Updated September 17, 2025 04:44AM
Fact: If you’ve ever visited a mountain town, you’ve thought, at least briefly, about moving there. Oh, maybe you knew it wasn’t in the cards. But maybe you eyed the locals in the coffee shop and tried to imagine what it would be like to be a regular there; maybe you imagined stepping out your front door into the crisp mountain air and seeing the morning sun reflecting off the peaks. Maybe you eyed the listings pasted to the window of the real estate office on the main tourist drag—something that I’m convinced every mountain town must be legally required to have—and caught yourself mentally calculating mortgage payments.
As anyone who’s ever moved to a mountain town will tell you, the reality is a lot more complicated. Wealthy second homeowners and remote-working hedge fund managers snap up the lion’s share of those gorgeous houses, and your median local is much more likely to be sweeping the floors of the cafe than reading their Kindle at one of the tables. But for those who are willing to take the plunge, moving to an outdoor community can still be incredibly rewarding. I talked to one of my colleagues who made the move, Drew Stoll, about what it took to become a mountain town local. Check out our conversation below, and read our guide to moving to a trail town to see if it might be for you.
Adam Roy: Hey everyone, I’m Adam Roy, editor-in-chief of Backpacker, and a little while ago we published a service story about how to move to a trail town by Eric J. Wallace. It took us through some of the difficulties, some of the ups and downs of making that switch, and today I thought we’d have a little discussion about it. Like a lot of people in the outdoor industry, I have lived in mountain towns. I moved to Moab, Utah right after college and lived there for a little bit, and I have with me one of my colleagues—Drew, would you like to introduce yourself to the camera?
Drew Stoll: Thanks, Adam. I’m Drew Stoll. I’m an account manager with Outside. I’ve been living in a trail town for the past 8 years. I live in Minturn, Colorado, more so known as a ski town, but lots of hiking around here too, right at the base of the mountains.
Adam: Tell me a little bit about your decision to move to Minturn and what drove you to go there?
Drew: Actually, when I moved to Minturn, I had never been to Colorado before, but I grew up loving the outdoors and I think it was pretty easy to assume that I would love Colorado as well. When I graduated college, it was a big priority of mine to live for experience rather than maybe monetary gain. That was a big driver for me moving out to the mountains. I got a job with Beaver Creek Ski Resort and moved out and haven’t left.
Adam: You’ve mentioned your job, and that’s a big factor when a lot of people move to an outdoor town, be it a trail town, a ski town, or anything similar. Jobs can be pretty scarce in those towns. The people in Moab where I used to live joked that there were two seasons of the year: the season where there’s housing—and we’ll get to that in a second—and the season where there are jobs. Tell me a little bit about how you and people you know make it work in a town like Minturn.
Drew: These towns are notoriously expensive, especially around Vail. Certainly very expensive, but there is work in these towns. It just depends on what you’re willing to do for work. Living in a place where tourism is rampant, people need to drive the economy for these tourists to visit the towns. For myself, I worked for the ski resort directly related to tourism, and a lot of my friends work in service or just generally for hotels, ski resorts—things that allow tourism to thrive in these areas. That can be seasonal work, that can be full-time, but I think just trying to find work where you can get it is the biggest thing. And then once you’re in communities like this, they tend to shrink. You know everybody, and that’s how you continue to find new jobs and continue work in the offseason or in the shoulder seasons as we call them.
Adam: As you mentioned, a lot of the jobs in these towns are seasonal. They’re things like being a lift operator working in operations for the ski resort that may not continue after the snow stops. What kind of things did you see people do to get through that offseason—at least those people who were there for the long haul, who weren’t leaving for the summer?
Drew: Definitely, I think a key one is budgeting during your winters. You have to be prepared for a period of time where you might not have work. You have to try and make your money where you can, and for a lot of people that’s working two jobs throughout the winter when there are jobs available. You might be a lift operator during the day and work at a pizzeria during the night and save all your tips for that time in late April or early May, where it’s downtime around here and businesses are closing, and then get ready for the summer season as well.
It can be really tricky to find work during those times, but I think if you do stay in these communities and do what you can to perhaps work multiple jobs, your community is only going to grow. You’ll meet people who can set you up for little things like perhaps house sitting for a second homeowner or doing other lines of work that you wouldn’t necessarily think of right away that could exist when businesses are closed during the offseason. I think that’s also a point of pride living in these communities; the people who live here full time lean on one another to make ends meet and we identify as that underbelly that keeps things moving outside of all the tourists that are coming. Perhaps you felt a little bit of that in Moab as well.
Adam: Let’s talk about the other side of the equation when you’re living in an outdoor town, which is housing. Housing is a really tough thing to manage. It’s only gotten tougher since the pandemic, as a lot of people with remote jobs and a good deal of disposable income have snapped up some of the real estate in these towns. How did you manage that when you first came to Minturn?
Drew: You have to be prepared to have roommates. If you want to live alone, living in a trail town or a mountain town is probably not the best route for you. It’s all about getting people into a house, finding ways to make the rent reasonable. I actually live in a finished attic in my house. It’s an old cottage and they redid the attic to be a lock-off and—I’m 5′ 8″ so I can make it work, but if I was 6’2″, I think I’d be hunching over every step that I took in my bedroom.
You have to be willing to make things work and live with roommates and again, not to go back to the community aspect so much, but know people who have connections that can help you find reasonable housing. Because the second homeowners are an obvious problem, people moving here who have higher salaries than what local businesses can pay is another issue. And then you’re in a valley, so geographically, there’s not a lot of space to build in these areas. There’s not new housing popping up. What is there is typically what you’re able to get. You have to be able to work with what’s already around you.
Adam: And looking back on it now, I can say this because I’m probably 15 years removed from this experience, but one of my problems may have been that I did want to live on my own. I had to take what I could get because there weren’t even that many small apartments in Moab. I ended up living in a two-bedroom, believe it or not, which was silly because I was 22 and didn’t even have the furniture to [fill it]. I had a mattress on the floor in that extra bedroom, and a bunch of boxes. At the time that was doable.
I think nowadays if I tried to do that, I’d be immediately priced out on rent, even in a crummy little apartment like I used to live in. But you can’t overstate the value of knowing people. You can always look on Craigslist or whatever the local equivalent is for a roommate, but once you know people that process gets so much easier.
Let’s talk about that social aspect. How did you meet people when you first moved to Minturn?
Drew: Like many things in a trail town or a mountain town, there are two sides of it. There’s a really amazing side of it, which is that it’s very easy to meet like-minded people. Everybody who lives in a town like this is interested in the same types of things whether it’s backpacking, climbing, mountain biking in the summer, fly fishing, or in the winter skiing and snowboarding. It’s really easy to make friends around the activities that you do for passion and for your hobbies.
The flip side to it is people come and go constantly. Seasonal work drives people in and out of these towns a lot. I’ve definitely had people who were my best friends for two years move away, and that can be tough. But as we’ve talked about, as you stick around these communities get smaller and smaller, and the people who stick around stick together. You’ll always have friends who are into the same things as you, which is great, but there is a bit of a transient property to everything.
Adam: As we’re getting to the end of this conversation, I’m wondering what kind of tips would you offer to somebody who’s thinking of making this shift? What would you tell a young person nowadays who’s straight out of college like you and I were, who’s thinking of moving to an outdoor town, someplace like Minturn or Moab or anywhere in between?
Drew: I think if you’re looking to make the move, do it. Get to the town. You’ll be able to find work when you’re in these towns. Have an idea; you should have one job lined up when you move to a town like this or a job that you know you can get, but then you can stack jobs on top of that and continue to grow your community that way. If you’re really interested in living in a town like this, it is amazing. You cannot beat the lifestyle if you’re interested in outdoor sports, but you have to be willing to work pretty hard at it.
I would just say make that move and then once you’re here, focus on your lifestyle, focus on yourself. You have to eliminate any comparisons you have to your peers—someone you might have gone to college with or grown up with. They might be buying a home at 26 or 27, settled down with a family. That’s less common in these mountain towns. Just understand you’re prioritizing the lifestyle and your experiences and find a way to be happy with yourself with that. I think that’s a really crucial part.
