Durango Days
November 25th, 2007 at 10:26am Michael Conniff 2
DURANGO, COLORADO—If you are like the likes of me, you immediately gauge the desirability of the place unvisited by its proximity to the nearest ski resort.
Thus, the random trip to Utah for a Shakespeare Festival is really a reason to check out Brian’s Head, the resort so far south it’s a three-hour escape from Las Vegas. (National Forest? What National Forest?) The possibility of a job at New Mexico State becomes an Interstate journey on the map to the Angel Fire ski resort some two hours away.
When you visit an actual ski town like this one, the exercise is particularly delicious, particularly when you come upon not one ski resort but two. Durango is known for the resort formerly known as Purgatory and now as Durango Mountain Resort (or, locally, as simply DMR), but little more than an hour away, on the other side of Pagosa Springs, there sits Wolf Creek, in a part of Colorado forest that is a dead-ringer for the deciduous density of New England. In between these two up-and-coming ski areas is the unsung urb of Durango. Here’s what I can tell you about our visit: whenever anyone pines away for old Colorado—the opposite of the Aspen that we call home—I immediately send them to Durango. You can buy actual land and houses in Durango for what are still reasonable prices, but that’s not why I send them south.
I recommend Durango to people because it is just way cool. From the Common Grounds coffee shop to the Seasons Restaurant to Nobody’s Inn, the adorable place where we stayed for the weekend, Durango has the sophistication of a small, hip city and the vibe of a college town, in part because of Fort Lewis College on a beautiful ridge above town. If you can do without Big 12 sports, Durango out-Boulders Boulder, with multiple coffee stops, great restaurants, and a down-home Durango Diner experience that had us come back two days in a row, without even a soupcon of discussion about the choice.
We even segued far enough off the path for Friday Night Lights at Durango High, where the nice-lady ticket-taker let us through the turnstiles without paying on the promise that we just wanted a quick feel. Durango High was getting thumped, but I was encouraged to read in the morning paper that the third-string QB, all five-foot-nine and 160 pounds of him, had emerged from obscurity to rally the team to a far more respectable loss than was in the offing when we left.
Now for the specifics. Common Grounds was everything you might expect from a cool-town coffee shop, a place for locals to be accepted as is, including the Dad and his son playing with the blocks Sunday morning. The Seasons Restaurant was nothing short of fabulous, just this side of too-cool-for school, with great steaks and salads and big drinks with look-who’s-here sightline.
Neil Young, it turned out, had been there earlier in the week: he was in town, so we were told, to ride the vintage Durango-Silverton railroad. How cool is that?
Nobody’s Inn captured the same vibe. You enter the back of the building, park your car, and head into rooms like “Everybody’s,” where we stayed. It was more like an apartment than an inn, with a full kitchen, a table, and a lovely bedroom for bedding down. When you are ready to partake of Durango, you go out the other way and walk down a staircase and onto the main drag, directly across the street from Common Grounds, and down a few blocks from the Seasons restaurant.
My future better-half tells me the shopping was every bit as good and interesting as everything else we saw. I can’t wait to go back for the skiing.
Entry Filed under: Colorado, Family Resorts, United Post, United States, Durango Mountain Resort, Pagosa Springs, Wolf Creek
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