Place

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 connected with a blast of dynamite, creating the...

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 bordered by the South Platte River to 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 . Boulder was founded during the Colorado Gold...

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 Music Hall of Fame, Boedecker Theater at The...

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 shopping and entertainment complexes during the...

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 in the state. Since it was...

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 base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the...

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 Cherry Creek , the city and county of Denver...

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 miles west of Denver in Summit County and...

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 regional hub for education, business, culture,...

Colorado is home to fifty-eight of the nation's ninety-six mountain peaks standing at or above 14,000 feet in elevation. Known colloquially as “Fourteeners,” these peaks dominate Colorado’s skyline and shape the way people live and identify with nature in the Rocky Mountain West. Throughout...

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 of the state’s strongest industries—tourism...

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 that runs from Alaska through South America...

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 the county seat of Weld County , one of the...

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 established until a silver boom in the late 1870s...

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 be converted to a thriving residential,...

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 largest city in Montrose County . Montrose’s main...

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 north of New Mexico and 100 miles south of...

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 canyon is considered a world wonder of geology ...

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 Sangre de Cristo Land Grant , which the Mexican...

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 to the first permanent settlement in...

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 booms and busts, the town continues to serve...

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 National Forest and overlooks the Wet Mountains...

“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 divide forms the region’s eastern boundary,...