5280 Magazine

Where: 1400 E. 17th Ave., Denver (City Park West) The Draw: Ample portions of zesty hand-pulled noodles at good prices The Drawback: Some sauces skew sweet; crowds come fast but reservations aren’t offered. Noise Level: Medium What To Order: Dan dan noodles, Mongolian beef noodle stir-fry, Iberico pork wontons, crystal mushroom dumplings Price Per Person: $25 (before drinks) It’s mesmerizing, really: a long, thick cord of dough transforming faster than my eyes can follow.

Skip the mall: Denver’s coolest shops are small-scale and owner-driven. Whether it’s browsing well-priced fashion and vinyl in FM’s polished space, hunting for one-of-a-kind finds sourced obsessively by Regal Vintage’s owners, or discovering affordable original art alongside dozens of local makers at Fern and Skye, the city’s best stores are built around passion rather than mass production.

Denver’s fitness culture lives at the intersection of studio sweat and mountain miles. From an infrared Pilates studio stocked with Bala bangles to a lakeside hike and a Colorado gear brand rethinking ultralight camping, these local standouts keep Denver moving. Get 1 Year for $19.95 › Toast the 2026 Top of the Town Editors’ and Readers’ Choice winners at our annual 5280 Top of the Town bash, presented by Kaiser Permanente.

If you’ve hiked through a Colorado boulder field, you’ve probably encountered a pika perched on a rock, emitting a high-pitched squeak. But these adorable mammals are more than treeline’s welcoming committee. “If we’re starting to see declines in pika as the climate is changing,” says Julie Krajewski of the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance, “that would be an indication that it’s affecting other species” that are harder to monitor, like lynx and wolverines.

Surely you’ve heard: The Centennial State turns 150 this year. Film lovers can celebrate Colorado’s sesquicentennial with this cinema fest, which includes screenings of 150 movies that memorialize our fair state, selected by Coloradans. Standout showings include South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, Little Miss Sunshine, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which voters chose as the number-one Colorado film.

On a Saturday morning this past May, some 150 people gathered in a quiet corner of Colorado, just minutes shy of the Kansas border. Some had traveled for days to be there; others had arrived by way of a four-hour bus ride from Denver. As the temperature pitched toward the 90s, they clustered in what shade they could find and talked in hushed voices. Though it’s hard to see it through the sagebrush that now blankets the land, Colorado’s 10th-largest city once stood here.

The July Fourth parade in Granby, Colorado, the Rocky Mountain town where I live, is a joyful celebration of small-town America. Our local veterans usually lead the marchers down the main street, followed by pickup trucks transformed for the day into festive floats promoting everything from local dude ranches and restaurants to our electric power co-op. Firefighters throw candy from big red pumper trucks and there’s usually a fighter jet flyover by the Colorado National Guard.

This year’s snowmelt may not deliver heart-pumping whitewater rafting conditions, but plenty of us are still heading to the mountains to spend weekends on the Arkansas River—the most commercially rafted section of whitewater in the nation. And if the rafting and kayaking don’t look promising, the wilderness around Salida and Buena Vista still offers lots of hiking, biking, and other alpine activities.

The warmer months are a time for relaxation and catching up on all that we haven’t read, so we checked with the experts at the world-renowned Tattered Cover to get some recommendations for your summer reading list. Whether you’re headed to the high country or a secluded beach, these books are all worthy of a place in your suitcase. (Plus: three scary books.

As I write this, the outside air temperature is 80 degrees. Humidity is about 20 percent. The wind is steady and relentless at about 15 mph. It hasn’t rained in our rural Rocky Mountain community for at least two weeks, and little is predicted for the next 10 days. Fire restrictions are in place.