Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Possible relocation to Colorado in the near future...

I'd be looking at Grand Junction rather than any city on the front range if retirement is in the near future.
I'd get out of Colorado Springs if I wasn't so old

This is why I live in Windsor in Weld County. Weld County has the lowest tax rates in the state. I'm 10 min from Ft Collins, Loveland and Greeley and can be on I-25 in 5 min if I hustle. I am surrounded by 27 holes of golf, 5 lakes stocked with fish and pretty damn nice views. I can be glassing 200"+ deer in no time from where I live

Grand Junction is your best bet for all you mentioned, even access to Grand Canyon isn't too tough. I'd not live there, but it's a thriving little city now; lots of medical stuff. Craig is building a new hospital. Meeker is better living. Steamboat is a
Boulder "mini-me". Montrose would bear a look-see. Rifle is trying to become something, not sure what but it don't speak english. From Glenwood east might as well be given to Boulder.
The pattern- Further west is better, possibly excepting the southern third of the state.

People are kidding themselves if they think Colorado isn't liberal as a whole. Two democrat governors in a row, and Denver and Boulder pretty much control the whole state politically regardless.

I would not go to Grand Junction or any town near there unless you like living next to meth addicts.

If you are going to stay on the front range I would really look hard at Fort Collins. It is a college town with low crime, and good housing. One thing to keep in mind though, if you live in the Denver metro area, you might as well live in Kansas. You are going to have to commute in heavy traffic to get to the "real" parts of Colorado.

Hey, what's wrong with Kansas??

antlers:

I live in Colorado Springs and I have my preferences but the Denver metro area is not among them. Neither is Boulder, which is a liberal stronghold and a place to be avoided.

I have friends in Flagstaff and visit them about once a year. I keep trying to find a depressed neighborhood in the Flagstaff area just to see if such an area actually exists there, but so far I haven't been successful. There's a very high quality of life in the Flagstaff area and that's why housing costs are high. It's worth it.

As an ER nurse you could find a job just about any place that is large enough to have a hospital with an emergency room. Why limit yourself to just a few options? If you like the semi-rural lifestyle then there are a couple dozen medium-size towns on Colorado's western slope, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana that would be nice places to live without the hectic lifestyle, crime, deteriorating neighborhoods, poverty, traffic conjestion, and polution that goes with a large metro area. The housing costs are usually reasonable in those semi-rural medium-sized towns too.

Since you like to hunt and climb then why not consider Alaska, for a few years at least? I don't know much about cycling in Alaska but they don't have a lot of roads so that might limit your biking opportunities.

The environmental quality, cycling and climbing are all great in the northwest (Washington and Oregon) but I get the idea that it takes a long time to get big game hunting licenses. The Cascades are beautiful.

Colorado Springs has grown way too big for my liking and I'm retired so I could move to one of those towns in a heartbeat but our children and grand-children live close and my wife won't leave them.

KC

Check out Durango.

Don't do it.

Colorado has warm and dry summers, mild winters, lots of shooting ranges around, tolerable gun laws, oodles of big game hunting including elk, deer, antelope, moose, & bear, lots of small game hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, cycling, backpacking, skiing, etc etc.

And lots of hospitals around where you could work.

You will hate it here.

This saddens me. I drove through Grand Junction 10+ years ago on a long road trip, and it stands out as one of the highlights of the trip.

Plenty of good suggestions so far. I was CO born and raised and went to college in Ft Collins. That said, most of the Front Range, for me, is now too busy and too crowded. But, if you need a city Ft Collins is hard to beat, as are the outlying towns around Boulder that have already been mentioned. If you can live with more rural areas (both professionally and personally) take a look at Trinidad, the San Luis Valley and the smaller towns around Durango (mancos, cortez, dolores, etc.)

I'll also add Moab, Bluff, Blanding and Cedar City UT for your consideration if you feel more drawn to the canyons then the mountains. You'll not likely exhaust the hiking/biking options over there.

good luck!

Lived in GJT for 17 years and love it. PM me if you look harder around here, there are parts of town to avoid. Seems to be no shortage of medical jobs. My kids do their part to keep the ER busy. There's no way I could handle the crowds on the Front Range. I'm still holding out for when dogcatcher moves back so we can go plinkin'!
sd

You might also check out some small towns in the white mountains of AZ. Pine top, show low and snow flake are smaller communities , but have many of the attributes of flagstaff without the cost or the hippies.

I grew up between Fort Collins and Windsor, Now that I have lived on the western Slope for the last 24 years I could never move back. The Grand Junction area is pretty good, Im not sure where dogcather gets his info about meth addicts though. The Grand Valley has great Mountain biking

Woodland Park -- In the mountains, affordable - amazing views and about 30 minutes to two big hospitals.

It seems amazing to me in this, of all forums, that Trinidad would not be mentioned. It is not a metropolis by any means but is in Colorado I do believe. It also has a hospital (used to be Mt Saint Rafael ),If memory serves but is now a modern public facility. Beautiful country overall. There is also TSJC if you are at all interested in firearms. I live in Southern Arizona and would not reccommend you come to this state. It's reasonably unpopulated and while we do have a couple of metro ares such as Phoenix and Tucson I would not reccomend them. Of course thats being selfish on my part as I would like to keep it as underpopulated as possible. As to biking they have the Tour de Tucson and most streets have bike lanes and Tucson used to have a world class builder of racing bikes so I suppose biking is big here, me ,it's too much excercise so I prefer to not do it.

Last couple of falls we've driven through there and my hunting buddy always has to say "Did you know Trinidad is the sex change capital of America?" Another factoid I'd rather not know...

Look at Gilpin County, CO. That is where I live. I think it is the lowest property taxes in the state. In the mountains are lots of hiking, climbing, biking. Live in the north part of the county and you are away from the two gambling towns that pay most taxes and you are close to Denver, Golden and Bulder where you can have a good job, but avoid property taxes. Here are a few views off my back deck looking west:

Green valley for those that don't know, is where the old fharts live.

If you wanted to live in flagstaff you would have plenty of chance to work in medicine in a third world country which is what i call anything 100miles north of phoenix. And I was born up there, and went to school at N.A.U.
Having said that If you really wanted to live in flagstaff, you could consider commuting a little bit from outside the flagstaff city area, such as munds park, williams, and other areas.

I wish I could pull up and head back to CO. Yes, it has grown, especially along the front range, but compared to the East coast it's still not as bad.