Alamosa, Colorado

Alamosa was a railroad's creation, and it arrived nearly ready-made. In 1878 the Denver & Rio Grande narrow-gauge line pushed down from La Veta Pass into the San Luis Valley, and the town was platted on the Rio Grande just before the tracks reached it that summer. Rather than build fresh, the railroad and its followers picked up the nearby end-of-track boomtown of Garland City and moved it. Whole finished buildings — the Occidental Hotel, saloons, stores, and homes among them — were loaded onto flatcars and hauled to the new townsite, then set back down and reopened. Local lore holds that a hotelkeeper served his guests breakfast in a building in Garland City and dinner in that very same building in Alamosa the same day. The name comes from the Spanish for the cottonwoods (álamo) lining the river, and the town has anchored valley commerce ever since.

That railroad head start hardened into an identity. For roughly half a century after 1890, Alamosa was the hub of narrow-gauge railroading in America, with the Denver & Rio Grande running repair shops, a shipping yard, and its narrow-gauge operations here, reaching out across southwestern Colorado and into northern New Mexico. Trains carried out the valley's ore, lumber, livestock, and — increasingly — its crops. Around the rail town grew the institutions that still define the place: Alamosa became the county seat when Alamosa County was carved out in 1913, and in 1921 the state legislator (and future governor) Billy Adams won authorization for a teachers' normal school to serve the remote valley. It held its first session in the summer of 1925 and is now Adams State University, still educating the region from the south side of town.

Today Alamosa is the practical capital of the San Luis Valley — the largest town in a wide, high, sparsely settled basin, and the place people across the valley drive to for the hospital, the college, the airport, and the shopping. It sits at about 7,543 feet, ringed by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in some of the highest farmland in the United States. The surrounding valley grows a remarkable share of the country's food: it is one of the largest fresh-potato regions in the nation and produces the great majority of Colorado's barley, much of it for the brewing industry. Just up the road, the Great Sand Dunes rise against the mountains, and Alamosa bills itself the gateway to that national park.

Alamosa is a friendly, unpretentious college-and-farm town with a genuine sense of place. Adams State University keeps things lively year-round, and the walkable downtown along Main Street and State Avenue has locally owned cafes, a brewery, and the old railroad heritage on display at the historic depot. The Rio Grande runs right through town, with a riverside trail and the Alamosa Ranch open space for walking and birding — this stretch of the valley is a major stopover on the migratory flyway, and nearby refuges draw thousands of sandhill cranes each spring. The biggest draw sits half an hour northeast: Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, home to the tallest dunes in North America, where Star Dune and Hidden Dune tie for the top at 741 feet. Between the dunes, the mountains, the river, and some of the darkest, clearest night skies in Colorado, it's an outdoor town wrapped around a real working valley.