Ouray lied when it called itself the Switzerland of North America. There was nothing wrong with it – it’s truly a beautiful town – but it’s at at the foot of long, slopey mountains with bright-red colors. It feels like you’re in Colorado when you’re in Ouray, even when you’re walking the city streets.
Telluride. Now Telluride feels like it’s Switzerland. There’s big, sharp slopes with ski runs, a big old gondola, and jagged peaks well above the treeline frowning down. The box canyon that it sits in is indescribably glacial in origin. The buildings in town give off a subtle elegance that come from years of your town being overrun by the richest people in the United States. It was like driving through a dream to drift through the city streets.
Unless you were looking for parking and somewhere to eat during Mountainfilm. Which was where I found myself on May 26, 2024 on the last day of our long Colorado weekend.
It took a while, but we eventually found a parking spot on San Juan Avenue on the southern edge of town, a few blocks away from the gondola entrance. There were plenty of restaurants around, but a brewery with some solid food sounded good, so Elizabeth and I settled on Stronghouse Brew Pub. Big advantage in my eyes: they had outdoor seating, which let us enjoy the gorgeous afternoon that was developing in town. We each got a beer, split a pretzel, and I got a brat to go with it. The whole meal was a little pricey ($70 or so), but I’m guessing that’s a fairly common theme in Telluride.
There was kind of a dilemma we had to work through. You see, Telluride is a famous ski resort town, but they also try to maintain the core downtown charm. That means the ski resort itself is actually well removed from the downtown area – on an entirely different mountain face. It’s sort of like Breckenridge in that way, but in Breckenridge the resort is just further up the same mountain. Here, there’s no roads that cross the ridge, though there are a few ski hills down directly into town. Therefore, if you’re a skier you probably want to stay exclusively on the Mountain Village side of things (We came back with Elizabeth’s family for Christmas and stayed in Mountain Village, actually).
I had gotten us a dinner reservation at Altezza at the Peaks, a restaurant inside one of those fancy Mountain Village resorts. To get up there, we had a couple of options. The primary way to get back and forth between the two villages is the Telluride gondola, which is kind of unique in that it’s completely free to ride at any point. We could take the gondola up to Mountain Village around dinnertime and then take it back down to get to our car when we left. Alternatively, to make it a little easier to get out of the mountains and back to the cabin, we could drive all the way around the mountain and up to Mountain Village, then ride the gondola back into Telluride for a part of the afternoon before coming back up around dinnertime.
We chose door number two. That did require getting into our car for a 7-mile round trip drive, but it was so worth it. Once we’d gotten back to the mouth of the box canyon that Telluride was in, a roundabout led us south over the toe of the ridge that the ski village sat on. At the top was a large meadow with a view of Mount Wilson, a previously (to us) undiscovered peak in the southwest corner of the San Juans. At 14,251 feet, covered in late-May snow, and sparkling in the midafternoon sun, it was gorgeous. Here’s the zoomed out view.
Everything about it screams “glorious”. I mean, this is what they painted back in the 19th century. It’s what they write country songs about. What could top it?
Maybe the zoomed in view:
Now I understand why Coor’s Light chose the image of Mount Wilson to be on their cans of ice-cold refreshing beer (it actually is).
After that kind of view, any old ski village would be anticlimactic. With that said, Mountain Village had the kind of quaint charm that would make anyone rapidly warm up to it. We drove in on the main boulevard. The right side of the road led uphill, and there were plenty of winding mountain roads that branched off of it leading up to people’s private residences. I wouldn’t exactly call them neighborhoods, because anyone who lives on the mountain slopes in Telluride is able to afford to keep their next-door neighbors far, far away.
There was a small parking garage near the Village Market, where about 7 months later Elizabeth and I would find ourselves grocery shopping for Christmas Eve dinner. The garage carried a sweeping view of the mostly clear lower ski slopes, the larger ski-in resorts just ahead, and beyond it, the backside of the Sneffels mountain group which towers above Telluride. It was still a little bit of a walk to the village center from here, but I have good news: we didn’t need to walk it. You see, when the city of Telluride was putting in that free gondola, they added a spur from the village center over to the Village Market. With it being May, there was absolutely no wait to get onto this mini-gondola. Elizabeth and I got into our gondola car and gawked at the swanky resorts, the aspens just beginning to bud, and the astounding mountain views.
The mini-gondola leads westward into the center of the ski area. From there, you get let out onto an elevated pavilion much closer to the actual Telluride town gondola. Elizabeth and I made the transfer to complete the process of traveling all the way back from which we’d came.
The Telluride gondola rises almost 1,000 feet from the Mountain Village station to the station at the top of the mountain at San Sophia. The two of us rode with a local worker who kept us on the lookout for wildlife, though there was none to be found. There’s a very swanky restaurant at the San Sophia station – you better believe Pam took us up to it on Christmas night 2024 for dinner – as well as a portrait of five dogs riding in one of the gondola cars, the “gondogola” (there is currently a 1,000-piece puzzle of the gondogola in my living room that may never be finished).
Then we were up and over the San Sophia station and into the Telluride side of things. It was much steeper – and much more insanely beautiful.
Breath-taking.
After our gondola ride was over, Elizabeth and I were back in the bustling streets of Telluride. It was about 2:00 pm and we didn’t have any plans until dinnertime, so this was as good a time as any to get ice cream (although I ended up not finding any place worth my time) and go gift shopping. Elizabeth made full use of her time in the downtown area. She scoured the gift shops for a Telluride sweatshirt, then scoured them again when the first search didn’t pop out anything to her satisfaction. Meanwhile I wandered happily alongside of her, side-stepping Mountainfilm goers and enjoying the sunshine. We spent a couple of hours in town with not much to do. That’s honestly such an underrated way to spend vacation.
With a similar lack of resolve, we headed back up the gondola toward Mountain Village. There was still an hour or two before our dinner reservation, but Mountain Village was a little less crowded. There was a village area with restaurants and other apres ski things. I was still determined to find my ice cream despite the fact that this was a bit more Swiss and a bit less American in design. Lo and behold, there was an ice cream shop. They had soft-serve vanilla and they had a beverage fountain to get Elizabeth a Coke, which was all we needed. On top of that, there were chairs up on the platform between the two gondolas. I sat down in one of them to take some pictures even though my camera had a low battery by this point.
And it was such a comfy spot with the sun shining on our backs. I ate my ice cream, then closed my eyes to enjoy it…
And next thing I knew, it was half an hour later. Elizabeth and I had fallen asleep sitting up in our chairs. If you want some sort of definition of vacation bliss, two of the most high-strung vacationers in the world doing that at the same time has to be it. Neither of us suffered sunburn during naptime, a feat which is more impressive than it seems at 8,500 feet.
Eventually we roused ourselves from the chairs and started walking toward our dinner reservation. Our reservation was at Altezza at the Peaks, a restaurant inside of one of the largest ski-in, ski-out hotels in the village. To get there, we had to wander through the ski village – a rustic center with restaurants, a skating rink, and cobblestone paths. Where Vail had blown me away with its ostentatiousness during my first ski visit in 2019-2020, Mountain Village was simultaneously more understated and also way, way, way fancier. It was easy to see that this was where rich people really go.
The Peaks was a short walk away. It’s also ski-in, ski-out, and basically has its own ski run leading down and away from the back door toward the chairlifts all the way at the bottom of the mountain. The inside of the resort was amazing. There were big glass windows everywhere to view out of that reminded me a bit of the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton Lakes. The view was less lake-y, and more “epic-looking golf course-y”.
Elizabeth loved the idea of declaring apres ski every evening (although they didn’t do it anywhere near as fun as the Madeleine Hotel, where we stayed in December. There, they had a guy blow a horn with a dog next to him, and then hotel staff passed out champagne and hot chocolate). All in all, The Peaks was enough to make you want to be rich enough to stay there.
The restaurant’s website claimed to be casual dining. Mistrusting of that, we had packed a change of clothes and used the lobby bathroom to change. It was nice to get out of the grimy hiking clothes and into something a little bit nicer. We even tried to get a Christmas-card-esque photo (but if there’s anything to be learned from the Many Glacier Hotel in 2022, you never actually want to use that as your Christmas card) on the back patio. You don’t get to see the photo, though, because WordPress won’t let me upload it.
It would have been easy to spend $200 at the restaurant. We tried to be a little more cautious than that after a pretty expensive lunch. Instead of getting the charcuterie AND drinks, Elizabeth and I really roughed it and just got the charcuterie.
Please try not to feel too sorry for us. As you can see, we were trying to stay brave in the face of difficult circumstances.
Vacation was winding down by this point. It’s one of my least favorite, but also one of my favorite things about the short weekend trips that Elizabeth and I do so often these days. It stinks because just as you’re getting into the swing of things, it’s time to do stuff like checking into your flight, and then realizing it’s your last night in Colorado. But the short trips also let us stay in the groove of going 1,000,000 mph, jam-packing each day, and then realizing that our next trip is only 6 weeks away. How could you ever be too far down in the dumps when you realize that Beach Week is coming up soon?
The sun was just starting to drop toward the horizon by this point, though. In late May, that means you still have two more hours of daylight left. With that said, driving through the mountains after dark is not something either of us finds enjoyable, and we’d had already had our fun day in Telluride. It was time to drive back to Montrose. We got in the village gondola and rode it back over to the market, marveling at the mountains one final time in the golden evening light. The parking garage where our car was parked offered one final panorama:
Good night, Telluride. Only 7 months remained until we would be driving the San Juan Skyway back in its direction.
Speaking of the San Juan Skyway… this blog series isn’t quite done yet. There’s still one final post from the May 2024 San Juans trip, and it will mostly be centered around our drive back to Montrose that night. Because as Elizabeth and I soared down the open road during golden hour, we came across the same scenic overlook from earlier. And good god, was it amazing.
