Durango

We stepped off a plane in Durango expecting a ski town and found instead a working railroad town that happens to sit at nearly 6,500 feet in the San Juan Mountains. The Animas River cuts straight through downtown, brick storefronts from the 1880s line Main Avenue, and there’s a permanent tang of coal smoke drifting through town most mornings, courtesy of a steam engine that’s been running the same route since before Colorado was fully settled. Lia and I checked into a hotel above a saloon and spent our first evening simply walking Main Avenue, listening to a busker outside the Strater Hotel and eating green chile everything.

The Durango & Silverton railroad

The reason most people come to Durango is also the reason we came: a coal-fired, narrow-gauge steam train that has run the 45 miles to Silverton since 1882, originally hauling silver and gold ore out of the mountains. We boarded at dawn in an open-air gondola car, and for three and a half hours the train clung to a ledge cut into the Animas River gorge, evergreens dropping hundreds of feet to the water below, snow still visible on the peaks in June. Cinders from the engine drifted back onto our jackets the whole way, which felt like part of the deal rather than a nuisance. Silverton itself, a near-ghost mining town at the far end, gave us two hours to eat lunch before the whistle called us back.

Main Avenue and the river

Back in town, Durango rewards slow walking. Main Avenue’s brick buildings house gear shops, breweries, and diners that have clearly outlasted several boom-and-bust cycles, and the Strater Hotel’s Victorian facade anchors the whole street with red-and-white gingerbread trim. Behind Main Avenue, the Animas River Trail runs for miles along the water, and on a hot afternoon we watched rafters and tubers float straight through the middle of downtown, a sight that still seems slightly implausible for a city street. We ended up at a brewery patio by the river, which is more or less the required Durango evening.

Mesa Verde and the San Juans

Durango also makes an excellent base for the surrounding country. We drove forty-five minutes west to Mesa Verde National Park, where Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings, some housing entire villages, are tucked into sandstone alcoves that are still faintly astonishing to stand beneath. Closer to town, the San Juan Mountains offer some of the best hiking and mountain biking in Colorado, and we spent a morning on the Colorado Trail’s opening miles out of town, aspens rattling overhead and the whole range still holding patches of snow well into summer.

Getting There

Durango-La Plata County Airport offers direct flights from Denver, Dallas, and Phoenix, and sits about twenty minutes south of downtown. By car, it’s a scenic but long drive from Denver, roughly six hours over several mountain passes, so most visitors fly in or combine the trip with a broader Southwest road trip through New Mexico or Utah. Downtown Durango itself is compact and walkable, though a car is useful for reaching Mesa Verde and the surrounding trailheads.