Telluride

The skiing splits between two characters. The lower half is gentle, sunny, perfectly groomed and works for almost any level, including beginners learning on broad meadow runs in Mountain Village. The upper half is something else: Gold Hill, Bald Mountain, Black Iron Bowl and, above all, the hike-to terrain on Palmyra Peak at 3 735 m, where a 45-minute climb on a wind-blown ridge opens out into some of the most committing in-bounds terrain in the United States. There are not many places in America where you can ride a fast quad and then bootpack into something this serious.

The town below is the other half of why people fall for Telluride. It was a mining camp in the 1880s, a counter-culture hideout in the 1970s, and is now a National Historic Landmark District whose old buildings are filled with a handful of excellent restaurants, a couple of serious bookshops, the festival venue that hosts Telluride Film Festival every Labor Day weekend, and a population of locals who skew toward low-key sophistication. Mountain Village above is more polished, more convenient for skiing, and more expensive. Getting there is the only thing that is genuinely hard: either fly into the small Telluride Regional Airport, into Montrose forty-five minutes north, or commit to a five-hour drive from Denver.