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Telluride is small and sort of remote and up in the mountains. It is a cluster of small villages & towns tucked up in mountain crevices. Folks not only want to live up high, but they spend a lot of effort to get even higher. They value high mountains and seem to like the ones above 14,000 feet high. It seemed to be a place where there were folks with a lot of money and folks without much who cater to them. Most of the shops were boutique types. There was, however, a jazz festival going on at the time, so my view of that town is probably very skewed.
Telluride is in the southwest part of Colorado, maybe 7 hours drive from Denver. It's in a beautiful box canyon, surrounded by spectacular scenery, but it was pretty much just a dusty old former silver mine (and gold, and lead) town until its transformation into a world class ski resort began in the 1970s. Gradually the wealthy people who came to ski, especially the Hollywood types, began to buy vacation homes and getaways that proved to have a different set of charms during the beautiful Colorado summers. Local business owners, smelling the opportunity, started booking summer events to fill up vacant hotel rooms and restaurant tables during the "off season," and voila! Telluride became a reknowned location for summer festivals for all kinds of things... jazz, bluegrass, film, you name it!
And that's why Hotzcatz's take on the population is spot on... winter or summer it's mostly rich people, and the folks who cater to them.
One trip we were driving from Bakersfield Ca. to Santa Maria Ca. on our way we stopped at a AMPM/7-11 kind of store. While there I grab some snacks and something cold to drink. I kinda started asking the lady(Caucasian)behind the counter about the area and the road conditions ahead. she was the rudest person I had ever come across!! wouldn't give me the time of day. As I pay for my stuff I had a travelers check.... I wanted to prolong the un-gawdly experience. She asks to see my I.D. I show it to her... Her attitudes suddenly changes...... OMG..... srsly..... a... a.... are you from haaawaaayeeee?? she started to act like she knew me.... she wanted to get all talkative.... I said yup, but its to late now!!
Racism, welcome to my world..... wait... you think she was thinking I was hispanic?
LOL now if a tourist comes to hawaii do you think they want to be welcomed with a red carpet?
Thanks Catz for you perspective and very good description of your visit to the Colorado - New Mexico area of the mainland. Things are spread out a lot more, so the speed limits are jacked up to 75, then people probably drive at 80 to shorten up the travel time a little bit. Some places measure distance by time, other places measure distance by miles. I don't remember how they did that there. It's been a few years since I've visited Colorado. It's a nice place to visit if you avoid the winter. You're description of the food prices matched what I saw comparing Hawaii to the Midwest, about double the food prices in Hawaii.
The grocery store prices are much higher in Hawaii, but the restaurant prices are almost similar. That might be why so many folks like to eat out in Hawaii if they can afford it.
The lack of humidity, especially in Telluride, was really surprising since there was snow melt all over the place and the ground was just dripping or had a shallow sheet of water running across it. Yet the humidity in the air was almost non-existent. Very odd, but I guess the high altitude kept the moisture from getting into the air.
The people we stayed with in Weston (a tiny hamlet down near the Southern border of Colorado) did most of their shopping in a bigger town about forty five minutes from their village. They did an every other month trip of about three or four hours up to Denver to do more shopping for things not available in their smaller towns. They also had a freezer full of elk, apparently every other year or so they get one for the freezer. I'm not sure if it is for economic or flavor reasons, elk is quite tasty.
They were real careful about letting their dogs wander around loose. Apparently there are bears and rattlesnakes in the area and they don't let the dogs out without supervision. They also had iron bars on the downstairs windows. At first, I'd wondered why the high security since they were rural but then once they mentioned bears, I figured the bars were there as an anti-bear thing instead of an anti-burglar thing. Wolves, coyote and mountain lions didn't seem to be as much of a concern as the bears.
In Denver, though, the neighbors said they'd seen several coyotes behind their house which seemed odd since this was near downtown Denver. There were rabbits pretty much everywhere, we saw those but didn't see any coyotes. Didn't hear any, either. Up in Telluride, we saw an occasional deer as well as some sort of beaver like rodent creature. About the size of a cat, lived by the side of a pond but wasn't a beaver. I think someone called it a "marmot"? There seemed to be a lot of wildlife sort of integrated into folks' lives. Not that they'd purposely interact with a bear, rattlesnake, wolf or coyote, but they took the possibility of it into consideration. When we went out walking in the forest around their house, our host had a sizable hand gun on him in case of critters.
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