Frisco: The Ultimate Colorado Ski Base

We came to Frisco because we needed somewhere to sleep. We left thinking we’d discovered perhaps the perfect base for a Colorado ski road trip. No lifts, no pistes and no enormous resort complex, just a proper little mountain town with six major ski areas within half an hour, a Main Street packed with places to eat and drink, and one wonderfully eccentric little inn that made us feel more like house guests than hotel guests. Then we woke up to find the whole place buried in fresh snow.

Frisco was never really supposed to be a destination.

It was practical.

We were moving around Colorado, skiing different mountains on our Ikon Passes, and needed somewhere that put us within striking distance of several of them. Look at a map of Summit County and Frisco makes an enormous amount of sense, sitting just off I 70 with mountains in almost every direction.

What I hadn’t expected was to like the town itself quite so much.

In fact, if I were planning the trip again and wanted to ski several Colorado resorts, I’d happily make Frisco my base for considerably longer.

Because Frisco’s great trick is that it doesn’t actually have a ski resort.

And that might be precisely why it works.

The resort with no resort

Frisco rather brilliantly describes itself as the “resortless resort town”, which pretty much nails it.

Within around 30 minutes you’ve got Copper Mountain, Breckenridge, Loveland, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin and Vail, while other Colorado mountains become perfectly realistic day trips if you’re prepared to drive a little further.

The official timings from Frisco make the point better than I can: Copper is around seven minutes away, Breckenridge 15, Loveland and Keystone around 20, A Basin 25 and Vail about 30.

Think about that for a moment.

You could wake up in the same bed every morning, look at the snow report over breakfast and then decide where you’re going skiing.

Fresh snow at A Basin? Go there.

Fancy Copper? You’re practically next door.

Want a day at Breckenridge? Fifteen minutes.

Vail looking good? Half an hour.

For anyone who likes the freedom of a multi mountain ski trip but doesn’t particularly fancy packing a suitcase every other morning, Frisco starts to look like a very clever option indeed.

And because there’s no ski mountain rising directly out of town, Frisco doesn’t feel as though its entire reason for existence is to process skiers through lifts, hotels and restaurants.

It’s a town.

A very cool one.

Then we found our little home

We stayed at the Frisco Inn on Galena, one street back from Main Street, and I’m struggling slightly with what to call it because describing it simply as a hotel doesn’t really capture it.

The Inn itself describes what it does as combining a traditional bed and breakfast with a boutique mountain inn, which is probably about right. It’s independently run, intimate and deliberately personal, with big communal spaces, fireplaces, an onsite spa, hot tubs, sauna and its own coffee roasted in house.

But that still doesn’t really describe how it felt.

It was more like arriving at somebody’s slightly eccentric, incredibly welcoming mountain home.

There were fairy lights around the entrance and this fabulous living room that immediately made you want to settle in rather than disappear upstairs to your room. There were things everywhere, little details to look at, warm lighting and none of that slightly anonymous feeling you get when every room in a hotel has been designed by the same corporate interiors department.

Then there was breakfast.

In the hallway were touchscreens where you could choose what you wanted the following morning, effectively putting together your breakfast order the night before. The Inn serves made to order breakfasts alongside its continental offering and even roasts its own Mt. Royal coffee onsite.

It was quirky, personal and absolutely charming.

My room added to the feeling. I had a little ground floor porch area outside that felt wonderfully American, the sort of thing I’ve seen a thousand times on television but rarely actually stayed in. I half expected someone from Little House on the Prairie to wander past.

Nothing about the place screamed luxury hotel, and that really wasn’t the point. The luxury was in feeling genuinely looked after.

The service was exceptional. I didn’t feel like room number whatever staying for two nights.

I felt like a guest.

And there’s a surprisingly big difference.

One street away was another surprise

Then we walked around the corner onto Main Street.

This was probably the point when I realised we’d completely underestimated Frisco.

I’d imagined somewhere functional, perhaps a few restaurants and bars catering to people who were really there to ski somewhere else.

Instead Main Street was fantastic.

It’s that wonderfully American mountain town mixture of low rise buildings, independent shops, cafés, bars and restaurants, with the Rockies looming around everything. There were watering holes you immediately wanted to investigate, restaurants that made choosing dinner genuinely difficult and enough going on that this didn’t remotely feel like somewhere you simply returned to when you’d finished having fun elsewhere.

Quite the opposite.

You could ski all day, come back, leave the car and wander into town for the evening. Have a drink somewhere, find dinner, move on for another beer and walk back to your bed without having to think about driving anywhere.

And unlike some purpose built ski villages, there was enough variety that I couldn’t imagine getting bored of it particularly quickly. Stay for a week and you’d barely scratch the surface. Stay for two and I still think you’d be happily discovering somewhere new to eat or drink.

That matters if you’re using somewhere as a base.

The skiing might change every day, but you also want to enjoy coming home.

Frisco gave us that almost immediately.

And then it snowed

Perhaps I have a slightly rose tinted view of Frisco because of what happened next.

We went to bed in our wonderfully quirky little inn and woke the following morning to find that Colorado had apparently decided to turn the whole town into a Christmas card.

It was dumping.

Snow was covering the road, sitting heavily on rooftops and piling onto cars. All those little buildings we’d been wandering past the previous evening were suddenly buried beneath white and the mountains around town were disappearing into cloud.

If I’d liked Frisco the night before, I absolutely loved it now.

There’s something incredibly exciting about waking up in a ski town to heavy overnight snow because the whole atmosphere changes. Breakfast suddenly becomes something you need to get through rather than linger over. Phones come out, snow reports are checked and the conversation becomes very simple.

Where has had the most?

Where are we going?

This was exactly why we’d come to Frisco.

We weren’t tied to the mountain outside the hotel because there wasn’t one.

We had choices.

And that morning our choice was Arapahoe Basin.

Around 25 minutes away, one of Colorado’s highest and most characterful ski areas was sitting under fresh snow waiting for us.

It was time to go.

“

It felt like the place that made the whole trip work.

This is how I’d do Colorado again

There are obvious attractions to staying slopeside. I love walking out of a hotel in ski boots and being on a lift minutes later, and places such as Steamboat and Winter Park had shown us just how effortless American ski in, ski out convenience can be.

But Frisco offers something different.

It gives you freedom.

Base yourself here with a car and suddenly your ski holiday doesn’t have to be dictated by one mountain. You can chase the snow, change your mind over breakfast or simply decide that you fancy somewhere different today.

Copper is seven minutes away. Breckenridge is 15. Loveland and Keystone are about 20. A Basin is around 25 and even Vail is only about half an hour in normal conditions.

And every evening you come back to Frisco.

Back to Main Street, its restaurants and bars, and in our case back to this slightly eccentric little inn one street away where someone genuinely seemed pleased to see us.

That combination really worked for me.

Frisco wasn’t the grandest place we stayed on our Colorado trip. It didn’t have a gondola rising from the centre of town, an enormous slopeside hotel or hundreds of kilometres of skiing carrying its name.

It didn’t need any of them.

We’d booked Frisco because its location was convenient.

Instead we found somewhere warm, characterful and unexpectedly cool, where you could eat and drink brilliantly, feel part of a proper Colorado mountain town and wake up each morning with some of the best skiing in America scattered around you.

Then there was that final morning, standing outside our little guesthouse with snow pouring out of the sky, the street looking like a Christmas card and A Basin waiting somewhere up the road.

At that point Frisco no longer felt like the place between the ski resorts.

It felt like the place that made the whole trip work.