The Best Ski Towns in Colorado

Ski jumping arrived with Carl Howelsen, a Norwegian who turned up after the town incorporated in 1900, and the hill named for him is the oldest continuously operating ski area in North America, owned and run by the City of Steamboat Springs Parks, Open Space and Recreation Department. It holds one of just three complete ski jumping complexes in the country. Some 13,224 people live around it, and Lincoln Avenue carries the Winter Carnival's chariot events.

Prosperous enough by 1893 to have banks, a hospital and two theaters, the silver town incorporated on 1 April 1881 and now counts 7,004 residents. What revived it was a ski resort developed on neighboring Aspen Mountain in the mid-20th century. The Wheeler Opera House still works: Jerome B. Wheeler financed it, it went up between June 1888 and April 1889 at East Hyman and South Mill, and the 503-seat auditorium is on the third story.

Gold prospectors got here first. The town dates to November 1859 and takes its name from Thomas Breckenridge, one of them; 5,078 people live here now. Skiing came a century later, in December 1961, when trails were cut on the lower part of Peak 8 and joined to the existing grid by Ski Hill Road. You drive up that road to ski and come back down it to Main Street's clapboard and log storefronts.

Purpose-built, and it does not hide the fact: the town incorporated in 1966, four years after Pete Seibert and local rancher Earl Eaton opened the ski area, and 4,835 people live in it. Modeled on European ski towns from the start, the core is partly pedestrianized and Gore Creek runs east to west through the center. Interstate 70 is the only road in or out, and Gerald Ford ran the country from The Lodge at Vail in the mid-1970s.

Founded in 1878 as a silver mining camp on the San Miguel River, the town fills a box canyon with Bridal Veil Falls at its head, and 2,607 people live in it. Its historic district is one of Colorado's twenty National Historic Landmarks. The gondola's four stations start with Telluride itself and take in St. Sophia before Mountain Village, and riding it costs nothing.

Coal built this one. Incorporated on 15 July 1880 and home to 1,639 people, the mining town did not revive until a ski area went up on Crested Butte Mountain in the 1960s, on the old Malensek Ranch two miles north, in what is now the separate municipality of Mt. Crested Butte. A free town bus runs up Gothic Road to reach it, and Colorado's General Assembly named the place the state's Wildflower Capital in 1990.

Sitting in southeastern Grand County at the southern end of the Fraser Valley, this is the smallest town in the first group at 1,033 permanent residents. U.S. Route 40 runs through it, climbing south and east over Berthoud Pass and covering the 66 miles to Denver. The resort it hosts is owned by the City of Denver and managed by Alterra Mountain Company, an unusual arrangement for a Colorado mountain.

Biggest town on the list at 19,071 people, laid out between September 1880 and April 1881 by the Denver and Rio Grande, which wanted a route through to Silverton. Main Avenue is a registered historic district cutting through downtown, and Fort Lewis College sits on a 350-foot mesa above it. The skiing is Purgatory, established in 1965 and 25 miles north, a genuine drive when it snows.

Called Barlow before the name changed in March 1884, the town incorporated on 4 September 1885 on top of geothermal water and now holds 9,963 people. The Yampah vapor caves are underground steam baths the Ute used long before either date. Skiing means driving south to Sunlight Mountain Resort, running since December 1966, and Doc Holliday is buried above Bennett Avenue in the original Pioneer Cemetery.

Railroad town before anything else: the Denver & Rio Grande put a narrow-gauge station here in 1880, when the place was known as South Arkansas. The post office was renamed Salida on 28 March 1881, and the downtown historic district joined the National Register in 1984. Its 5,666 people ski twenty miles west on U.S. 50 at Monarch Mountain, open since 1939, and in June the FIBArk race runs 25.7 miles of the Arkansas.

Mine owners Horace Tabor and August Meyer founded the place in 1877, and its 2,633 people live in the highest incorporated city in the United States, which you notice on the walk from the car. Tabor's Opera House on Harrison Avenue was the costliest structure in Colorado when it went up. Skiing sits out at Tennessee Pass, where Ski Cooper opened in 1942 as Cooper Hill and trained the 10th Mountain Division from Camp Hale.

Incorporated on 2 October 1876 and named for Chief Ouray of the Utes, this one does its winter trade on ice rather than groomed snow: the world's first ice climbing park, dozens of frozen waterfalls between 80 and 200 feet high, farmed along more than a mile of the Uncompahgre Gorge. All 898 residents live at the narrow head of a valley enclosed on three and a half sides by steep mountains, and Main Street is a National Historic District.

Three mining entrepreneurs founded it in 1874: William Kearnes, Dempsey Reese and Thomas Blair. The entire town is a National Historic Landmark District, 9,318 feet up, with 622 residents and one grocery store, the Silverton Grocery & Deli, formerly the Greene Street Grocery. The ski mountain nearby allows only guided skiing at certain times of year, and Red Mountain Pass, the road in from the south, gets blocked by avalanches.