It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of the tech boom and the green revolution. It was the age of uncertainty in the mineral extraction industry.
Denver shimmers in its newfound glory. Cheyenne persists.
Traffic was sparse around Cheyenne, the capital of Wyoming and featured in the first part of this two-part series, but increased steadily outside Fort Collins, Colorado, into downtown Denver.
Somehow the occasional vast fields stretching to the mountains in the distance made the congestion more frustrating.
The swaths of flat land in and around Denver continue to surprise this writer who, as a boy in hilly (relatively speaking) Maine had the mistaken impression that flat land didn't exist in the land of the Rockies.
But the open fields are vanishing, replaced by row after row of housing developments. As a friend from Montana sardonically lamented about smaller but also growing Bozeman, "we've got to fill in all those open spaces, after all."
My place of lodging for the night, the Maven Hotel, was not amidst the sprawl, but in the revitalized Dairy Block part of LoDo – Lower Downtown for those unhip readers who, like this writer, are clueless to Denver neighborhood designations, prefer to use whole words and don't think four syllables are two too many.
The modern city of Denver was founded in 1858, when General William Larimer placed cottonwood logs in the center of a plot that would become part of LoDo.
The motivation was gold, as in so many other places in the West, discovered here in the South Platte River. Though the transcontinental railroad bypassed Denver in favor of Cheyenne, a spur soon connected the cities, ending at what became Union Station. Over the years, as highways and airports were built and passenger rail travel dwindled, the area fell into a long economic slump.
After demolishing a significant number of historic buildings in the 1960s and 70s, the city created the Lower Downtown Historic District in 1988 to preserve what was left. The ordinance includes height restrictions and encourages mixed-use development.
In 1993, Major League Baseball awarded an expansion team to the Mile High City. The team built its new stadium, Coors Field, in LoDo.
Colorado voters passed an initiative legalizing recreational marijuana in 2012. The local technology sector began to grow around the same time.
New and newish businesses have proliferated near Coors Field, and while not overflowing, many of them were doing steady business when I visited in the early evening of a beautiful weekday when the Rockies were playing on the road.
The beer flowed at the Great Divide Brewing Company, where a bartender asked another, "Did (bleeping) everybody decide to drink beer today?"
Given Denver's deserved reputation as a beer town, I wondered: Just today?
After sampling a few quarter-pint tasters I headed out on foot. On the corner feet from revelers stood the telltale signs of a homeless person’s belongs – a shopping cart, food boxes, and a blanket covering a mound of other items – but no person. I looked up and across the street. A man who looked like he might be homeless walked slowly in front of an empty lot, muttering to himself, the clean and impressive skyline of downtown Denver reaching for the heavens behind him.