Colorado

Colorado's ski industry exists because of World War II. In the 1940s, the U.S. Army trained the 10th Mountain Division at Camp Hale near Leadville, at 9,200 feet in the Rockies, teaching soldiers to fight on skis in brutal mountain conditions.

After the war, those soldiers came home and built over 60 ski resorts across the country, including Vail and Aspen.

Long before any of that, the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples called this land home. In the southwestern corner, the Ancestral Puebloans built over 600 cliff dwellings right into the sandstone canyon walls.

The biggest one, Cliff Palace, has 150 rooms tucked under a massive rock overhang. By around 1300, they'd moved south for reasons still debated today.

Gold flipped Colorado's story overnight. In 1858, prospectors found flakes near present-day Denver, and by 1859 about 100,000 people rushed west under the cry "Pikes Peak or Bust."

Colorado became a territory in 1861 and a state in 1876, exactly 100 years after the Declaration of Independence. That's how it got the nickname the Centennial State.

Colorado's history also carries real darkness. In 1864, Colonel John Chivington led roughly 700 soldiers in a dawn attack on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camp at Sand Creek, killing around 150 people, mostly women and children. Chief Black Kettle had been flying a U.S. flag and a white flag over his lodge.

Fifty years later, the Colorado National Guard attacked a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, killing as many as 25 people, including 11 children.

But this is also the state that inspired "America the Beautiful." In 1893, Wellesley professor Katharine Lee Bates rode a prairie wagon up Pikes Peak, switched to mules near the top, and looked out at a view that moved her to write the poem that became one of the country's most famous songs.

You can climb through Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde and catch a concert at Red Rocks, the natural sandstone amphitheater just outside Denver. Hike Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, sled down the tallest sand dunes in North America at Great Sand Dunes, and poke around old mining ghost towns scattered through the mountains.

Grab a bowl of Pueblo green chile, a craft beer in just about any town you walk into, and a breakfast burrito smothered in that spicy, smoky sauce Colorado people won't stop talking about.