Winter Park, Colorado

Winter Park owes its existence to a hole through the mountains. In the early 1920s a construction camp went up on the west side of the Continental Divide to house crews boring the Moffat Tunnel, the 6.2-mile railroad tunnel that would finally give Denver a direct rail link to the Western Slope. The camp and the site took the plain name West Portal, for the tunnel's western mouth. When railroad traffic first ran through the tunnel in 1928, the work that had sustained nearby settlements moved on, and in 1932 a man named Doc Graves bought ten acres and set up a cluster of tourist cabins, a cafe, and a service station he called Hideaway Park, aimed at hunters and fishermen. That little roadside village on U.S. Highway 40, just below the tunnel's portal, became the seed of the town.

What turned Hideaway Park into a ski town came from Denver, not Grand County. George Cranmer, Denver's manager of Parks and Improvements and the same visionary behind Red Rocks Amphitheatre, saw the snowy basin at the tunnel's west portal as a natural winter playground. With U.S. Forest Service authorization, the City and County of Denver built tows and trails there, and the Winter Park ski area opened for the 1939-40 season, with a J-bar tow, dollar lift tickets, and skiers arriving by train straight through the Moffat Tunnel — some 10,000 people turned out for the grand opening in January 1940. Remarkably, Denver owned and operated the mountain for more than sixty years as part of its Mountain Parks system, until the city leased operations to Intrawest for the 2001-02 season. The ski area's name eventually pulled the town along with it.

The town itself incorporated in 1978, formally trading the name Hideaway Park for Winter Park to match its famous mountain. Sitting at nearly 9,000 feet along the Fraser River valley, it grew into a classic Colorado resort town without ever losing its railroad bones — the ski train still runs, revived in 2017 as the Winter Park Express. One of the mountain's proudest legacies is the National Sports Center for the Disabled, which began in 1970 when a Winter Park ski instructor, Hal O'Leary, taught a group of children with amputations from Denver's Children's Hospital to ski, and grew into one of the world's largest and oldest adaptive-sports organizations. Today Winter Park is a year-round outdoor town, still shaped by the tunnel, the railroad, and Denver's long stewardship of its slopes.

Winter Park today is a friendly, unpretentious mountain town strung along the Fraser River valley, where the ski resort's base sits right at the edge of things and the historic ski train still rolls in through the Moffat Tunnel. In winter it's all about the mountain — big, varied terrain topping out at Parsenn Bowl above treeline, plus Nordic trails, tubing, and one of the best adaptive-ski programs anywhere at the National Sports Center for the Disabled. Come summer the valley turns green and gold and the town becomes a mountain-biking hub, with lift-served downhill and a famous network of singletrack, along with hiking, fly-fishing the Fraser, and easy access to the wide-open ranch country around Fraser and Tabernash. It's a walkable, laid-back place with a real year-round community, close enough to Denver for a weekend but high and wild enough to feel like the mountains.