Beneath the glacier-carved peaks and valleys of Rocky Mountain National Park, below the alpine lakes and rushing streams, a concrete-lined tunnel belies the illusion of a pristine wilderness. In 1944, the two ends of the Alva B. Adams Tunnel were…

Aspen, located along the Roaring Fork River west of Independence Pass, is the county seat of Pitkin County. Now one of the state’s most iconic hubs for culture and recreation, Aspen began like many Colorado towns—as a small mining camp, founded by Henry…

Now home to the tri-institutional campus of Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Colorado–Denver, and Community College of Denver, the Auraria neighborhood has a long and rich history predating the founding of Denver itself. Auraria is…

Berthoud is a semirural town south of Loveland in both Larimer and Weld Counties. It started in the early 1860s as Little Thompson Station, a stagecoach stop near the Little Thompson River about halfway between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Denver on the…

Boulder is Colorado’s eleventh-most populous city, twenty-five miles northwest of Denver, nestled against the foothills of the Front Range. Home of the University of Colorado (CU), the city has a population of 97,385 and is the seat of Boulder County…

Rising in Rocky Mountain National Park and coursing 126 miles to its junction with the South Platte River near Greeley, the Cache la Poudre River is the lifeblood of several northern Colorado communities and contributes significantly to the economy of…

Carol Taylor is a local historian and researcher with expertise creating compelling public programs and interpretive writing for historical exhibits. She has worked with partners such as the Native American Rights Fund, National Park Service, Colorado…

Cave of the Winds, located in Williams Canyon a few miles northwest of Colorado Springs, is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Colorado. Two schoolboys are credited with discovering the cave in 1880, though various legends hold that Ute and…

Celebrity Lanes, later known as Celebrity Sports Center and then Celebrity Fun Center, was a relatively successful entertainment complex in Denver from the 1960s through the 1980s. The center represented the rise of a national trend in centralized…

Built in 1878, the Central City Opera House is the oldest opera house in Colorado. Though it declined along with Central City’s economy in the 1880s, it puttered along as a theater and movie house until owner Peter McFarlane finally closed its doors in…

Colorado Springs is the second-most populous city in Colorado, with more than 456,000 residents. Located about sixty miles south of Denver at the base of Pikes Peak, it is the county seat of El Paso County and one of the most popular tourist destinations…

The last of Colorado’s great silver strikes, the town of Creede boomed after its namesake, Nicholas Creede, discovered silver along Willow Creek in 1889. An estimated 10,000 people poured into the narrow valley before the Panic of 1893 sent the town into…

Perhaps no town in the western United States has taken a more unexpected turn than Crestone, Colorado – the onetime mining and ranching center has become an international hub for Buddhist, Hindu, New Age, and other spiritual practices. Located at the…

The Croke-Patterson-Campbell Mansion at 420 E. Eleventh Avenue in Denver is one of the oldest still-standing residences in the city. It was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth…

Denver is the capital of Colorado and the twenty-first largest city in the United States, sprawling over six counties and 3,497 square miles of the High Plains and the Rocky Mountain foothills. Centered at the confluence of the South Platte River and…

The Denver Public Library, located in downtown Denver, is a cultural hub and valuable resource for the Denver metro area. Begun in the early 1860s, the library collections have grown with Denver, moving from “Old Main,” the Carnegie-funded structure in…

The Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel (also known simply as the Eisenhower Tunnel) carries Interstate 70 traffic underneath the Continental Divide. The 1.6-mile-long pair of tunnels, carrying two lanes of traffic east and west, respectively, is seventy…

Fairplay is one of Colorado’s oldest mining and ranching towns. Situated in South Park in the mountains of central Colorado, it was part of the homelands of the Nuche or Ute people when US settlement began in 1859 during the Colorado Gold Rush. Gold…

Fort Collins, the fourth-most populous city in Colorado, lies along the Cache la Poudre River near the foothills of the northern Front Range. The seat of Larimer County, Fort Collins was founded as an Army camp in 1864 and has since developed into a…

Fort Lewis College is an accredited four-year liberal arts school located in Durango. Originally an army post, Fort Lewis evolved into an Indian boarding school in the late nineteenth century before the state of Colorado purchased the facilities in 1911…

For UK thrill seekers looking to add a new kind of excitement to their adventures, independent bookmakers UK offer a unique thrill similar to conquering the Fourteeners. Similar to the daunting task of conquering a 14,000-foot peak, navigating the…

The Front Range is a corridor of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding land stretching 200 miles from the Wyoming border on the north to the Arkansas River on the south. The western border of the Front Range consists of a collection of high mountain ranges…

The Georgetown Loop is a rail line running between Georgetown and Silver Plume that showcases Colorado’s mountain scenery and mining heritage. The Georgetown Loop represents a major part of Colorado’s formative history—railroad development—as well as one…

Glenwood Springs is a mountain resort community 150 miles west of Denver, at the confluence of the Colorado and Roaring Fork Rivers on Colorado’s Western Slope. It is the seat of Garfield County and has a population of nearly 10,000. The city is known…

The beautiful and imposing mountain scenery of Colorado’s Great Divide has led to the common belief that the state is home to a singular “Continental Divide.” The divide in Colorado, however, is only a piece of the larger Great Divide, a geologic crest…

In 1878 a widely publicized total solar eclipse passed over the state of Colorado. The so-called Great Eclipse of 1878 would garner national attention for the state, as it was the ideal place to view the event thanks to the higher elevation and ready…

Greeley is a growing community of 100,000 people along the Front Range in northeastern Colorado. Founded as an agricultural colony in 1870, the city has an economic, political, and cultural reach that extends far beyond its municipal borders. Greeley is…

Hotel de Paris was an idealized imitation of a Norman inn and is older than the State of Colorado itself. A former cook, journalist, and miner, Frenchman Louis Dupuy (born Adolph François Gerard) established the hotel and restaurant on October 9, 1875,…

At an elevation of 10,152 feet in the central Rocky Mountains, Leadville is the Lake County seat and the highest incorporated city in the United States. Gold first brought prospectors to the area in the early 1860s, but Leadville itself was not…

The Leadville strike of 1880 was the first major labor conflict in the central Colorado silver boomtown, shutting down most of the area’s mining district from May 26 to mid-June as miners pressed owners and managers for higher wages, an eight-hour…

Officially known as the Union Station neighborhood until The Denver Post’s Dick Kreck first referred to it as LoDo (as in Manhattan’s SoHo) in a 1983 column, Lower Downtown Denver has become a national model of how a decaying core city neighborhood can…

About 225 miles west of Denver, at an elevation of 6,400 feet and adjacent to the White River, lies the small mountain community of Meeker. It is known for its ranching and access to hunting and fishing areas, as well as other outdoor recreation hotspots…

The city of Montrose lies in the heart of the Uncompahgre Valley on Colorado’s Western Slope, about sixty miles southeast of Grand Junction and sixty-three miles east of the Utah border. With a population of about 20,000, it is the county seat and…

The town of Ouray was founded in 1875 along the Uncompahgre River near where it runs north out of the San Juan Mountains. Two years after the Nuche (Ute) people were dispossessed by the Brunot Agreement in 1873, prospectors found silver and later gold in…

Pueblo is a city of approximately 110,000 people located near the confluence of Fountain Creek and the Arkansas River, along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. It is the county seat of Pueblo County, lying just off Interstate 25 about 100 miles…

Located just west of Denver near the town of Morrison, Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre combines awe-inspiring natural scenery with natural acoustic splendor. The 868-acre park stands 6,450 feet above sea level between the Great Plains and the Rocky…

The Royal Gorge is a spectacular canyon along the Arkansas River near Cañon City in south-central Colorado. With a narrowest width of just 30 feet at the bottom of the canyon and a depth exceeding 1,200 feet in some places, the nearly ten-mile-long…

Salida is a city of about 6,000 in the Upper Arkansas River valley, surrounded by Colorado’s central Rocky Mountains. It is the county seat of Chaffee County. Salida is named for the Spanish word for “exit,” as it is located near the mouth of a canyon of…

The oldest continuously occupied town in Colorado, San Luis sits along Culebra Creek, just west of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the southeast portion of the San Luis Valley. In April 1851, Hispanos from Taos, New Mexico, founded San Luis on the…

Covering nearly 8,000 square miles in southern Colorado, the San Luis Valley is the largest valley in the state and the largest high-altitude desert in North America. Known as “the Valley” by locals and other Coloradans, the San Luis Valley is bordered…

The Sangre de Cristo land grant was a Mexican land grant possessed in January 1844 by Narciso Beaubien and Stephen Luis Lee. Covering almost 1.4 million acres in the San Luis Valley and Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado, the grant gave rise…

Stapleton International Airport opened as a small municipal airport in 1929–30 and went on to become Denver’s primary airport for sixty-five years, until it was replaced by Denver International Airport in 1995. The airport played a major role in Denver’s…

Sterling is the county seat of Logan County in northeastern Colorado. Founded by homesteaders along the South Platte River in 1881, Sterling quickly developed into a commercial hub on Colorado’s eastern plains. Although it has been through its share of…

Union Station, located in Lower Downtown Denver (LoDo) on Wynkoop Street between Eighteenth and Sixteenth Streets, is downtown Denver’s main transportation center. It opened in 1881 as the city’s first consolidated railroad depot, and a renovation…

Victor, the “City of Mines,” is located in Teller County on the western side of Pikes Peak. Incorporated in 1894, Victor was part of the Cripple Creek District, site of Colorado’s last significant gold mining boom. The city is situated next to Pike…

Founded in 1888, Walden is located in the high basin of North Park in Jackson County, at an elevation of 8,099 feet. Considered the “Moose Viewing Capital of Colorado,” Walden has an estimated population of 600. Despite its small population, the town…

“A Fantasy land,” “a mystique,” “a state of mind”—these are only some of the expressions used to describe the Western Slope of Colorado, commonly defined as the roughly one-third of the state that lies west of the Continental Divide. The serpentine…

The Wheeler Geologic Area is a sixty-acre volcanic rock formation located within the La Garita Wilderness in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado. A prehistoric time capsule, Wheeler has in more recent years inspired two presidential interventions…

William Henry Jackson (1843–1942) was one of the best-known photographers of the American West. He is renowned for his photographs of Colorado’s mountain scenery, many of which show now-famous landmarks such as Mount of the Holy Cross, Garden of the Gods…