Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Steamboat Springs sits in the broad Yampa Valley of northwest Colorado, a place the Ute people knew for centuries — they summered here for the elk, deer, and other game, gathered the edible yampa root, and soaked in the mineral hot springs that bubble up around the valley. The town's own name comes from those springs: the story, repeated by the city and other local histories, is that early French trappers heard one spring's rhythmic chugging and took it for the paddle of a steamboat coming up the river. James H. Crawford, a homesteader, arrived in 1874, built a cabin near the springs, and is remembered as the town's founder. After the Utes were removed from the region around 1880, white settlement filled in, Crawford organized the Steamboat Springs townsite company in 1884, and the town platted around the water he'd staked.

The town incorporated in 1900 with Crawford as its first mayor, and for its first decades it ran on cattle and coal. When the railroad reached the valley in 1909 it turned Steamboat into one of the largest cattle-shipping points in the West. But the thing that would define Steamboat arrived on skis. Carl Howelsen, a Norwegian ski-jumping showman billed as the 'Flying Norseman,' settled here in the early 1910s and helped build the town's ski-jumping hill. Howelsen made the first jump there in February 1915, and that hill — later named Howelsen Hill in his honor — is the oldest continuously operating ski area in North America. Howelsen also helped launch the Steamboat Winter Carnival in 1914, the oldest continuous winter carnival west of the Mississippi.

That early jump grew into something remarkable: Steamboat has produced roughly a hundred Winter Olympians — more, by the resort's own account, than any other town in the country — which is why it trademarked the nickname 'Ski Town USA.' The mountain that towers over town tells the local story in a single name — it was called Storm Mountain until homegrown racer Buddy Werner, a three-time Olympian and a Steamboat son, died in an avalanche near St. Moritz, Switzerland, in April 1964; the community renamed it Mount Werner in his memory. Today Steamboat is two towns at once: the big destination ski resort on Mount Werner, and the working ranch town along the Yampa, where Lincoln Avenue keeps its Western-town feel and the Winter Carnival still shuts Main Street for skiers pulled behind galloping horses.

Steamboat pulls off a rare trick: it's a world-class ski town that still feels like a ranch community. In winter the light powder that locals call 'champagne powder' piles up on Steamboat Resort, while right in town Howelsen Hill lets kids learn to jump on the same slope Olympians trained on. But the year-round soul of the place is the Yampa River, which runs straight through downtown — people tube it on hot afternoons, fish it, and paddle it, then soak sore muscles at the Old Town Hot Springs in the middle of town or drive up to the rustic pools at Strawberry Park. Lincoln Avenue keeps its Western-town feel, with saddle shops and steakhouses alongside newer cafes and galleries, and the surrounding valley is genuine cattle country with big open ranchland and aspen-covered hills. It's an outdoorsy, friendly, unpretentious place where a day can hold skiing, a river float, and a hot-spring soak.