Living here isn’t all fly fishing and backpacking. I’m a fourth generation Coloradoan, have lived in Colorado almost my entire life, including a decade on the Front Range, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve waded in a pristine mountain stream. If you live close enough to the mountains to enjoy them once in a while, you spend most of your time fighting traffic and looking for just a few more cubic inches of elbow room. The state’s infrastructure is crumbling (thank you SO much, Doug Bruce!) our schools aren’t worth a crap (with the rare exception where the rich folk live) and higher education is a lot less “higher” than it used to be. We’re in the middle of one of the worst and longest droughts on record and water is so scarce three of the six states that border us are suing us over water rights.
I moved out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for college. I’m in my final semester here and have not grown tired of the beauty. I will grant that I’m spoiled even by Santa Fe standards, because the trail that leads to this* view starts in a parking lot about two minutes across campus from my dorm, and even on the other side of campus, once you get off the couple miles or so of wilderness that the college owns, you’re in a state forest for quite a few more miles. The sunsets are worth a million bucks.
I don’t hike half as often as I should, but I do still appreciate the beauty. Then again, I grew up in New Jersey, immediately across the river from Philadelphia, where you need to drive halfway across the state to find anything that hasn’t been paved over. I’m also quite ready to leave, but that’s probably just because I’m very much a city person, and Santa Fe is not a City city.
(If you’re a serious skier, northern NM is a great place, apparently, but I’ve never been so I really can’t speak on that.)
I moved to California from the Bronx in NYC and a day hasn’t gone by in 25 years where I haven’t been grateful for the beautiful rural area that I get to live in now. After a few days in East coast cities I’m climbing the walls to get away from the crowds and concrete. Maybe the effect isn’t as strong if you didn’t grow up in slums but I’ve never regretted it for a minute and I’d never move back.
I moved out to Salt Lake City from the Northeast. It was to finish my degree. I loved it – SLC was better than where I’d been living by far. I never did get over the scenery (the first time I saw snow on the Oquirrh Mountains, it took my beath away), and the availability of the outdoors (hiking, cycling, and skiing) was incredible.
But I came back East when it came time to get a job. No jobs for me in SLC, and I preferred the East to California.
I grew up in NJ and finished up school and lived a few years after in Boulder, CO. About 7 years total. When I first moved out there I lived on an old farm near Niwot on the flat lands. Watching the constellations rise up from the horizon was just awesome. I delivered pizza in Longmont for a summer and the highlight of my day was watching the afternoon thunderstorms form up over the front range and roll through. More awesomeness!
I never tired of all the places to go and hanging out with my friends but I did tire of not being able to find any sort of meaningful work, and things just got kind of stale job-wise and music-wise, so I came back east. As much as I wanted to stay there, I wanted to get off my duff and do some other things more.
One of the things that kept me from moving back is that there isn’t a whole lot of work out out there for what I do. So if I moved there and got laid off I’d be SOL. Here, if I get laid off from company A I can go to work for company B or C, or do contract work, or work for an outsourcing firm. Or…or… Opportunities don’t exist in the front range or if they do, it’s very shallow.
I used to take my vacations out in NM, CO, UT, AZ, but haven’t been out since my twins came along 6 years ago. I’m planning on taking the family out this summer (finally).
I really enjoyed my time out there. I’d highly recommend it if you’re unencumbered and want to give it a shot and aren’t too picky about where you work. If you can line up a decent job, then you’ve got it made.
I moved from northern Indiana to New Mexico (Albuquerque area) 9 years ago, specifically for the mountains and sunshine. I love living here and am still amazed by the scenery around here.
I go hiking and camping a lot; I live in the desert, but in an hour I can be in rugged, mountainous terrain with crystal clear streams, or red rock canyons, or on a dormant volcano hiking on lava flows, or exploring 1,000 year-old Indian ruins.
One of the best things about living here is the weather. 300 days of sunshine a year, but we’re at 5,000 ft. elevation, so it never gets too hot. I lived here 3 years before I ever saw it get over 100 degrees F. It gets into the 90’s a lot in the summer, but the humidity is low so it’s quite tolerable. Winters are mild (it’s been in the high 50’s all week, and sunny)- we sometimes get snow but it usually melts the next day. Yet there is lots of snow in the mountains. I can go play in the snow when I want and go back to warm sunshine when I’m done.
I’d love to. I’m used to hard winters (Minnesota & Wisconsin) and I’ve vacationed out West the past 2 summers. I love the recreation out there. If I could find a job in any of the Rocky Mountain states (just finished college: geology/GIS/cartography) I’d be in heaven.
Oh, I just remembered another point: if you tend to get sunburn easily, look very carefully at what climate/altitude you’re moving to if you do move. Here in Santa Fe (elevation 7,000 feet), I have gotten sunburn while sitting outside for 20 minutes in May, at 9 AM. There’s a fairly high rate of skin cancer out here, because - as Bumbershoot said - it’s always sunny, and there’s not much atmosphere to soften it.
I am a lawyer in Wyoming, Altair - and it is a very different law practice than I had in Dallas, Ohio or New York.
The biggest concern people have who move in from other parts are 1) the long cold winters and 2) the isolation. Don’t get me wrong, I gave up a lot of income to move here (or back here as I grew up in the area), but I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Feel free to PM me about what I know about Wyoming in general and the Rocky Mountain legal world in particular.
I moved from S.C. to Colorado (after college in MA) years ago, and haven’t regretted it for one day since. It’s definitely an adjustment - I still have to remind myself to put on sunscreen, even in the winter, dammit! There are issues with Denver - it was a small big city when I got here, it’s morphed into a big(ger) city since then, and much of what Sunrazor wrote is true. But those are outweighed, for me, by the view from my apartment balcony, the sunsets and sunrises I experience regularly, the camping and hiking available to me with very little effort.
Yea, it’s cold, but honestly I get colder when I go back home - that lack of humidity that makes “dry” heat more bearable also makes dry cold more bearable. You’ll have to stock up on some layers (the number and type of which will depend on where you move and what you like to do). However, it was in the high 60s and low 70s in Denver for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week (it’s back in the low 30s and snowing right now), so the weather is amazingly unpredictable. You get used to dressing in layers, and shedding and donning them as appropriate.
And have I mentioned the view? In my mind, there really isn’t a comparison. I grew up in the Piedmont area near the Blue Ridge Mountains, and while they are lovely, the Rockies have a breath-taking beauty that stuns me regularly.
Which is a really good reason to consider Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, even Nebraska or Kansas. We’re full. We were full 20 years ago. Many posters in this thread have mentioned “the view”. What they don’t mention is that “the view” soon fills up with rooftops. And what’s particularly irritating is late-comers bitching about how growth is ruining Colorado. Everybody wants to be the last guy to move to Colorado.
It’s like that here in coastal California too, and people seem to think that the gates should have been locked the day after they got here and newcomer is defined as anyone that got here after them. I can understand why a lot of older people are upset because in their lifetime they’ve seen their little laid-back beach town first grow into the home of a large university and then into a bedroom community of Silicon Valley. The cheap beach bungalows have either been torn down for motels or replaced with expensive condos and now we’re either the second or third least affordable area in California. Their kids can’t afford to live here when they grow up, and even old rural properties were costing between 750K and a million before the housing slump. We still have the scenic beauty and wonderful climate but the town barely resembles what it was in the 70s. Everyone used to blame the students and hippies but now they blame the wealthy people building McMansions and the illegal aliens sucking up the social services and filling the low-end housing. Change happens and it’s sad to see a place you love get more crowded, but so it goes. Everyone wants someone to blame.
I fell in love with California the first time I visited. Who wouldn’t want to live in Napa Valley or Sonoma? Even Lodi and Stockton were somehow exotic and inviting to this High Plains country boy. I’ll visit over and over again, leaving my money behind and the housing market intact.
I don’t want to sound like a “get off my lawn!” grump, but simply moving out West because you’ve discovered its beauty is a bad idea – bad for you, bad for us. I’m really not anti-growth, and if there truly is economic opportunity here (energy, especially alternative energy, is a good example) and you have the skills to do the job, by all means, c’mon out. But if you’re moving here just because you fell in love with the place and hope to find a job, please, do yourself and us a favor and stay home. Places in the East, South and Midwest that are suffering economic decline need good, hard-working people to rebuild their regional economies. If you have no economic opportunity here, you won’t find it by pounding the pavement.
Hey, I moved out here because I fell in love with the place and hoped to find a job, and did it in 1988, when the economy in Colorado sucked mightily. I managed to make it. So, yea, you are sounding like a “get off my lawn” grump
And while it’s true that the Front Range might be “full,” I’d say that if somebody was interested in a less-developed area of Colorado, they could manage. After all, the ski resorts still get the waves of ski bum college grads every year to work on the slopes. Some of them make it, others realize that their dreams are better served elsewhere.
In my mind, there really isn’t a comparison. I grew up in the Piedmont area near the Blue Ridge Mountains, and while they are lovely, the Rockies have a breath-taking beauty that stuns me regularly.