A road trip through Colorado’s mountains

While a heady combination of Rocky mountain majesty, powder snow and camera-ready celebrities has powered Colorado’s best-known resorts to global fame, key too is the Interstate 70. Stretching west from Denver, this artery puts big-name resorts such as Vail, Breckenridge and Aspen within easy reach. In fact, 65 per cent of all skiers who visit Colorado end up in resorts close to its six lanes.

But commit a few extra hours to the road and you can reach a range of less-visited, and arguably more characterful, resorts. Arming ourselves with a Chevy Suburban and a hefty fuel kitty, a friend and I gave the I-70 the slip 125 miles west of Denver and headed south.

Delayed by driving snow and a jack-knifed lorry, we arrived at 1am in Crested Butte to be confronted by a strangely geometric meringue of a mountain glowing blue under a full moon. But this isolated peak’s Disney-esque demeanour belies impressive bite: Crested Butte’s 1,167 acres, rich in 50-degree chutes, gladed steeps and pillow drops, remain Colorado’s premier playground for off-piste fanatics.

The snow is usually good too: 7.6m of “champagne powder”, made light and dry by the air’s passage over western deserts and Colorado’s high altitude, falls here each year. And while the morning after a new storm you might struggle to find a burrito for brunch (“Sorry, we’re closed. Powder day!” read the sign at the Teocalli Tamale), such absentee landlords are likely to be the ones tipping you off on the chairlift as to which bowl ski patrol is about to open.

A $2.5bn programme of improvements is currently under way, intended to draw a more mainstream clientele to Crested Butte, and the upscale (if bland) makeover given to the Club Med, now the Elevation Hotel and Spa, makes it the handiest full-service address in the purpose-built base village. But it’s three miles down the road, in the cute, kitschy town proper (linked by free shuttle buses), where accommodation consists of cosy B&Bs and homes for hire, that the best off-mountain fun is found.

Back in the Chevy, we pressed on towards Colorado’s southwest corner, the landscape becoming ever wilder: soaring canyon walls, hair-raising passes (some often close for bad weather, so checking ahead at www.cotrip.org is essential) and plunging ravines. Those who write off Colorado’s mountains as giant hills, lacking the drama of the Alps, have clearly never made it as far as the San Juan range.

Here lies Durango, a metropolis in mountain terms, with a population of 13,000, and a well-kept monument to its boom years as a service hub for the network of silver and gold mines in the area. On its bustling streets, sushi bars rub shoulders with boutiques and Victorian red-brick confections such as the Strater Hotel. Durango boasts that it is blessed with the same restaurant-to-resident ratio as San Francisco.

But the big story is 27 miles up the road, where the town’s 1,325-acre ski area, called Purgatory, shares a mountain with Colorado’s biggest cat-skiing operation. Cat-skiing – hitching a lift to backcountry descents in a modified pistebasher – may be nicknamed “the poor man’s heli-skiing”, but there’s nothing mean about the 35,000 acres within this outfit’s domain, or the 10 to 12 untracked runs guests achieve per day.

Two hours’ drive north is Colorado Avenue, Telluride, all elegant clapboard villas, historic red-bricks and quaint shopfronts. Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank here in 1889, and since Telluride caught the eye of Oprah Winfrey in the early 1990s, he’s not the only one to make a killing here. Oprah moved in, and other A-listers including Jerry Seinfeld, Daryl Hannah and Tom Cruise followed suit, prompting a boom in house prices.

Every detail of the Telluride ski experience oozes rarefied elegance, from the boutique hotels in the Mountain Village base area, a 12-minute free gondola ride above Telluride proper, to the new-ageish spas and the town’s intimate restaurants. And the resort’s former problem of simply not having enough terrain to justify the journey has over the last four years been resolved with the opening of 500 new in-bounds acres.

That the Triangle Motel, a (just about) converted gas station, is the first listing under “premium lodgings” on Silverton Mountain’s literature was my first indication of just how back-to-basics this ski area is. A 90-minute drive from Telluride, or an hour from Durango, Silverton is manageable as a day trip, but the chance to spend a night in a tiny mountain town (population: 531) untouched by mass tourism held an intrigue of its own.

Conceived as a reaction against the commercialisation of conventional resorts, Silverton Mountain has a no-frills manifesto. Admitting a maximum of around 80 riders per day to its ungroomed 1,819 acres, it has just one ancient chairlift (agonisingly slow and safety-bar free), but also boasts an embarrassment of 50 degree-plus descents, and 10.2m of snow a year.

Bouncing between trepidation and excitement, I paid my $99 for lift use and guiding (compulsory, except for late in the season), rented avalanche-safety gear and did my best to ignore the 30m drops below the lift. At the top, keener groups strapped skis and boards to backpacks and got hiking along the ridge. I secretly rejoiced that ours seemed happy to lap the two gladed runs back to the bottom of the lift.

Unusually, Silverton’s heli-skiing arm offers single drops, so for $159, a few of us tried it for the first time. But at the end of the day our group buckled down to an hour’s march towards a point on the ridge called Tiger’s Claw. And having played the reticent Englishman all day – “no, please, after you” – I was even awarded first tracks on the fast, fluid ride down.

Rupert Mellor travelled with Ski Independence ( www.ski-i.com ), which offers 16-night packages taking in all four resorts, with most lift passes, one-way car hire and flights from Durango back to Denver, from $2,850