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.