Colorado

I remember the moment the road climbed out of Denver and the Front Range appeared through the windshield — not gradually, the way mountains usually announce themselves, but suddenly, as if someone had dropped a wall of rock across the horizon. Colorado does that. It doesn’t build to a reveal. It simply changes the register of everything around you without warning.

The Elk Mountains around Aspen and Crested Butte are what most people come for, and they should — this is some of the most concentrated high-country scenery in North America. The Maroon Bells at dawn, before the shuttle buses arrive and the light is still oblique and cold, are genuinely one of those landscapes that make you doubt your own perception. Twin fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, a glacial lake, cottonwood-yellow aspens in October. It reads like a composite of every mountain image you’ve ever seen because it is, in fact, the original. Photographers have been trying to do it justice for a century and consistently falling short. The drive to Telluride through the San Juan Mountains — through Ouray, past Box Canyon, along a road cut into cliff faces above thousand-foot drops — is the equal of any alpine road in Europe and almost nobody talks about it.

What Colorado does better than anywhere I know is the transition between extremes. The Great Sand Dunes in the south sit in a valley ringed by fourteen-thousand-foot peaks — an inland Sahara at the foot of the Rockies that looks like a mistake in the landscape and turns out to be one of the most compelling places in the American West. Mesa Verde in the southwest corner holds cliff dwellings built by the Ancestral Puebloans in the twelfth century, tucked into alcoves in canyon walls with a precision that still confounds architects. Denver itself has quietly become a serious food and culture city while retaining the slightly unfinished energy of a place that knows it’s second to the mountains it lives beside.

When to go: Late September and early October for fall colour — the aspens turn a yellow so pure it almost hurts, and the crowds thin as temperatures drop. June through August for hiking; the wildflower season in July is extraordinary. Ski season runs November through April at the major resorts, with March typically offering the best combination of snow depth and longer daylight.

What most guides get wrong: They send everyone to Aspen and Vail and leave the rest of the state unexplored. The San Juan Mountains between Ouray and Silverton are more dramatic and a fraction of the crowds. Crested Butte has better wildflowers than anywhere in the state and a town that hasn’t been bought by the same private equity that owns everything else. And the eastern plains — flat, enormous, empty — are where Colorado keeps its agricultural soul, if you’re curious about what the state looked like before the ski industry arrived.