Colorado Springs, Colorado

Colorado Springs sits at the foot of Pikes Peak, the 14,115-foot fourteener that is the highest summit of the southern Front Range and looms over the whole city from the west. The town itself sits high too, around 6,035 feet, where the short-grass plains run straight into the foothills. Just northwest of downtown, that collision shows itself plainly at Garden of the Gods, a free city park where slabs of red sandstone tilt as much as 300 feet out of the ground, with Pikes Peak framed behind them.

The town was founded in 1871 by General William Jackson Palmer, a Civil War veteran and railroad man who ran his Denver and Rio Grande line south and set out to build a genteel resort and health destination rather than a mining camp. He wanted homes, schools, and colleges, and he wanted it dry: early Colorado Springs Company deeds prohibited the sale, production, and consumption of alcohol, and a violator forfeited the deed back to the company. The clause survived a challenge that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1879, and it wasn't held unenforceable until a Colorado court ruled against it in 1963, finding the company had failed to enforce it consistently. The resort drew so many British investors and visitors that locals nicknamed it 'Little London.' One of those visiting easterners, Wellesley College professor Katharine Lee Bates, made the trip to the top of Pikes Peak in the summer of 1893 while teaching at Colorado College, and the view there moved her to draft the lines that became 'America the Beautiful.'