Two things prompted my move from Michigan to Colorado in 2017: the mountains and a tight-knit group of friends that loved the outdoors as much as I did.
As a 20-something hiker who couldn’t get enough trail time, my hometown started to feel stifling, like the state lines were confining my happiness. After backpacking the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail in 2015, Denver felt like the promised land, so I moved.
Within a year, half a dozen hiking friends followed, planting themselves in the foothills alongside me. But thanks to the rising costs, the community I built didn’t last long.
Moving to Denver came with a promise
At first, Denver delivered everything I had hoped for. The economy hummed, the people were warm, and the mountains were brutal and unforgiving, exactly as I wanted.
My first FriendsGiving filled the house with familiar faces, food, and laughter that spilled into the early morning hours. Countless faces I’d seen along the Appalachian Trail dotted my living room, and for the first time in years, I genuinely felt at home.
I fell into a rhythm over the next several years, growing my career, my community, and my mountain skill set. But eventually the novelty of being in Colorado faded, and those rose-colored glasses came off. Denver was expensive.
The pandemic struck, inflation ballooned, and the state’s existing fault lines cracked open. Colorado is now the sixth-least affordable state in the country. The cost of living had my friends doing the math and not liking what they found.
My friends started moving away
The first friend to go was my college roommate. We’d claimed Colorado as our home years earlier, hopeful for all the state’s promises. But she’d done the numbers and found that homeownership on a single income in Denver wasn’t in her cards. Her mother’s declining health and a softer market back home made it hard to rationalize the grind. A few months later, she signed a three-bedroom lease in western Michigan for less than she’d paid for her Denver studio.
Her departure awakened my own doubts. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to own a home, so purchase prices didn’t haunt me the same way that they’d haunted her.
But rent was another story. I started doing my own math, late at night, in the way you do when you’re not quite ready to admit what you’re calculating.
Within a year, two of my best friends announced they were heading to Arizona. They didn’t want to leave, but Phoenix offered cheaper housing and a family network that Denver lacked. This loss felt heavier than the first, marking a pattern that was forming.
I remember standing in the driveway, watching a small caravan of U-Hauls disappear down the road when an ache bloomed in my chest. Part of me felt something close to gratitude, knowing they were choosing the lives they wanted rather than clinging to Colorado out of habit or convenience.
But a quieter part of me wondered if I was next. If the village was gone, what was keeping me here? Was I staying in Colorado for the love of the place, or because I hadn’t yet worked up the courage to consider that it wasn’t my forever home?
I had a personal reckoning
One morning, I found myself alone at a trailhead that I’d visited hundreds of times before. The wind whistled as I began my ascent, and the familiarity of dirt trails eased my sorrow as I climbed.
I’d spent years using the mountains as medicine whenever life became too loud, heavy, or uncertain. They’d been a constant I’d craved: tall, indifferent, and unmoved by the concerns of men.
I wondered what my life would look like if I maintained my conviction to stay. Although the landscape of my life kept shifting like tectonic plates, I was exactly where I wanted to be. I decided to stay in Denver and build a new community.
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