Denver

I arrived into Denver Union Station at seven in the morning on the California Zephyr after two nights crossing the desert, and the great barrel vault of the old train hall — cream tile, brass fixtures, the light coming in slow through tall windows — hit me like a wave of civilisation after the emptiness. Denver does this: it offers itself as a kind of reward after the journey. The barista at the terminal coffee counter knew exactly how strong I wanted my espresso without asking. The city was already awake, already on its second cup, already carrying that slightly elevated, slightly buzzy energy that I’ve come to associate with life at altitude.

The thing about Denver that surprises most people is how seriously it takes food. Not in the way that insecure cities do, with their Michelin lobbying and press releases, but in the confident, multicultural way of a city that has spent the last twenty years quietly becoming something. The Rino Arts District along Brighton Boulevard holds restaurants that would be talked about in any city on earth — Thai places where the larb has genuine funk, Mexican joints run by families from Oaxaca whose mole has been simmering since five in the morning, bakeries doing croissants laminated with local honey and piñon. I ate breakfast tacos three mornings in a row at a counter with eight stools and a woman who worked the comal with a kind of focused silence I found deeply reassuring.

What no photograph quite captures is the way the mountains sit at the end of every westward street in a grid city. You look up from your phone, turn the corner, and there they are — the Front Range, white and enormous, not quite belonging to the same world as the downtown glass towers. It is one of those views that never becomes ordinary because it is so compositionally wrong. Mountains don’t belong at the end of urban streets. They belong to a different register of experience entirely. Denver lives with this juxtaposition every day and has, I think, absorbed it into its personality: a city with one foot in the grid and one foot in something wilder.

I spent an afternoon walking the Cherry Creek Trail south from downtown, following the water through a city that has taken its riverfront seriously in ways that many American cities have not. The path passes under bridges, through parks where dog walkers and cyclists negotiate peacefully, past the Confluence Park where Cherry Creek meets the South Platte, all the way to the botanic gardens where October chrysanthemums were burning yellow and orange against the brown of the city beyond. The trail felt like the city’s secret, used daily by people who live here and rarely mentioned in the travel articles.

The altitude does something to drinking that nobody in Denver seems to want to warn you about. A single glass of wine at 5,280 feet operates differently than it does at sea level. The local craft beer culture is extraordinary — Colorado has always been serious about its beer — and the taprooms along Larimer Street and in the Highlands neighbourhood are places where you could spend an entire afternoon in the amber light learning about the difference between a Denver pale ale and a Colorado red without once consulting your phone.

When to go: May and September are the sweet spots — warm enough for the city’s outdoor culture but before the summer crowds. October brings the aspens turning above the city and a particular clarity to the mountain views that justifies the early morning chill.