Denver

There is a moment that happens every time I step outside in Denver — I look west on a clear morning and the mountains are so close, so sharply rendered in the high-altitude light, that I feel a slight vertigo. Not from the altitude, though the air at 1,609 meters does catch you off guard the first day. From the proximity of wildness. From the fact that those peaks aren’t a backdrop — they are the reason for everything.

The 16th Street Mall and What’s Around It

Denver’s downtown is built around the 16th Street pedestrian mall, a long corridor of coffee shops and food trucks and people moving with a particular kind of purposeful ease. The free shuttle runs the length of it. Lia and I walked it end to end our first afternoon, stopping at Larimer Square — the oldest block in Denver, Victorian brick storefronts converted into cocktail bars and candlelit restaurants — and eating green chile smothered pork at a counter spot on Colfax Avenue, the long east-west spine of the city where Denver’s rougher, more interesting edges survive.

The chile was hotter than I expected. That was the first surprise. Colorado’s Hatch green chile is a serious thing, not a garnish — it sits in thick pools over eggs, over burritos, over anything that holds still long enough. I ordered it twice more before we left.

RiNo and the Afternoon Brewery Circuit

The River North Art District, RiNo, is where the city’s creative energy has pooled. Warehouses painted floor-to-ceiling in murals, a brewery every hundred meters, and the kind of food hall — The Source — where you can eat Cambodian food, Japanese noodles, and a locally aged cheese board within the same building. Denver has more craft breweries per capita than almost anywhere in the country, and the afternoon light in October, golden and thin at this elevation, turns every patio into something slightly cinematic.

What nobody told me: the dispensaries are on every corner too, unremarkable as pharmacies, and the city carries this particular relaxed quality that I didn’t fully explain until I noticed them. Denver was the first major American city to legalize recreational cannabis, and the fact of it has seeped into the city’s tempo in ways that aren’t conspicuous but are real.

Up into the Mountains

The thing about Denver is that it’s a staging ground as much as a destination. Winter Park is 90 minutes up I-70. Rocky Mountain National Park is less than two hours north. We drove to Evergreen on a Tuesday morning with no particular plan and found ourselves eating breakfast at a bakery by the creek, elk grazing maybe forty meters from the window.

The mountains are not aspirational here. They are Tuesday.

When to go: September and October bring crisp air, golden aspens in the high country, and fewer crowds than ski season. January through March is for skiing, obviously — but dress in layers because Denver itself can hit 20°C in the afternoon even in February, the sun at this elevation having a particular insistence that catches you off guard.