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Where the ski hill is 25 miles up the highway
Durango was a working town long before it was a ski destination, and that is still the shape of a trip here.
Purgatory Resort sits 25 miles north of Durango on US-550, about a 30 minute drive from downtown, in the San Juan Mountains. It’s visitors enjoy 1,635 acres on 105 trails with 12 lifts, rising from a base at 8,793 feet to a summit at 10,822 feet, a vertical drop of 2,029 feet. The terrain is weighted toward the middle and the top end: roughly 45 percent intermediate, 35 percent advanced or expert, and 20 percent beginner. Average annual snowfall is 260 inches. Lifts run from nine in the morning until four.
The town is the other half. Durango’s Main Avenue Historic District covers 34 acres and was listed on the National Register in 1980 with 104 buildings, and it still reads as a turn of the century commercial street rather than a resort base. The Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad has run continuously since 1882, 45 miles up to Silverton through the San Juan backcountry, and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1961. The full run operates May through October; in winter, trains go as far as Cascade Canyon. Its 1882 depot sits at 479 Main Avenue, at the foot of downtown.