Accidentally Magellan: Colorado

Colorado is a state that seems determined to make the rest of America feel inadequate. Here, mountains rise dramatically into skies of almost insulting blue, rivers rush through valleys, and people appear to regard walking uphill carrying a thirty-pound backpack as a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Saturday. Colorado became the 38th state in 1876, giving it the cheerful nickname of the Centennial State, but its story began long before American statehood. Indigenous peoples had lived across the region for thousands of years, followed by Spanish exploration, Mexican influence, fur traders, settlers, miners, and prospectors. Then came the gold rush, which transformed Colorado almost overnight. Denver grew from a frontier settlement into a major city, while the mountains became both obstacle and opportunity. Colorado has been reinventing itself ever since.

The state's greatest attraction, however, requires very little reinvention. The Rocky Mountains are already doing most of the work. They stretch across Colorado like an enormous geographical barricade, producing forests, alpine meadows, deep canyons, high deserts, and peaks that seem to have been designed specifically to make human beings feel small. The wildlife is equally impressive. Elk wander through mountain valleys in enormous herds, bighorn sheep balance on cliffs with irritating confidence, and moose lumber through wetlands looking like someone accidentally released a prehistoric cow. Black bears, mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, pronghorn, beavers, marmots, and bald eagles inhabit the state as well. Colorado's wilderness is therefore not simply a collection of scenic backgrounds for photographs. It is an enormous biological neighborhood, and humans are merely the residents who insist on building roads through it.

Where there are mountains, there are inevitably stories about things that supposedly live in them. Colorado folklore contains ghosts, lost mines, mysterious lights, buried treasure, strange creatures, and enough tales of unexplained happenings to keep a particularly imaginative camper awake all night. The mining era produced legends about prospectors who vanished while searching for riches, while modern Colorado has contributed its own assortment of UFO sightings and Bigfoot encounters. The mountains themselves encourage such stories. After all, when you are standing in a remote forest beneath a fourteen-thousand-foot peak and hear something moving in the darkness, the rational explanation is probably a deer. But there is always a tiny part of the brain that whispers, "Yes, but what if it is a six-foot hairy mountain creature?"

Modern Colorado culture is an extraordinary mixture of old frontier independence and aggressively modern outdoor enthusiasm. Denver offers restaurants, museums, music, professional sports, technology companies, and all the amenities expected of a major American city. Beyond it lie ranching communities, mining towns, university towns, ski resorts, and mountain villages. Yet nearly everyone seems to share an enthusiasm for being outside. Colorado has acquired a reputation as one of America's fittest states because its residents have an almost pathological relationship with exercise. They run trails, climb mountains, cycle enormous distances, ski, snowboard, kayak, paddleboard, and hike. A Coloradan may casually mention that they "went for a little hike" and then describe an expedition involving twelve miles, three thousand feet of elevation gain, and a summit higher than most European mountains.

And then there is Colorado's other famous recreational activity: drugs. The state's decision to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012, alongside Washington, transformed Colorado into a symbol of America's changing attitude toward cannabis. Dispensaries became ordinary businesses, cannabis tourism became a recognizable phenomenon, and the state acquired a reputation as a kind of national laboratory for drug liberalization. More recently, Colorado has also adopted laws permitting regulated access to certain psychedelic substances. To outsiders, this can make the entire state appear to be one enormous smoke-filled mountain retreat populated by people who hike into the wilderness to contemplate the meaning of existence. The reality is considerably less dramatic. Colorado's drug laws are relaxed in some respects, but they certainly do not make every drug legal, and most Coloradans remain occupied with the mundane business of work, family, school, and paying astonishingly expensive rent.

The stranger truth about Colorado is that beneath all these stereotypes lies a remarkably ordinary place populated by remarkably welcoming people. The marijuana dispensaries, ski resorts, fitness enthusiasts, craft breweries, and spectacular scenery can make Colorado seem like a theme park designed for adventurous adults. Yet there are families shopping at farmers' markets, ranchers tending cattle, volunteers maintaining hiking trails, students drinking coffee, and neighbors helping one another after heavy snowstorms. The famous outdoor culture is not merely a marketing invention. Many residents genuinely care about preserving the landscapes around them, even if they occasionally disagree about how that should be accomplished. There is a friendliness here that can be easy to overlook when everyone appears to be in a hurry to climb something.

Ultimately, Colorado is far more interesting than either of its most common stereotypes: the pristine mountain playground or the great American drug haven. It is both, but it is also something considerably larger. It is a state shaped by Indigenous history, frontier ambition, mining, ranching, conservation, immigration, urban growth, and a deep fascination with the wilderness. Its mountains are spectacular, its wildlife abundant, its folklore wonderfully peculiar, and its culture a strange but effective marriage of rugged independence and modern progressivism. You can come expecting marijuana, skiing, and extraordinarily fit strangers jogging past you at altitude, only to discover that the real attraction is simpler. Colorado is beautiful, its wilderness is astonishing, and its people are often happy to welcome you in—provided, of course, that you promise not to block the trail while taking photographs.