Glenwood Springs, Colorado

Glenwood Springs sits where the Roaring Fork River pours into the Colorado, at about 5,761 feet in a deep canyon on Colorado's Western Slope. Long before the town, this was Ute country: for hundreds of years the Parianuche, the "elk people," wintered here to soak in the hot springs and recover after the fall hunts. The largest spring still carries its Ute name, Yampah — "Big Medicine." The settlement that followed the Utes' violent removal in the early 1880s was first, fittingly, named Defiance, a rough camp of miners and traders. In 1882 Isaac Cooper, John Blake, and partners bought out an earlier settler and formed the Defiance Town and Land Company; the town was soon renamed Glenwood Springs after the Iowa hometown of Cooper's wife Sarah, and it incorporated on September 4, 1885, as the seat of Garfield County.

What made the town was the water and one ambitious man. Mining engineer and silver magnate Walter Devereux formed the Glenwood Hot Springs Company, tapped the Yampah spring — which still gushes roughly 3.5 million gallons a day at about 122°F — and on July 4, 1888 opened an enormous swimming pool fed by the mineral water, with a grand red-sandstone bathhouse following in 1890. That pool, still in use, is billed as the world's largest hot springs pool. Devereux went on to help build the Italianate Hotel Colorado, which opened in 1893 grand enough that papers of the day called it a marvel. When the Denver & Rio Grande railroad reached town in 1887, it delivered trainloads of guests to the springs. That same era gave Glenwood its most famous grave: gunfighter and gambler Doc Holliday came seeking a tuberculosis cure and died here in 1887, buried above town at Linwood Cemetery.

The resort reputation stuck. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft made extended stays at the Hotel Colorado, earning it the nickname "the little White House of the West" — and the hotel is happy to share (though it doesn't insist on) a much-told legend that the teddy bear was born there when maids stitched Roosevelt a stuffed bear during his 1905 visit. Today Glenwood Springs is a year-round tourism and service hub of around 10,000 people, wedged in its canyon between Aspen and Vail. I-70 threads through spectacular Glenwood Canyon to reach it, the springs and vapor caves still draw soakers, and the Glenwood Caverns — the old Fairy Caves — sit on the mountain above. It's a working town built around water that has been drawing people to this spot for a very long time.

Glenwood Springs is the rare place where the main attraction is also the town's oldest tradition: a long soak in mineral water. You can float in the big historic hot springs pool with steam rising against the canyon walls, duck into the natural Yampah vapor caves, or try the newer terraced pools tucked along the river. The setting does a lot of the work — the Colorado and Roaring Fork rivers meet right in town, so summer means rafting, paddling, and fishing, and the paved trail through Glenwood Canyon is one of the prettiest bike rides in the state. High above downtown, the Glenwood Caverns and its adventure park ride up the mountain by gondola. Downtown itself is walkable and unpretentious, with the grand old Hotel Colorado, Doc Holliday's hilltop grave, good coffee and breweries, and easy day trips up-valley to Aspen or down to the wine country near Palisade. It feels like a real town, not just a resort.