Best Skiing Destinations: Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Though it hosts one of Colorado’s largest and most well-known ski resorts, the town of Steamboat Springs, population 12,088, has a character that is unique in the state. Northern Colorado is ranching country, and Steamboat is still an authentic, working cowboy town that has evolved into one of the most important ski towns in America. You won’t find cutesy false-front stores here, but you will find the city-owned Howelsen Hill, the longest continuously operating ski area in Colorado, where the town’s Winter Sports Club practices on seven wooden ski jumps contoured out of the mountain. There’s also a Winter Carnival every February, when truckloads of snow are dumped on the town’s broad main street for ski-joring competitions and a high school band that comes through on skis.

Three miles away, rising high above the Yampa River Valley, is the Steamboat Ski Resort, spreading white ribbons across a forested massif of six rounded peaks. Though offering less puckering expert terrain than some areas in the state, what Steamboat does deliver is its signature light powder, world-class tree skiing, and snowboarding through endless groves of aspen. The ski school is considered one of the best in the country, and Steamboat claims to have produced 79 Olympic skiers and snowboarders, more than any town in America.

Like many of Colorado's most attractive towns, Steamboat Springs has great hot springs. The hot springs in Steamboat are down an adventurous drive north of town that brings you to a riverside canyon in one of the most perfect soaking settings imaginable.

In fact, the town got its name from its famed water works. Fur trappers who visited the area in the late 1800s heard the bubbling sound of one of the local hot springs and thought it sounded like a steamboat coming down the Yampa River.

Steamboat is known, also, for its long-standing Western heritage — with a more than 100-year-old summer rodeo — and deep-seated ski heritage. The town has two ski areas: Steamboat Ski Resort and Howelsen Hill, the oldest, continuously used ski area in Colorado and home to nearly 90 Winter Olympians.

Call Rawhide Travel and Tours at (602) 843-5100 to book your holiday travel today. Check out our website: rawhidetravel.com.

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