Steamboat Springs: Cowboys, Powder, and Champions
Near Steamboat Springs, Colorado
Steamboat Springs sits at about six thousand eight hundred sixty-seven feet in the Yampa Valley of northwest Colorado, a ranching town that became one of the most celebrated ski destinations in North America without ever quite forgetting what it was. Surrounded by the Park Range of the Rocky Mountains, Steamboat carries two identities that coexist with remarkable ease: the working cattle ranches of Routt County, where cowboys still ride fence lines through broad meadows, and a ski mountain that has sent more Winter Olympians than any other town on the continent.
The Yampa River runs through downtown, cold and clean, fed by snowmelt from the mountains that define the skyline. The valley was home to the Yamparika band of the Ute Nation for centuries before settlers arrived in the eighteen seventies, drawn by the same rich grazing land and abundant water that had made it a favored Ute hunting ground. Within a decade the Utes had been forced from the valley entirely, and by the eighteen eighties cattle ranching had become Routt County's foundation industry.
The railroad arrived in nineteen oh nine, when the Denver, Northwestern and Pacific Railway pushed through the mountains and connected Steamboat to the wider world. Tourism grew slowly alongside ranching. Howelsen Hill, a ski jump built in nineteen fourteen by Norwegian immigrant Carl Howelsen, became the training ground for generations of local athletes. The Winter Olympians who have come from Steamboat Springs represent every discipline from alpine skiing to Nordic combined.
Steamboat also mourned one of its greatest sons. Buddy Werner, born here in nineteen thirty-six and widely considered the finest American ski racer of his generation, died in an avalanche in Switzerland in nineteen sixty-four at the age of twenty-eight. The mountain above town bears his name.
The Tread of Pioneers Museum on Oak Street collects the artifacts and stories of all these eras, from Ute arrowheads to Olympic memorabilia. Steamboat Springs does not choose between its cattle roots and its champion skiers. It carries both.
