It’s a Tuesday morning in early January and there’s fresh snow on the Colorado mountains but inside the Off the Beaten Path bookstore café no one’s dressed to ski. An older couple read morning papers. Two middle-aged women chat and laugh. Several people sit alone, sipping coffee and typing on laptops. Smile and they’ll probably smile back.

Welcome to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a town on the Yampa River 160 miles north-west of Denver that’s known to visitors for its 3,000 acres of world-class skiing but valued by locals for its sense of place, history and diversity.

It is a town of entrepreneurs, artists, college students, retirees and parents who every so often raise a new Olympic skier.

Some people here have two jobs in order to pay their rent. Others are easing into retirement with plush, multimillion-dollar second homes. They share a passion for the skiing, fishing, hiking, cycling and horse riding – and they love “the Steamboat” for what it’s not – pretentious or glitzy.

Although their views on continued resort development vary dramatically, second home owners and veterans alike want, seemingly above all else, to belong to the community. And that means working both to preserve the town’s past while embracing change.

Take Elaine Gay, who has spent 79 of her 87 years in Pleasant Valley, 20 minutes south of town. She’s known locally for her book How Pleasant is the Valley, for her irresistible pies and for leading a fight against plans for a massive ski resort in her backyard 20 years ago. In the end, she won a compromise: developers built the high-end, private Catamount Ranch & Club but also put 4,000 acres of open land into a trust.

Gay’s father moved the family to Colorado from Kansas to escape a drought. Her late husband, Bob, was born into one of many Swiss families that settled a century ago, lured by free land for agriculture offered under the Homestead Act. And her son Bill still runs cattle on family land, after a stint travelling Europe as the “Marlboro Man”.

Gay, who occasionally gives talks at Steamboat’s Tread of Pioneers Museum, says she misses the days when ranching families played cards at night and her kids rode horses to school. But she isn’t bitter about Steamboat becoming a ski home destination with a host of new residents. “Most of them are extremely rich people who have built great big houses, [but] they are very easy to get along with,” she says. “I play bridge with a bunch of them. They’re here because they think Steamboat is as friendly as a town gets.”

Of course, she adds, “I don’t think it’s as friendly as it was without them.”

Steamboat’s agricultural heritage resulted in simple farms and frame houses that give the area its distinctive Wild West feel. The Utes (native Americans) once summered here, and several residents can still call themselves cowboys, which gives Steamboat character much deeper than the snow.

“Steamboat is hanging on tight to that image,” says Tom Ross, a ski-bum turned fly fisherman, father and reporter for The Steamboat Pilot & Today newspaper. Indeed, Billy Kidd, an Olympic medallist and Steamboat’s current director of skiing, has for many years worn a Stetson on the slopes.

National TV sports announcer Verne Lundquist and his wife Nancy moved to Steamboat from Dallas in 1984 because, he says, “it was a resort town but it had the feel of living in a real, viable small town as well.”

In their home, elegant chandeliers, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase and walls covered in traditional and modern art reflect the couple’s city roots. But a classic Colorado mountain look is embodied in the high ceilings, exposed wood beams, stone fireplaces and picture windows, offering views of the Yampa Valley and the ski mountain.

Best of all, Lundquist says, they have a large circle of friends in town. The couple play golf more than they ski. And they’re involved in Steamboat’s thriving arts community, including the Strings in the Mountains music festival.

“The great thing about Steamboat in the summer is you can have chamber music in a tent on the mountain while they’re holding a rodeo in town,” Lundquist says. “It’s a community of diverse groups who have in common a love for this gorgeous place and a concern that [the needs] of all of those groups are met somehow.”

Lundquist travels about once a week to cover a football game or golf match, using the airport and the internet to connect him to his work. Similarly, avid skier Scott Tracy, 36, is based in Steamboat and travels as the west coast salesman for a Missouri company. On the one hand, Tracy worries about the resort’s growth and rising cost of living, yet he works for a man who owns land in Steamboat and vacations here. They met on the slopes.

As one would expect, the earliest condominiums for second home owners in Steamboat sprang up adjacent to the ski mountain, three miles from the town centre. A few dozen shops, restaurants and bars – including the notorious and decades-old Tugboat Saloon – form a village below the slopes. But while the resort was at one time separate and distinct from the historic downtown, homes and businesses now line the road and scatter the hillsides in between. Those building new, deluxe homes are less concerned with proximity to the ski hill than having a valley or mountain view.

Shops, eateries and cafés line Lincoln Avenue, downtown’s main artery, which is wide not because it is also US Highway 40 but because ranchers used to drive cattle down the centre (and still do, mostly for show). To the east are several blocks of small, older homes, a few churches and the high school. Many other residents live up and over the hillside, in older condominiums and townhomes. Some have moved north of town, where they can get more house for their money.

Coming from the mountain, the first stop on the right downtown is the Steamboat Springs Health and Recreation Center, built nearly a century ago on and around the Heart Spring – one of several hot springs in the valley – which pumps out about 150 gallons a minute, filling several pools.

Half the town belongs to the centre. “Working here is like a family,” says Jeanne Gilespie, assistant director and a Steamboat resident for more than 30 years. “The town as a whole is like that. If something bad happens to somebody, everybody helps out, whether you know them or not.”

The “health and rec” is an institution, as is Howelsen Hill, Steamboat’s first ski hill, named for Norwegian Carl Howelsen, who in 1913 taught residents that skiing could be a sport, as well as a way to get around. On December 30 last year, residents crowded into the streets downtown to watch hometown boy Ryan St Onge win an aerials competition in a televised US ski team Olympic trial.

But those who live here, says Ross, appreciate Howelsen Hill for much more than the Olympic spotlight. It’s the place where many kids in town learn to ski.