Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Good, Bad, and Ugly about living in Colorado

Dave

we are neighbors........live in Bellvue



Lefty

Moved to Mesa County 26 years ago from SD, never left. People complain about the TX and CA move-ins, but I've met way more midwesterners than those from either of those states. Maybe we all just gravitate together to admire the snow that falls vertically instead of horizontally. My take is on my little Whoville which may not apply to the rest of the state.

Good: The weather does not try to kill you on a regular basis like SD. I lived here 7 years before buying a snow shovel, buddies back home didn't believe me. But summers aren't stupid hot like further south and we don't have near as many creepy crawly bugs as the southeast. The west slope is not all desert and hot, all the HVAC guys will tell you we have more heating days than cooling days across the year. I'm a beekeeper so I notice when it gets above 45 in the winter (bees come out) and we have fewer of those days than Denver. But, the flowers start popping up by the end of Feb, so that's cool. All the public land you care to explore, you'll never see or hike it all. Outside of the ski towns and the Boulder/Denverbanite enclaves, the rest of the state is fairly conservative or at least purplish. We've found our community to be very welcoming and made some great friends we count as family. We've been able to carve out a good life through luck and hard work. The state has a wide variety of types of communities to choose from, the farming towns in the east are just like what I was used to in SD. Mountain towns all seem to have their own vibe that can be a blast or drive you crazy. Denver is big city, with all its plusses and minuses, just like most every other US city. Our Denver trips are usually on the weekends so we always go the opposite way of the I-70 traffic jams in the mountains. People worry about "survival kits" getting stuck in the mountains, going all Bear Grylls, all that. I always laugh and tell them before planning on that, plan for getting stuck in your car with your kids on I-70 for hours. On avg, having games, snacks, and something to pee in will serve you way better than knowing how to trap a lizard or eat an eyeball.

Bad: Inflation across the board. Land and housing is and has been surprisingly expensive. Goods and materials to my community are harder to get than the rest of the state or places closer to a coast. There's something to do with being just outside a day trip and back for most trucking outfits. Denver is a 4 hour drive when everything goes right, which is only about 50% of the time. Salt Lake City is about 4.5 hrs but the congestion there is almost worse than DEN now. Good jobs are hard to come by. There's an old saying around here that if you want to make good money, plan on travelling. I've found it to be true. The population is 6M and growing, and most like to recreate in the outdoors on the weekend. It's hard to get away and the wildlife never gets a break all year. Something our kids will have to reckon with. The state income tax sucks but property tax isn't as crazy as back in SD.

Ugly: Our political issues are a shining example of the urban/rural divide around the nation. When they passed the wolf into initiative, there was a collective headslap statewide from everyone who actually leaves the pavement for more than just weekends and shots for the 'gram. Other new state laws are just stupid, our legislature cannot follow CA fast enough with many of their woke boneheaded initiatives from business HR rules to law enforcement. Suicide rates are alarmingly high for adults and kids. It's rough being a kid here who doesn't like outdoors stuff. I don't know how much of that us causation, but I think there is some correlation.

Dave, I don't know how you do Grand Junction. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. Monster trucks, meth, pitbulls, white trash, and low paying jobs is all I remember about that town. It's like a western slope Pueblo.

I will itierate that there are good people moving in, it is just the one "activist" that starts the problems rolling. They move to Colorado and then have to start meddling because "things could be so much better if you would just follow what they want". I wish that Game and Fish would start an activist season with no limits.

Sounds like you lived in Clifton, a small part of life in the Gand Valley.

Yeah, YMMV for sure, GJ was rough in that gas boom/bust cycle. I'm not sure which was worse, the boom or the bust for a wide spectrum of reasons. And that's when our kids were all little so we were pretty focused inside the four walls of our home...well that and the soccer fields I guess. I know a few LEOs and apparently some meth task force fired up after that timeframe and took a decent bite out of things, but it's still not great, especially in some localized areas around town. That might tie to the suicide thing, that's bugged me for years because nobody talks about it. When I volunteered for S&R we drug a lot of bodies off the monument, and they didn't die from exposure. Property crime has really gone up lately without any slowing in sight unless the winds change with respect to LE funding. I guess we got lucky!

Holler if you wind up moving to SD!

A single person, semi-livable wage here starts at 100k. If you have kids, even just one, you better be double that. The median home price in Denver area for October 2021 was $550,000 and that house is probably 2300sqft, over 40 years old, needs serious updating, and has a two car garage that is barely big enough to fit a Camry. A house in the burbs that has some hint of architectural appeal and not needing an HGTV makeover will be over a million.

I was born and raised in Denver, maternal great grandparents homesteaded in Colorado in the 1880's. Grandparents managed a large ranch on Grand Mesa in the 1930's. Other granddad was railroad man based in Colorado on trains in and out of Colorado for 30 years.

Lived in Colorado Springs area over 30 years, most years in Black Forest north of the Springs. We bought a prime 5 acre lot (trees, close in, great view of Pikes Peak and overlooking Air Force Acacemy) for $xxx bucks in 1979. Quickly built house. In 1980 there was exactly one stop sign between us and a main drag (Academy Blvd) in Springs.

Growth was horrific.

When we sold (and moved out of state) in 2006, there were 14 traffic lights on the same path to Academy Blvd! Also, a new subdivision (Cathedral Pines) had opened adjacent to ours, and at the time we sold they had several 2-1/2 acre lots (half the size of ours) for sale for 35 times what we had paid for ours! Yes, the growth pushed us out. We're in a much better place now.