Moved to Rural Town That’s Big With Tourists; Has a Lot of Downsides

When I tell people where I live, they say, “That must be amazing!”

As I look out our window at stunning mountain sunsets or put on my pack for a hike on the nearby trails, I totally agree.

After all, we’d always dreamed of leaving the Denver suburbs to live in the so-called Heart of the Rockies — an area we’d visited for vacation many times over the years.

We craved hiking trails within walking distance, a short drive to ski slopes instead of a multihour traffic battle, and a slower-paced lifestyle.

So, in 2017, as my husband neared retirement, and I confirmed my ability to work remotely, we bought 2 acres with mountain views a few miles outside Salida, Colorado, a town with a population of about 6,000.

It checked all our boxes: less than a three-hour drive to Denver International Airport, housing costs within our budget, and amazing recreation outside our door.

Now, we’ve lived in the area for about eight years.

Our lifestyle and community have been even better than we expected, but we definitely underestimated a few realities of living full-time in a rural tourist destination.

Sparse grocery store shelves can make meal planning challenging

Our area is popular with tourists and has dozens of hotels and vacation rentals. It’s no surprise, given our proximity to the beautiful Rockies, but sharing a rural space with many visitors can make some aspects of daily life more difficult.

The first summer we lived in our mountain town, we learned an important grocery-shopping lesson: If you see an ingredient you want on the shelf, buy it.

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Next time you go to the store, it could be gone. When tourists arrive on Fridays, they typically descend into the few local stores, stocking up on food to prepare for their long weekends here.

Oftentimes, this means they leave behind empty shelves that might not get restocked for days.

Nearly empty yogurt displays, sparsely stocked produce aisles, and nowhere-to-be-found condiments that we’d thought were common have been a new experience for us.

In suburbia, if we needed something for a recipe, we would stop at the store and easily find it. Now, we order oyster sauce from Amazon and stock up on perishables midweek.

Our area isn’t exactly a food desert, but it can be tough to plan meals and eat healthily when we don’t know what will be available.

Limited healthcare options mean long wait times and lengthy drives

We considered the healthcare situation when we decided to move to a more remote area. The regional medical center in town includes hospital services and several specialists, so we figured we’d be fine.

What we didn’t realize is that the ratio of medical providers to the population can sometimes result in long waiting times for appointments and limited choices of doctors.

For certain advanced care, many locals drive to Denver — about a five-hour round trip — and in life-threatening emergencies, patients are sometimes flown by helicopter to Colorado Springs or Denver.

We’re grateful for the care we can and do get locally; some rural communities don’t even have a doctor nearby. As we age, though, the limits on local healthcare weigh more heavily on our minds.

We’re worried about how easily we can lose service and access to emergency resources

Widespread service outages weren’t something we really worried about or broadly experienced until we moved to a more rural area.

Our county has a very limited number of telecommunications fiber-optic lines, and we can lose cellphone and internet service if one gets cut during construction or a wildfire destroys the infrastructure.

Even without major issues, we still find ourselves suddenly losing connectivity for several hours here and there. A few summers ago, service was disrupted across nearly our entire county.

Gas pumps, stores, and restaurants were unable to process credit-card transactions. Local ATMs weren’t working since they needed internet connectivity.

These inconveniences became more problematic as hours dragged on. Worse, though, was the disruption to local emergency services.

Without cell service, we couldn’t call 911, and there were issues with dispatches as local responders scrambled to find solutions.

It’s scary to realize we may not be able to reach those who could help in an emergency. Fortunately, our county officials have been pushing local carriers to implement redundant systems and other infrastructure upgrades to minimize the risk of complete outages.

Still, we feel lucky to live in this imperfect mountain paradise

Though I’ve learned that even places that seem idyllic come with downsides, I still feel lucky to call my mountain town home.

We love being able to ski in the morning and hike in the afternoon on spring days. Our area is so peaceful that we jokingly grumble about too much traffic when we see more than a few cars on the road.

And, in part due to living in a smaller community, we’ve made more close friends here in eight years than we did in 17 years in the suburbs.

When we ask ourselves where we’d rather live, we can’t think of a better place.