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The beloved thoroughfare at the heart of Denver, Sixteenth Street has always been the Mile-High City's "Main Street." Sixteenth Street got its jump start in 1879 when Leadville's Silver King and Colorado's richest man, Horace Austin Warner Tabor, came to town and built the city's first five-story skyscraper at the corner of Sixteenth and Larimer Streets. In coming years, Sixteenth Street became Denver's main retail center as shopkeepers and department store owners constructed ever-more impressive palaces, culminating in the Daniels and Fisher Tower--the city's tallest building for five decades and the symbol of the city. In the second half of the 20th century, Sixteenth Street saw major changes, including the creation of one of the most successful pedestrian malls in the country, an archetype of the power of great urban places and an inspiration to other cities, large and small.

The "scenic route" in southwestern Colorado means the San Juan Skyway, a 236-mile loop created by U.S. Routes 550 and 160 and State Routes 62 and 145. The Skyway wends through glacial valleys and over high passes between some of the most breathtaking, ice-sculpted peaks in the Rocky Mountains. Native Americans, pioneering mountain men, miners, and railroaders inhabited these slopes. Although the Skyway towns of Durango, Silverton, Ouray, Ridgway, Telluride, Rico, Dolores, and Cortez were first connected by wilderness trails and railways, the loop's final modern section of highway between Coal Bank and Molas Passes was completed in the 1940s. The rugged San Juan Mountains were the backdrop for exploits by Butch Cassidy and Wyatt Earp, but, as author Frederic B. Wildfang notes, the scenery is also "a syllabus for a course in geology."