June 7, 1999

A Reluctant Resort
The remote mountain town of Durango, Colorado, would rather be left alone. 
But a steady stream of city slickers are knocking on its door.

 By Alex Markels

There are few better examples of the timelessness of a good quote than the words Will Rogers once uttered about the small town of Durango in southwest Colorado.

Sixty-four years after the cowboy-philosopher described this serene outpost as "out of the way ... and glad of it," his matter-of-fact assessment perfectly sums up the current state of affairs: Durango’s very remoteness has helped it avoid the "success" that has robbed numerous Western resort towns of their allure.

Here, where the sparkling Animas River flows past jutting red rock buttes on its way toward the vast deserts of Cowboy-and-Indian country, you can hike or mountain bike for miles without seeing a soul. At the local ski resort two miles away, you can wear jeans and ski on 20-year-old boards without fear of ridicule. You can stand at your back door and watch a parade of elk, wild turkeys and sundry other critters forage in the surrounding forest. Or, confidently leaving your doors unlocked, you can take a walk past the century-old brick and native-stone Victorians lining Main Street, assured that you will bump into someone you know. Those you don’t know will likely offer up a neighborly greeting anyway.

Such qualities have helped persuade a steady trickle of urban refugees like Frank and Carol Farrell to retire here. "We made more friends after two months here than we did after 23 years in Texas," Mr. Farrell, age 66, says of the couple’s escape from Dallas seven years ago. "And instead of talking about how many square feet their new house is or how much money they make, people around here talk about the bear they saw outside their window or the hike they took yesterday."

Proudly perusing photographs of flocks of wild turkeys, deer and black bear taken from his back porch, the former sales executive with Armstrong World Industries, Lancaster, Pa., happily recalls the stroke of luck that landed him and his wife in a cozy, log-hewn home at the end of an idyllic stretch of dirt road 11 miles outside Durango’s city limits. While visiting a former Armstrong associate—and Durango native—who had chucked his big-city job to return to his hometown, "Carol and I looked at each other and said, ‘This would be a great place to live,’" Mr. Farrell recalls.

So, upon Mr. Farrell’s retirement after 32 years with Armstrong, the couple soon headed for the hills. "All we really wanted was a little log cabin," Mr. Farrell says. But when a slice of heaven became available on a ranch-turned-housing development sandwiched between the Animas River and the San Juan National Forest, the Farrells found themselves at the right place at the right time and bought their 3,800-square-foot dream house the first day it went on the market—picking it up for about $265,000.

"If I only had a year left in my life, this is where I’d spend it," Mrs. Farrell says as she heads off to play tennis at the Shed & Dumpster Racket Club, a simple court nestled below spectacular red rock cliffs near the sparse development’s maintenance area. "It’s everything Dallas isn’t ... down to earth, friendly and absolutely spectacular. Just look at our view. It’s paradise."

Splendid Isolation

Not that paradise comes without a price. Although this century-old former mining and railroad town can rightfully claim status as the capital city of the four-corners region (where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona intersect), Durango sits about 150 miles from the nearest interstate and a long day’s drive from a major airport. A commuter flight from the town’s small airport to Denver International can cost as much as a flight from Denver to London. And thanks to airline deregulation, local air service is less frequent than it was 15 years ago. Only one carrier currently provides service to Durango.

But to say that Durango is "out of the way" depends on your point of view. This sun-drenched locale sits only a tank of gas away from some of the country’s greatest natural treasures. The Grand Canyon is within striking distance, as are Utah’s famed Canyonlands and Arches national parks, and New Mexico’s Enchanted Circle wilderness area near Taos. Even closer is Mesa Verde National Park, the world famous Anasazi Indian ruins declared a World Cultural Heritage Site by the United Nations, only 37 miles south of Durango. Meanwhile, Purgatory Ski Resort sits a mere two miles—and 2,000 feet in elevation—up the road. And there are two other great ski resorts (Telluride and Wolf Creek) within a couple of hours’ drive along some of the most scenic roads in America.

Such attractions help ensure a steady stream of visitors at Russ and Betty Serzen’s. The couple retired here from south Florida in the early 1990s, and since then, "We’ve had more than 100 guests," says Mr. Serzen, 66, who has built a guest house onto his home overlooking the Animas River.

"With all the company, we need the extra room," Mr. Serzen says. Their three grown children and their families are frequent visitors, and several friends from the East Coast have moved here after visiting them in Durango. "We’re doing our part for the Chamber of Commerce," jokes the retired orthopedic-device salesman.

Actually, like many transplanted Durangoans, Mr. Serzen would rather keep the charms of his adopted hometown under wraps. That’s hardly an easy thing to do. With nearly 300 days of sunshine each year and high temperatures that average from the 40s in January to the low 80s in July, Durango and its arid, 6,500-foot-elevation climate have attracted a long roster of world-class outdoor athletes, who train and live here.

Retirees, meanwhile, take comfort in the town’s 105-bed Mercy Medical Center, the region’s largest hospital, with specialists in 23 fields. Then there’s Durango’s four-year liberal-arts college, Fort Lewis College, which offers its 4,500 students 24 degree programs, as well as nationally recognized Elderhostel summer classes in everything from geology to Hopi Indian prophecy and a new, $5 million performing-arts center. Not surprisingly, Colorado’s state demographer forecasts a doubling in Durango’s 3,600-strong population of residents between the ages of 55 and 65 in the next 20 years.

The town has also received considerable publicity from such movies as "City Slickers," the most recent in a long line of Westerns shot here, including "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Viva Zapata" and "Support Your Local Gunfighter." After actor Billy Crystal waxed enthusiastic about Durango while making the talk-show rounds to promote "City Slickers," the local newspaper "ran a column saying, ‘Put a lid on it, Billy!’" Mr. Serzen recalls. "I felt the same way. Once you’re here, you just don’t want things to change and grow."

Creeping Change

Yet things have changed. A real-estate surge in the early 1990s has leveled off, but median home prices in the county continue to climb at about a 5% annual clip to $166,000 last year. Hundred-year-old ranches have become housing developments, and strip malls have mushroomed on the town’s perimeter. After a decade-long fight, Durango finally succumbed to its first Wal-Mart last year. Completed in July, the superstore was built along the river just outside of town and is adorned with native stone and subdued signage.

"We joke that we’ve got the most beautiful Wal-Mart in America," says Karen Brucoli Anesi, 47, a longtime resident who writes for the local newspaper, the Durango Herald. "That says a lot about this place."

Tourism, which accounts for about 30% of the local economy, clogs Main Street with cars during the midsummer high season, trying the patience of locals who find themselves waiting in line for a table at their favorite restaurant. "Of course, many of those restaurants wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for the tourists," notes Ms. Brucoli Anesi, who writes the Herald’s restaurant reviews. "For a small town, we have an abundance of good restaurants. That you have to wait for a table during high season is just another one of the trade-offs you deal with living here."

Indeed, trade-offs abound in Durango. But while locals tolerate tourism and business development as necessary evils, they have little patience for the kind of ostentatious wealth that has pockmarked the hillsides of such towns as Aspen and Vail with gaudy trophy homes, heated driveways and high-security fences. When one couple built an obtrusive pink-stucco and copper-roofed home overlooking Durango’s historic downtown stretch two years ago, locals quickly dubbed it the "Pepto-Bismol House."

"Anyone who’s feeding their ego is very much a misfit here," says Bill Mashaw, 77, a former chief executive of the National Retail Hardware Association who retired in Durango 15 years ago, from Indiana. "It’s just
terrible when you meet people who behave as if they were still in the suburban social- climbing environments they came from. We just don’t live that way."

Mr. Mashaw’s dressed-down attitudes are mirrored around every business and restaurant table in town. "You see someone in a standard tie, and you know they’re from out of town," says Larry Scanlon, 58, who retired here with his wife, Marcia, from Vermont four years ago. "When they say formal attire out here, they mean blue jeans with no holes. I don’t know if I own anything else."

That’s probably what led USA Today to call Durango the "Worst-Dressed Town in America." Not that Durangoans take offense. "When I heard about that, I felt proud," says Mrs. Scanlon. "I’ve learned to dress just how I feel and forget about what people think."

Reverse Snobbery

Such reverse snobbery was in full bloom last year after the Durango Herald inaugurated a new column designed to highlight fund-raising events and the locals who support them. The editors named the column High Society, and ran the banner over photographs showing residents attending the opening of a new children’s
museum.

"The idea was to call it High Society, as in high mountains," says Ms. Brucoli Anesi, who was recruited to write and take pictures for the feature. But after the first column, "I got a ton of phone calls from people who were really offended by the name. They said they had moved here to get away from all that."

The reality, however, is that living comfortably in Durango requires the kind of money that can only be made elsewhere. While the cost of living is higher than the national average, Durango’s service-based economy yields a per-capita personal income that lags about 10% behind the rest of the nation’s. Linda Stout and her husband, Dean Wolford, found that out the hard way after moving here from Minnesota six years ago. "We went from bringing in $160,000 a year to a $30,000 pension," recalls Mr. Wolford, 59, who took an early-retirement package after a 24-year career with International Business Machines Corp. "So we needed to find some additional income."

With 10 years’ experience in product development at IBM and a master’s degree in writing, Ms. Stout, 50, figured she could land a marketing job at a local electronic-security firm. "They interviewed me and presented the picture of the job, which had a lot of responsibility," she recalls. "Then at the end of the interview I asked about salary, and they said [the job] paid $8 an hour."

Eventually, Ms. Stout decided to try working for herself and two years ago enrolled in an Internet-based correspondence course in personal and business coaching—a kind of counseling for private and career life. But Durango’s limited telecommunications infrastructure presented more challenges. The local phone company has yet to install the fiber-optic lines needed to speed Internet connections, and the community has run out of telephone-line capacity.

"It’s very difficult to get on the Internet," says Ms. Stout, who had to hire an outside agency to answer her business calls; voice mail is currently unavailable in much of the county. "This area is pretty limited as far as telecommuting."

Improvements are on the way. Several major telecommunications companies are battling for a contact to lay fiber optic cable in Durango. The project, expected to be completed within the next 18 months, will increase capacity many fold, allowing companies and residents to have better Internet connections and more telephone lines.

But even with the current situation, Ms. Stout and her husband say their move to Durango has been entirely worthwhile. While her coaching business and his three-day-a-week job selling computers to schools on nearby Indian reservations may not make them millionaires, the work, they say, is much more meaningful than the jobs they left behind in Minnesota. And their new lives have afforded them enough time to build a beautiful home overlooking the San Juan Mountains’ snow-capped, 14,000-foot peaks (seven of which Mr. Wolford has climbed) and to plant a garden in the backyard.

"The soil’s not great, but growing season is a heck of lot longer than other places we had considered moving to," Ms. Stout says. "Gardening is a lot like living in Durango. It’s not sophisticated or complicated, but getting your hands dirty outside really satisfies the soul."

Which brings to mind another Will Rogers quote: "What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds." In Durango, it seems, there’s plenty of both.

Mr. Markels is a former Wall Street Journal staff reporter who moved to Colorado in 1997.