Denver’s rising costs unraveled a tight-knit hiking community

A Denver arrival in 2017 began with mountains and a close group of hiking friends. Years later, rising costs—amplified by the pandemic and inflation—pushed many of them out, prompting the author to face a painful question: whether Colorado was home or just hab

When she drove out of her driveway with familiar shoes in the back of a U-Haul, the price of staying in Denver stopped being theoretical. It became something you could feel in your chest as the vehicles disappeared down the road.

She had moved from Michigan to Colorado in 2017 for two reasons: the mountains and a tight-knit group of friends who loved the outdoors as much as she did. After backpacking the 2. 200-mile Appalachian Trail in 2015. Denver started to feel like the promised land—less confining than her hometown. where state lines somehow made her happiness feel smaller.

Within a year, half a dozen hiking friends followed her to the foothills. For a while, it looked like the move would be permanent in every way. The economy hummed, the people were warm, and the mountains were brutal and unforgiving in exactly the way she wanted. Her first FriendsGiving brought familiar faces into her living room, with food and laughter spilling into early morning hours. Countless people she’d seen along the Appalachian Trail filled her home. and for the first time in years. she said she genuinely felt at home.

Over the next several years, she built a rhythm—growing her career, her community, and her mountain skill set. But then the novelty faded. Denver turned out to be expensive. and the ground under the plan shifted again during the pandemic. when inflation ballooned and Colorado’s “fault lines” began to crack open. In her telling. Colorado is now the sixth-least affordable state in the country. and the cost of living was what made her friends do the math and not like what they found.

The first friend to leave was her college roommate. They had claimed Colorado as home years earlier, drawn by the state’s promises. But her roommate ran the numbers and found that homeownership in Denver on a single income wasn’t in her cards. Her mother’s declining health and a softer market back in Michigan made it hard to justify the grind. A few months later. her roommate signed a three-bedroom lease in western Michigan for less than she’d paid for her Denver studio.

That departure shook something loose for her, too. She said it awakened doubts about whether she wanted to own a home—so purchase prices didn’t haunt her in the same way they haunted her roommate. Rent. though. was a different story. and she began doing her own math late at night. the way someone calculates when they aren’t ready to admit what the numbers might be telling them.

Soon, more friends started leaving. Within a year, two of her best friends announced they were heading to Arizona. She says they didn’t want to go, but Phoenix offered cheaper housing and a family network that Denver lacked. She described the loss as heavier than the first, and said it marked a pattern beginning to form.

Standing in the driveway watching the U-Hauls move on, gratitude and worry braided together. She felt something close to gratitude because they were choosing the lives they wanted rather than clinging to Colorado out of habit or convenience. But another, quieter part of her wondered if she was next. If the “village” was gone, what would keep her here?. Was she staying because she loved Colorado—or because she hadn’t yet found the courage to consider that it might not be her forever home?.

The question landed in a moment that felt smaller than the debate she’d been having with herself. One morning, she found herself alone at a trailhead she’d visited hundreds of times before. Wind whistled as she began her ascent, and the familiarity of dirt trails eased her sorrow as she climbed. She said she’d spent years using the mountains as medicine whenever life became too loud, heavy, or uncertain. They had been a constant—tall, indifferent, and unmoved by the concerns of men.

That made her wonder what her life might look like if she stayed with the conviction to remain in Denver. Even as the landscape of her life shifted like tectonic plates, she felt certain she was exactly where she wanted to be. She decided to stay in Denver and build a new community.

Her story moves on from the departure she watched. but the economic reality that drove it—rising costs. the pandemic. inflation. and Colorado’s affordability ranking—never fully disappears. The choice she makes isn’t framed as surrender to the market. It’s framed as a response: if people leave. she would stop waiting for the old circle to return and start rebuilding.

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