Outside magazine ranks Springs No. 1 -- share your best moment

Outside magazine just ranked Colorado Springs the best city in the nation, factoring in “cultural vibrancy, economic well-being and overall quality of life.” We beat perennial Outside favorites Seattle, Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon. View the ranking here.

Do you agree Colorado Springs deserves this honor? Do we really have “the best weather of any city on our list?” Are we really experiencing a “cultural resurgence?”

Send us your best outside stories in Colorado Springs, and your pictures, and we’ll post them online and include the best in a story in Thursday’s Gazette. Email them to reporter R. Scott Rappold at srappold@gazette.com, and please include the proper spelling of your name, where you live and a phone number where you can be reached.

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Bighorn sheep live on the edge of town, and rock-climbing is abundant within city limits. An Irish bar sponsors a weekly running club for those who want to exercise before drinking their Guinness. Normally law-abiding folks trespass up a 2,000-foot former railroad line for the region’s best workout.

All of it is presided over by a 14,115-foot mountain that people pay to run up twice a year.

Yep, we love the outdoors in Colorado Springs, but a national magazine says that’s only part of what makes this the country’s best city in which to live.

Outside Magazine, which claims to speak to “active, affluent, educated professionals,” in its August issue ranked Colorado Springs No. 1 for “cultural vibrancy, economic well-being, and overall quality of life.”

“With 249 annual days of sun, an ascendant, heavily tech-based economy, and quick access to nearly four million acres of Rocky Mountain wilderness and a dozen world-class ski resorts, it’s simply a pretty awesome place to live,” said the magazine, which has been rating cities since 2004. Colorado Springs has never made the list.

Senior Editor Sam Moulton said the magazine this year began rating only the 100 largest cities and using numerical quality-of-life data, as opposed to the opinions of editors and writers. The magazine also factored in the proximity to biking, running, paddling, hiking and skiing, which pushed Colorado Springs to the top, he said.

So is it just another best-of feather in our caps, to be cited by city promoters but otherwise forgotten, or has Colorado Springs shaken off its image as mainly a religious, conservative, military town with a pretty mountain?

“I hope so,” said Susan Edmondson, executive director of the arts-funding Bee Vradenburg Foundation, who was proud to see the magazine’s reference to what it called a “cultural resurgence” here.

“In recent years, we’ve really strengthened our arts community and realized we need to be a well-rounded community, that it takes the great outdoors and the arts to make it the kind of place where people want to live and locate their business and go on vacation,” she said.

The magazine noted the presence of conservative and military organizations. “But regardless of your political bent, it scored extremely high in our education category, has the best weather of any city on our list, and, most important, blew away the competition when we compared average income to cost of living.”

Best weather of any city on the list? They should come in January, or experience some of the gloomy afternoons this summer.

Still, outdoors enthusiasts generally agreed with the sentiments.

“I moved here having visited all 50 states and lived in 15 and I can honestly say yes, this is by far the No. 1 place,” said Al Brody, chairman of the Pikes Peak Area Bike Coalition. He talked about being in Ute Valley Park on the west side, watching hawks, rabbits, deer and other wildlife.

In January’s defense, he said it’s his top month to ride, because the weather is the most predictable of the year.

“I love living here. Pikes Peak – you can mountain bike, you can ski, do all the hiking,” said Mike Miller, who works at Mountain Chalet outdoors shop downtown and appreciates light crowds on bike trails, compared to other Front Range cities.

He paused.

“The only thing that isn’t close by to us is the boating. If you’re afraid of the water, this is a great place to live,” he said.

Says the magazine article, “Sure, there are a few other towns with this many outdoor options, but they generally cost twice as much — or, like Boulder, require you to shave your legs.”

Moulton, the magazine editor, noted some Boulder cyclists, even men, shave their legs – not for the look but the aerodynamic benefits.

And for the record, Boulder didn’t make the list because it’s not large enough. Nor did Denver, because editors limited the final list to one city per state. Denver nearly scored higher than Colorado Springs and, if not for the limitation, would have been in the top five.