that has made them popular through the years, with both tourists and transplants. Many people moved here to flee the pollution, crime, and crowding of the East and West coasts, and some native and long-term Coloradans have begun to complain that these newcomers are bringing with them the very problems they sought to escape.

There is also a growing effort in Colorado to limit, or at least control, tourism. For instance, in 1995, just as the ski season was winding down, town officials in the skier’s mecca of Vail reached an agreement with resort management to limit the number of skiers on the mountain and alleviate other aspects of overcrowding in the village. The word now from Vail and other high-profile Colorado tourist destinations is that visitors will be given incentives, such as discounts, to visit at off-peak times. In 2008, the idea of a toll in the mountains on I-70 surfaced at the Colorado State Capitol. More recent proposals include fees for hiking the state’s “fourteeners”—14,000-foot mountains.

Several years ago, Colorado voters approved a measure that effectively eliminated state funding for tourism promotion. That resulted in the creation of the Colorado Tourism Authority, funded by the tourism industry, but debate continues over whether state government should take a more active role. Those in the tourism industry who run small businesses or are located away from the major attractions say they have been hurt by the lack of state promotion, whereas others insist that government assistance for one specific industry is inappropriate and argue that the tourism industry is doing very well on its own—too well, in some areas.

One problem is the increasingly popular Rocky Mountain National Park, which is not only attracting increasing numbers of out-of-state visitors but becoming a popular day trip for residents of the fast-growing Front Range cities of Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Fort Collins. During the summer, park roads are packed and parking lots full to overflowing; in autumn, during the elk-rutting season, hundreds of people make their way to the Moraine Park and Horseshoe Park areas each evening. National park officials say that motor vehicle noise is starting to have a negative effect on the experience, and disappointed visitors are asking where they can go to find serenity. A limited shuttle system has been put into effect in one of the busier areas, and park officials have begun studying ways to expand public transportation in the park, possibly by creating off-premises parking areas where day visitors could leave their vehicles and hop a shuttle.

Looking Back at Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs

Dateline

12,000 b.c. First inhabitants include Folsom Man.

3000 b.c. Prehistoric farming communities appear.

a.d. 1000 Ancestral Puebloan cliff-dweller culture peaks in Four Corners region.

Late 1500s Spanish explore upper Rio Grande Valley; colonize Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico; and make forays into what is now southern Colorado.

1803 The Louisiana Purchase includes most of modern Colorado.

1805 The Lewis and Clark expedition sights the Rocky Mountains.

1806–07 Capt. Zebulon Pike leads first U.S. expedition into the Colorado Rockies.

1822 William Becknell establishes the Santa Fe Trail.

1842–44 Lt. John C. Frémont and Kit Carson explore Colorado and American West.

1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends Mexican War, adds American Southwest to the United States.

1858 Gold discovered in modern Denver.

1859 General William Larimer founds Denver. Major gold strikes in nearby Rockies.

1861 Colorado Territory proclaimed.

1862 Colorado cavalry wins major Civil War battle at Glorietta Pass, New Mexico. Homestead Act is passed.

1863–68 Ute tribe obtains treaties guaranteeing 16 million acres of western Colorado land.

1864 Hundreds of Cheyenne killed in Sand Creek Massacre. University of Denver becomes Colorado’s first institution of higher education.

1870 Kansas City–Denver rail line completed. Agricultural commune of Greeley established by Nathan Meeker. Colorado State University opens in Fort Collins.

1871 General William Palmer founds Colorado Springs.

1876 Colorado becomes 38th state.

1877 University of Colorado opens in Boulder.

1878 Little Pittsburg silver strike launches Leadville mining boom, Colorado’s greatest.

1879 Milk Creek Massacre by Ute warriors leads to tribe’s removal to reservations.

1890 Sherman Silver Purchase Act boosts price of silver. Gold discovered at Cripple Creek, leading to state’s biggest gold rush.

1893 Women win right to vote. Silver industry collapses following repeal of Sherman Silver Purchase Act.

1901–07 President Theodore Roosevelt sets aside 16 million acres of national forest land in Colorado.

1906 U.S. Mint built in Denver.

1913 Wolf Creek Pass highway is first to cross Continental Divide in Colorado.

1915 Rocky Mountain National Park established.

1934 Direct Denver–San Francisco rail travel begins. Taylor Grazing Act ends homesteading.

1941–45 World War II establishes Colorado as military center.

1947 Aspen’s first chairlift begins operation.

1948–58 Uranium “rush” sweeps western slope.

1955 Environmentalists prevent construction of Echo Park Dam in Dinosaur National Monument.

1967 Colorado legalizes medically necessary abortions.

1988 Sen. Gary Hart, a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, withdraws from race after a scandal.

1992 Colorado voters approve a controversial state constitutional amendment barring any measures to protect homosexuals from discrimination.

1993 Denver becomes 15th U.S. city with three major professional sports teams by adding the Rockies, a new Major League Baseball franchise.

1995 The $4.2-billion state-of-the-art Denver International Airport opens, as does the $2.2-million Coors Field, home of Major League Baseball’s Rockies. Denver gets its fourth major professional sports team, the Avalanche of the National Hockey League.

1996 The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Colorado’s 1992 constitutional amendment, stating that it could prevent homosexuals from enjoying basic constitutional rights granted to all Americans.

1996 The Avalanche win the Stanley Cup, giving Colorado its first championship in any major league.

1997 Weather wreaks havoc across the state. First, a summer rainstorm turns a small creek that runs through Fort Collins into a roaring river. Then, in late October, a 24-hour blizzard, the worst October storm in Denver since 1923, virtually shuts down I-25 from Wyoming to New Mexico and strands thousands at Denver International Airport.

1997 Gary Lee Davis, convicted of the 1986 abduction and murder of a Colorado farm wife, is executed by lethal injection, the state’s first execution in 30 years.

1998 The Denver Broncos win the Super Bowl, defeating the Green Bay Packers. The stunning victory saves the Broncos the indignity of becoming the first team to lose five Super Bowls.

1999 The Broncos win the Super Bowl again, this time defeating the Atlanta Falcons.

1999 The worst school shooting in United States history takes place in suburban Denver inside Columbine High School, leaving 15 dead.

2002 One of the worst wildfire seasons in history hits Colorado, with about 1,000 fires burning some 364,000 acres across the state. The biggest fire, southwest of Denver, burns 138,000 acres and destroys 133 homes.

2003 Wynkoop Brewing Company owner John Hickenlooper elected mayor of Denver.

2006 T-REX, the biggest road and light-rail project in Denver history, is completed.

2008 Denver hosts the 2008 Democratic National Convention; Barack Obama accepts the party’s nomination at Invesco Field at Mile High.

2009 Falcon Heene, aka “Balloon Boy,” momentarily captivates the nation as he was thought to be floating above the Front Range.

2010 Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper runs for Colorado governor.

To explore Colorado today is to step into its past, from its dinosaur graveyards and impressive stone and clay cities of the Ancestral Puebloan people (also called the Anasazi) to reminders of the Wild West of Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday. The history of Colorado is a testimony to the human ability to adapt and flourish in a difficult environment. This land of high mountains and limited water continues to challenge its inhabitants today.

Early Beginnings

The earliest people in Colorado are believed to have been nomadic hunters who arrived some 12,000 to 20,000 years ago by way of the Bering Strait, following the tracks of the woolly mammoth and bison. Then, about 2,000 years ago, the people we call the Ancestral Puebloans arrived, living in shallow caves in the Four Corners area, where the borders of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet.

These hunters gradually learned farming and basket making, and then pottery making and the construction of pit houses—basically large underground pots. Eventually they built complex villages, examples of which can be seen at Mesa Verde National Park. For some unknown reason, possibly drought, they deserted the area around the end of the 13th century, probably moving south into present-day New Mexico and Arizona.

Although the Ancestral Puebloans were gone by the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the mid–16th century, in their place were two major nomadic cultures: the mountain dwellers of the west, primarily Ute; and the plains tribes of the east, principally Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Comanche.

Spanish colonists, having established settlements at Santa Fe, Taos, and other upper Rio Grande locations in the 16th and 17th centuries, didn’t immediately find southern Colorado attractive for colonization. Not only was there a lack of financial and military support from the Spanish crown, but the freedom-loving, sometimes fierce Comanche and Ute also made it clear that they would rather be left alone.

Nevertheless, Spain held title to southern and western Colorado in 1803, when U.S. President Thomas Jefferson paid $15 million for the vast Louisiana Territory, which included the lion’s share of modern Colorado. Two years later the Lewis and Clark expedition passed by, but the first official exploration by the U.S. government occurred when Jefferson sent Capt. Zebulon Pike to the territory. Pikes Peak, Colorado’s landmark mountain and a top tourist attraction near Colorado Springs, bears the explorer’s name.

Colorado Takes Shape

As the West began to open up in the 1820s, the Santa Fe Trail was established, cutting through Colorado’s southeast corner. Much of eastern Colorado, including what would become Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs, was then part of the Kansas Territory. It was populated almost exclusively by plains tribes until 1858, when gold-seekers discovered flakes of the precious metal near the junction of Cherry Creek and the South Platte, and the city of Denver was established, named for Kansas governor James Denver.

The Cherry Creek strike was literally a flash in the gold-seeker’s pan, but two strikes in the mountains just west of Denver in early 1859 were more significant: one at Clear Creek, near what would become Idaho Springs, and another in a quartz vein at Gregory Gulch, which led to the founding of Central City. The race to Colorado’s gold fields had begun.

Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States in November 1860, and Congress created the Colorado Territory 3 months later. The new territory absorbed neighboring sections from Utah, Nebraska, and New Mexico to form the boundaries of the state today. Lincoln’s Homestead Act of 1862 brought much of the public domain into private ownership and led to the plotting of Front Range townships, starting with Denver.

Controlling the American Indian peoples was a priority of the territorial government. A treaty negotiated in 1851 had guaranteed the entire Pikes Peak region to the nomadic plains tribes, but that had been negated by the arrival of settlers in the late 1850s. The Fort Wise Treaty of 1861 exchanged the Pikes Peak territory for 5 million fertile acres of Arkansas Valley land, north of modern La Junta. But when the Arapaho and Cheyenne continued to roam their old hunting grounds, conflict became inevitable. Frequent rumors and rare instances of hostility against settlers led the Colorado cavalry to attack a peaceful settlement of Indians—who were flying Old Glory and a white flag—on November 29, 1864. More than 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, two-thirds of them women and children, were killed in what has become known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

Vowing revenge, the Cheyenne and Arapaho launched a campaign to drive whites from their ancient hunting grounds. Their biggest triumph was the destruction of the northeast Colorado town of Julesburg in 1865, but the cavalry, bolstered by returning Civil War veterans, managed to force the two tribes onto reservations in Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma—a barren area that whites thought they would never want.

Also in 1865, a smelter was built in Black Hawk, just west of Denver, setting the stage for the large-scale spread of mining throughout Colorado. When the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the Union Pacific went through Cheyenne, Wyoming, 100 miles north of Denver; 4 years later the Kansas City–Denver Railroad linked the line to Denver.

Colorado politicians had begun pressing for statehood during the Civil War, but it wasn’t until August 1, 1876, that Colorado became the 38th state. Because it gained statehood less than a month after the 100th birthday of the United States, Colorado became known as the Centennial State.

The state’s new constitution gave the vote to blacks but not to women, despite the strong efforts of the Colorado Women’s Suffrage Association. In 1893, women finally succeeded in winning the vote, 3 years after Wyoming became the first state to offer universal suffrage.

At the time of statehood, most of Colorado’s vast western region was still occupied by some 3,500 mountain and plateau dwellers of a half-dozen Ute tribes. Unlike the plains tribes, their early relations with white explorers and settlers had been peaceful. Chief Ouray, leader of the Uncompahgre Utes, had negotiated treaties in 1863 and 1868 that guaranteed them 16 million acres—most of western Colorado. In 1873, Ouray agreed to sell the United States one-fourth of that acreage in the mineral-rich San Juan Mountains in exchange for hunting rights and $25,000 in annuities.

But a mining boom that began in 1878 led to a flurry of intrusions into Ute territory and stirred up a “Utes Must Go!” sentiment. Two years later the Utes were forced onto small reserves in southwestern Colorado and Utah, and their lands opened to white settlement in 1882.

Colorado’s real mining boom began on April 28, 1878, when August Rische and George Hook hit a vein of silver carbonate 27 feet deep on Fryer Hill in Leadville. Perhaps the strike wouldn’t have caused such excitement if Rische and Hook, 8 days earlier, hadn’t traded one-third interest in whatever they found for a basket of groceries from storekeeper Horace Tabor, the mayor of Leadville and a sharp businessman. Tabor was well acquainted with the Colorado “law of apex,” which said that if an ore-bearing vein surfaced on a man’s claim, he could follow it wherever it led, even out of his claim and through the claims of others.

Tabor, a legend in Colorado, typifies the rags-to-riches success story of a common working-class man. A native of Vermont, he mortgaged his Kansas homestead in 1859 and moved west to the mountains, where he was a postmaster and storekeeper in several towns before moving to Leadville. He was 46 when the silver strike was made. By age 50, he was the state’s richest man and its Republican lieutenant governor. His love affair with and marriage to Elizabeth “Baby Doe” McCourt, a young divorcée for whom he left his wife, Augusta, was a national scandal that became the subject of numerous books and even an opera.

Although the silver market collapsed in 1893, gold was there to take its place. In the fall of 1890, a cowboy named Bob Womack found gold in Cripple Creek, on the southwestern slope of Pikes Peak, west of Colorado Springs. He sold his claim to Winfield Scott Stratton, a carpenter and amateur geologist, and Stratton’s mine earned a tidy profit of $6 million by 1899, when he sold it to an English company for another $11 million. Cripple Creek turned out to be the richest gold field ever discovered, ultimately producing $500 million in gold.

Unlike the flamboyant Tabor, Stratton was an introvert and a neurotic. His fortune was twice the size of Tabor’s, and it grew daily as the deflation of silver’s value boosted that of gold. But he invested most of it back in Cripple Creek, searching for a fabulous mother lode that he never found. By the early 1900s, the price of gold, like silver, began to be driven down by overproduction.

Into the 20th Century: Growth & Tourism

Another turning point for Colorado occurred just after the beginning of the 20th century. Theodore Roosevelt had visited the state in September 1900 as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Soon after he became president in September 1901 (following the assassination of President McKinley), he began to declare large chunks of the Rockies forest reserves. By 1907, when an act of Congress forbade the president from creating any new reserves by proclamation, nearly one-fourth of Colorado—16 million acres in 18 forests—was national forest. Also during Roosevelt’s term was the establishment in 1906 of Mesa Verde National Park, in the state’s southwest corner.

Tourism grew hand in hand with the setting aside of public lands. Easterners had been visiting Colorado since the 1870s, when Gen. William J. Palmer founded a Colorado Springs resort and made the mountains accessible on his Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.

Estes Park, northwest of Boulder, was among the first resort towns to emerge in the 20th century, spurred by a visit in 1903 by Freelan Stanley. With his brother Francis, Freelan had invented the Stanley Steamer, a steam-powered automobile, in Boston in 1899. Freelan Stanley shipped one of his cars to Denver and drove the 40 miles to Estes Park in less than 2 hours, a remarkable speed for the day. Finding the climate conducive to his recovery from tuberculosis, he returned in 1907 with a dozen Stanley Steamers and established a shuttle service from Denver to Estes Park. Two years later he built the luxurious Stanley Hotel, still a hilltop landmark today.

Stanley befriended Enos Mills, a young innkeeper whose property was more a workshop for students of wildlife than a business. A devotee of conservationist John Muir, Mills believed tourists should spend their Colorado vacations in the natural environment, camping and hiking. As Mills gained national stature as a nature writer, photographer, and lecturer, he urged that the national forest land around Longs Peak, outside Estes Park, be designated a national park. In January 1915, President Woodrow Wilson created the 400-square-mile Rocky Mountain National Park. Today it is one of America’s leading tourist attractions, with more than three million visitors each year.

The 1920s saw the growth of highways and the completion of the Moffat Tunnel, a 6 1/4-mile passageway beneath the Continental Divide that in 1934 led to the long-sought direct Denver–San Francisco rail connection. Of more tragic note was the worst flood in Colorado history. The city of Pueblo, south of Colorado Springs, was devastated when the Arkansas River overflowed its banks on June 1, 1921; 100 people were killed, and the damage exceeded $16 million. The Great Depression of the 1930s was a difficult time for many Coloradans, but it had positive consequences: The federal government raised the price of gold from $20 to $35 an ounce, reviving Cripple Creek and other stagnant mining towns.

World War II and the subsequent Cold War were responsible for many of the defense installations that are now an integral part of the Colorado economy, particularly in the Colorado Springs area. The war also indirectly caused the other single greatest boon to Colorado’s late-20th-century economy: the ski industry. Soldiers in the 10th Mountain Division, on leave from Camp Hale before heading off to fight in Europe, often crossed Independence Pass to relax in the lower altitude and milder climate of the 19th-century silver-mining village of Aspen. They tested their skiing skills, which they would need in the Italian Alps, against the slopes of Ajax Mountain.

In 1945, Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke—he the founder of the Container Corporation of America, she an ardent conservationist—moved to Aspen and established the Aspen Company as a property investment firm. Skiing was already popular in New England and the Midwest, but had few devotees in the Rockies. Paepcke bought a 3-mile chairlift, the longest and fastest in the world at the time, and had it ready for operation by January 1947. Soon, easterners and Europeans were flocking to Aspen—and the rest is ski history.

The war also resulted in the overnight creation of what became at the time Colorado’s 10th largest city, Amache, located in the southeastern part of the state. Immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government began rounding up Americans of Japanese ancestry and putting them in internment camps, supposedly because the U.S. government feared they would side with the Japanese government against the United States. Although there was a great deal of prejudice against those of Japanese ancestry throughout the United States at the time, Colorado Gov. Ralph Carr came to their defense, stating, “They are loyal Americans, sharing only race with the enemy.” He welcomed them to the state and authorized the Amache Relocation Center, which at its peak had a population of more than 7,500. Amache was much like other Colorado towns of the time, with a school, post office, hospital, and even its own government, although its residents did not have the freedom to travel.

Controversial Progress

Colorado continued its steady growth in the 1950s, aided by tourism and the federal government. The $200-million U.S. Air Force Academy, authorized by Congress in 1954 and opened to cadets in 1958, is Colorado Springs’ top tourist attraction today. There was a brief oil boom in the 1970s, followed by increasing high-tech development and even more tourism. Colorado made national news in 1967 when it became the first state to legalize medically necessary abortions.

Weapons plants, which had seemed like a good idea when they were constructed during World War II, began to haunt Denver and the state in the 1970s and 1980s. Rocky Mountain Arsenal, originally built to produce chemical weapons, was found to be creating hazardous conditions by contaminating the land with deadly chemicals. A massive cleanup began in the early 1980s, and by the 1990s the arsenal was well on its way to accomplishing its goal of converting the 27-square-mile site into a national wildlife refuge.

In 1992, Colorado voters approved a controversial state constitutional amendment that would bar any legal measure specifically protecting homosexuals. The amendment would have nullified existing gay-rights ordinances in Denver, Boulder, and elsewhere. Enforcement was postponed pending judicial review, and in the meantime, gay-rights activists urged tourists to boycott Colorado. (Tourism did decline somewhat, although many Colorado ski resorts posted record seasons.) Then, in May 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the measure in a six-to-three vote, saying that, if enforced, it would have denied homosexuals constitutional protection from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations.

On April 20, 1999, in a suburb of Denver, two students shook the city, state, and nation when they went on a shooting spree through Columbine High School. They killed 12 students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves in the worst school shooting in the nation’s history.

Now in the 21st century, the big event to date was certainly the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, where president-to-be Barack Obama accepted the nomination in front of 75,000 people at Invesco Field at Mile High. The Denver location was a politically calculated pick—Colorado is a swing state—and it worked, with Obama taking the state in the 2008 election.

Since fiscal turmoil struck Wall Street that same season, Colorado’s building boom has slowed but not stalled entirely. The state has weathered the recession better than most, with lower-than-average unemployment and a relatively vibrant economy. One industry that has been on fire and captured a fair amount of national media attention has been medical marijuana. In 2009 and 2010, roughly 1,000 dispensaries opened along Denver’s Front Range as a so-called “green rush” began.

Beyond this thriving sector, the state saw growth in tourism in 2010 after a slow 2009, with skier numbers rebounding along with hotel occupancy. Economic pundits have put Colorado and several Front Range cities near the top of lists for livability and doing business, and the future outlook remains relatively bright.

The Lay of the Land

First-time visitors to Colorado’s Front Range are often awed by the looming wall of the Rocky Mountains, which come into sight a good 100 miles away, soon after you cross the border from Kansas. East of the Rockies, a 5,000-foot peak is considered high—yet Colorado has 1,143 mountains above 10,000 feet, including 53 over 14,000 feet! Mount Elbert, which is southwest of Leadville, is the highest of all at 14,433 feet.

The Rockies were formed some 65 million years ago by pressures that forced hard Precambrian rock to break through the earth’s surface and push layers of earlier rock up on end. Millions of years of erosion then eliminated the soft surface material, producing the magnificent Rockies of calendar fame.

An almost perfect rectangle, Colorado measures some 385 miles east to west, and 275 miles north to south. The Continental Divide zigzags more or less through the center of the 104,247-square-mile state, the eighth largest in the nation.

You can visualize Colorado’s basic topography by dividing the state into vertical thirds: The eastern part is plains, the midsection is high mountains, and the western third is mesa.

That’s a broad simplification, of course. The central Rockies, though they cover six times the mountain area of Switzerland, are not a single vast highland but consist of a series of high ranges running roughly north to south. East of the Continental Divide, the primary river systems are the South Platte, Arkansas, and Rio Grande, all flowing toward the Gulf of Mexico. The westward-flowing Colorado River system dominates the western part of the state, with tributary networks including the Gunnison, Dolores, and Yampa-Green rivers. In most cases, these rivers are not broad bodies of water such as the Ohio or Columbia, but streams, heavy with spring and summer snowmelt that shrink to mere trickles during much of the year under the demands of farm and ranch irrigation. Besides agricultural use, these rivers provide necessary water to wildlife and offer wonderful opportunities for rafting, fishing, and swimming.

The forested mountains are essential in that they retain precious water for the lowlands. Eleven national forests cover 15 million acres of land, with an additional 8 million acres, controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, also open for public recreation. Another half-million acres are within national parks, monuments, and recreation areas; and there are more than 40 state parks, including about 10 within an hour’s drive of Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs.

But all is not well in Colorado’s forests: Mountain pine beetles have wreaked havoc on the state’s lodgepole pine. About 70% of the state’s 1.5 million acres of lodgepole are dead—nearly 10% of the state’s total forest. While it will recover—with other species taking root in favor of lodgepole, most notably aspen—there are huge tracts of dead trees in Colorado’s high country, particularly around Grand Lake and the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, that are not only eyesores but a carbon-emitting fire danger.

But the state’s natural beauty remains superlative in most areas. Colorado’s name, Spanish for “red,” derives from the state’s red soil and rocks. Some of the sandstone agglomerates have become attractions in their own right, such as Red Rocks Amphitheatre, west of Denver, and the startling Garden of the Gods, in Colorado Springs.

Of Colorado’s five million people, about 80% live along the I-25 corridor, where the plains meet the mountains. Denver, the state capital, has a population of well over half a million, with over three million in the metropolitan area. Colorado Springs has the second-largest population, with about 420,000 residents, followed by Fort Collins (140,000), Pueblo (105,000), and Boulder (100,000). There is concern that this large and growing population threatens Colorado’s natural habitat.

Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs in Popular Culture: Books, Film, TV & Music

Those planning vacations in Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs and the nearby mountains can turn to a number of sources for background on the state and its major cities. Among my favorites is A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, a fascinating compilation of Isabella L. Bird’s letters to her sister; they were written in the late 1800s as she traveled alone through the Rockies, usually on horseback. Those who enjoy lengthy novels will want to get their hands on a copy of James Michener’s 1,000-page Centennial, inspired by the northeastern plains of Colorado. For a more bohemian point of view, look no further than Jack Kerouac’s classic, On the Road. Also engrossing is Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1971 novel, Angle of Repose. Horror fans will surely appreciate a pair of Stephen King classics with Colorado ties: The Stand is set in Boulder and The Shining was inspired by the writer’s stay at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park (but actually filmed at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon).

Travelers interested in seeing wildlife will likely be successful with help from the Colorado Wildlife Viewing Guide, by Mary Taylor Gray. You’ll probably see a lot of historical sights here, too, so it’s good to first get some background from the short, easy-to-read Colorado: A History, by Marshall Sprague.

Movies set on the Front Range are limited, although Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, About Schmidt, and WarGames are exceptions, at least in part. Television shows in the area are more noteworthy: Dynasty (Denver), Mork & Mindy (Boulder), and South Park (50 miles southwest of Denver).

Musically speaking, the region has a rich heritage and a diverse current scene. John Denver; Earth, Wind & Fire; Big Head Todd and the Monsters; and the String Cheese Incident are among the bands that broke it big with strong ties to Denver or Boulder. In parts of the world, the “Denver Sound,” a roots-based genre that melds Gothic and country, has been gaining notoriety, with bands like 16 Horsepower, Munly and the Lee Lewis Harlots, DeVotchKa, and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club gaining an international following. The Denver music scene arguably finally arrived in the last few years with the emergence of the Fray (Denver) and 3OH!3 (Boulder) on the national charts.

Eating & Drinking in Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs

In Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs, restaurants tend to close no later than 10pm during the week and 11pm on weekends, although there are exceptions. Tipping is standard for the U.S. at 15% to 20%.

Local delicacies include Rocky Mountain oysters (yes, they are deep-fried bull’s testicles), Mexican fare, beef, and game. Boulder is on the forefront of numerous culinary trends, namely vegetarian, “localvore,” and organic, as are Denver and Colorado Springs, although to a lesser degree. The farm-to-table movement helped earn Boulder the title of “America’s Foodiest Town” from Bon Appetit magazine in 2010, thanks to its status as a hub for the natural-foods industry, its farmer’s market, and its dynamic dining landscape. Likewise, Denver and Colorado Springs culinary scenes have taken major steps forward in recent years.

Then there’s the suds: Denver and the surrounding area have been dubbed “the Napa Valley of beer,” and with good reason. Home to numerous microbreweries and brewpubs, the Mile High City plays host to the Great American Beer Festival, the world’s largest beer festival, every September. It also brews more beer per capita than any other city in the country (and that’s not counting Coors in nearby Golden) and ranks second in terms of total breweries. In LoDo (Lower Downtown), the landmark Wynkoop Brewing Company is the largest brewpub in the nation, and its founder, John Hickenlooper, went on to become mayor of Denver en route to the governor’s office.