Golden

The first thing you see driving into Golden is the arch — a century-old span of lightbulbs over Washington Avenue spelling out the town’s name, first strung up in 1949 to lure travelers off the highway. Lia laughed at how earnestly retro it was, then admitted, twenty minutes later, that she’d already taken four photos of it. Golden sits pinched between North and South Table Mountain, two flat-topped mesas of ancient lava rock, and Clear Creek runs directly through the middle of downtown loud enough to hear from every restaurant patio. It has the compact, walkable bones of a nineteenth-century mining town that briefly served, from 1862 to 1867, as the capital of Colorado Territory.

Clear Creek and the whitewater course

By midmorning we’d rented tubes from a shop a block off Washington Avenue and joined a stream of locals floating the whitewater course that runs straight through downtown Golden — a series of engineered rapids built for kayakers that doubles, on a hot afternoon, as the town’s unofficial swimming hole. We bounced through the standing waves, got thoroughly soaked, and climbed out near the visitor center laughing and dripping onto the sidewalk. It is a strange, wonderful thing to float rapids within sight of a coffee shop and a bookstore, the whole town watching from creekside benches with the casual attention of people who’ve seen it a thousand times.

Table Mountain and the brewery

In the afternoon we hiked up North Table Mountain, a short but steep basalt-capped mesa where the trail climbs through prickly pear and yucca to a rim overlooking the entire Front Range — the Rockies rising jagged to the west, the plains flattening east toward Denver. Coming back down, hot and dust-covered, we detoured to the Coors Brewery for the free tour, wandering the largest single-site brewery in the world and finishing, appropriately, with three small pours in a tasting room full of fellow hikers doing the same recovery ritual. Golden’s identity, we realized, is built on exactly that pairing: hard mountain air followed by a cold glass.

Getting There

Golden lies about twenty-five minutes west of downtown Denver via US-6 or I-70, making Denver International Airport, roughly an hour away, the primary gateway. RTD buses connect Golden to the greater Denver light-rail network, though a car is the easiest way to combine a visit with the mountain trailheads and byways just beyond town, including the winding Lariat Loop up Lookout Mountain. Downtown Golden itself is small and entirely walkable, with the Clear Creek path linking the brewery, the historic district, and the trailheads in a single easy loop.