Disneyland in Fort Collins?

May 2003
Men's Journal

There are times when Fort Collins can seem like Disneyland, and for good reason: The theme park's Main Street USA was modeled after the compulsively tidy buildings of Old Town Fort Collins. But the City offers a couple of big advantages over it's Disney double: First, you can actually live here; and second, there's even more room to play.

With three national forests, a national grassland and the Rocky Mountain National Park nearby, it has more federally protected land within a one-hour radius than any other city we rated - which makes for unlimited hiking, mountain biking, mountaineering, and backcountry skiing. But this isn't a vacation town. On a regular afternoon, the streets teem with students from Colorado State, as well as software designers, financial consultants, and microbrewers, many of whom migrated here from Silicon Valley and Los Angeles in search of more jobs and an easygoing lifestyle.

A magic kingdom, indeed.