Salida, the Gateway on the Arkansas

You are standing in Salida, a mountain town wrapped around a bend in the Arkansas River, cradled by some of the highest peaks in the Rocky Mountains. The name is a small riddle. Salida is a Spanish word that means exit, or outlet, or gateway, and the town earned it honestly.

This is the spot where the Arkansas River finally spills out of its wide upper valley and pours into the tighter canyons downstream, on its long run toward the Royal Gorge. According to the most repeated account, the name was suggested around the time of the town's founding by people connected to Alexander Hunt, a former territorial governor of Colorado who had become a railroad man. One version credits the governor's wife with the idea, another credits Hunt himself, who had recently traveled in Mexico and thought the Spanish word for exit suited a town at the mouth of a valley.

The railroad is why Salida exists at all. In the year eighteen eighty, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad pushed its narrow gauge line up the Arkansas and reached this place, and Salida became a division point, a hub where trains were serviced and crews changed and rail lines fanned out in several directions. For decades the whistle of the railroad set the rhythm of the town.

Around Salida rise the Sawatch Range and the Collegiate Peaks, a wall of summits over fourteen thousand feet, including Mount Shavano, named for a Ute chief, and famous for a shape of melting snow called the Angel of Shavano that appears on its face each spring. To the west, United States Highway Fifty climbs to Monarch Pass, crossing the Continental Divide, the great spine of the continent where rivers choose whether to flow toward the Atlantic or the Pacific. Salida sits at roughly seven thousand feet above sea level, and today it is known for three things above all.

It is a whitewater town, home to a whitewater festival billed as America's oldest on the Arkansas River. It has one of the largest historic downtowns in Colorado, block after block of brick storefronts from the railroad era. And it became one of the first towns in the state certified as a creative district, where old mining and railroad buildings now hold galleries and studios.

Gateway town, river town, art town. Salida is all three.