A letter from a local
Nine thousand three hundred feet. One plowed road.
Silverton sits at 9,318 feet in a mineral bowl of the San Juans, one paved highway in and out, population a few hundred souls with strong opinions about snow tires. Silverton Mountain — one lift, guided-only most of the season, expert-everything — is fifteen minutes up the county road and there is nothing else like it in North America.
Summer opens the high country: Ice Lakes' impossible blue at 12,257 feet, the Hardrock 100 course out every door, Kendall Mountain's town-hill trails, and the Animas headwaters running orange-gold through the willows.
It's the most committed town on this list — remote, snowbound, tight-knit. For a certain kind of person that sentence reads as a warning. For the rest of us it read as an invitation.
— Duke