Front Range Storyline

Denver, mountain passes, gold roads, and the high-country imagination

Six places along Colorado's Front Range, climbing from the city to the tundra: the 13th step of the State Capitol cut to read exactly one mile high, the 1914 Beaux-Arts station reborn as Denver's living room, the triangular hotel where a 1911 love triangle ended in gunfire, a wartime hangar that trained 1.1 million airmen, the red sandstone fins a surveyor named for the gods, and the park where Enos Mills lobbied a wilderness into being.

Itinerary

1. Denver: The Mile High City Where the Mountains Begin — The 13th step of the Colorado State Capitol is engraved 'One Mile Above Sea Level' -- exactly 5,280 feet, the precise line where the Great Plains end and the Rockies begin. The thin, dry air shapes everything here: 300 days of sunshine a year, baseballs that fly 9% farther at Coors Field, and a city that banks its fortune on the plains while keeping its soul in the powder fifteen miles west.
2. Denver Union Station — Four competing railroads finally agreed to share one depot at 17th and Wynkoop in 1881; after a fire and two rebuilds, the current Beaux-Arts hall opened in 1914 with 'TRAVEL BY TRAIN' burning in red neon. Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, and FDR passed beneath its vanished Mizpah Arch. Closed in 2012 and reopened in 2014 as the Crawford Hotel and Denver's 'living room,' it now moves over 100,000 passengers a day.
3. Brown Palace Hotel — A week after surviving the Titanic, Molly Brown checked into her favorite suite here. Henry Brown's triangular red-granite wedge opened in 1892 as one of America's first fireproof buildings, its atrium climbing eight floors to a stained-glass ceiling. Every president from Roosevelt to Eisenhower has stayed -- and in 1911 a society love triangle ended with gunfire in the Marble Bar that killed two men.
4. Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum — Hangar 1 on the old Lowry Air Force Base graduated more than 1.1 million military personnel between 1937 and 1994, training airmen for four wars. When the Air Force handed the 182,000-square-foot building to volunteers, they filled it with over fifty aircraft -- a nuclear-capable B-52, an F-14 Tomcat, the swing-wing B-1A prototype -- and a Smithsonian Apollo boilerplate capsule.
5. Garden of the Gods — 'A fit place for the Gods to assemble,' Rufus Cable blurted in 1859, and the name stuck. Red, pink, and white sandstone fins -- laid down by ancient seas more than 300 million years ago, then tilted vertical by the same uplift that raised the Rockies -- rise from the prairie at the foot of Pikes Peak. A railroad man's family gave the land to Colorado Springs in 1909 on one condition: it must stay free, forever.
6. Rocky Mountain National Park — Enos Mills moved to the foot of Longs Peak at fourteen, climbed its 14,259-foot summit more than forty times alone, and lobbied Congress until Woodrow Wilson signed the park into being in 1915. Today the Continental Divide runs through 415 square miles where Trail Ridge Road -- the highest continuous paved road in America -- crosses tundra at 12,183 feet, and a third of the park stands above treeline.