— Estes Park, Colorado —
On an African safari, tour guides are very careful not to promise what wildlife you’ll see. Not so in Estes Park.
“If you’re here for 24 hours or longer, you will see elk, unless there are extreme weather conditions,” Brooke Burnham, director of communications and public relations for Visit Estes Park, guaranteed.
Wildlife sightings are so common in Estes Park, which is surrounded by Rocky Mountain National Park on three sides and Roosevelt National Forest on the remaining edge, that visitors are often taken aback by just how comfortable the local fauna is wandering down Main Street.
Thousands of elk live in town and in the surrounding wilderness, but visitors are just as likely to encounter mule deer and rare birds, which are hard to miss during migration season.
Groups can organize photo safaris or guided wilderness walks for an up-close-and-personal wildlife experience, but due to the high elevation, many prefer to “hike in your car,” as Burnham termed it, along the highest continuously paved road in America, which ascends to more than 12,000 feet above sea level.
Scenic cafes and lodge restaurants dot the mountains, providing ideal lunch stops during a day outing in the mountains, but Estes Park’s river walk is where the main epicurean draw lies. As in many places in Colorado, craft beer, wine and cocktails are prevalent. The historic Stanley Hotel, inspiration for the movie “The Shining,” offers groups tastings from the largest whiskey collection in Colorado in addition to property tours.
— Lake Placid, New York —
When you visit a place that has held not one but two Olympic Games, you expect to see a large stock of hotels and a setting that looks like it could accommodate a sudden onslaught of hundreds of thousands of people. In Lake Placid, the only place that fits that bill is the sleek Lake Placid Winter Olympic Museum, where groups can arrange dinner and athletic shows by Olympic athletes.
In the rest of Lake Placid, you’re more likely to run into locals taking a business meeting on the ski lift or over a walk around the lake than crowds of photo-snapping tourists. With just around 3,000 year-round residents, Lake Placid is such a small village that it is technically part of the town of North Elba.
“Throughout all of the Adirondack communities, the main driver [of tourism] is the mountains and the lakes, but Lake Placid also has the resort atmosphere, the really quaint atmosphere of shops and restaurants,” said Kim Rielly, director of communications for the Lake Placid Convention and Visitors Bureau and Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism. “When you go to those stores on Main Street, you’re interacting with the owner.”
Though impressive options for skiing and hiking are always available, groups visiting Lake Placid tend to adjust quickly to the small resort town’s laid-back environment and follow loose, low-impact itineraries of timeless activities like snowshoeing and toboggan chute runs in the winter and paddleboating and mountain strolls in the summer.
— Cherokee, North Carolina —
Few sites in the United States mix history, nature and culture like Cherokee, North Carolina, which is simultaneously a sovereign Native American nation, North Carolina’s gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and a site archaeologists believe has been continuously occupied since around 10,000 B.C.
Though most of the ancestors of the Cherokees who today make up the Cherokee Nation went west to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears, the ancestors of the Cherokees in North Carolina, known as the Eastern Bank of the Cherokee Indians, were able to hide in the Smoky Mountains and continue to live in the area as their ancestors had for thousands of years.
Since the national park was opened, this group has shaped the tourism climate in Cherokee to teach visitors not only about the natural places they are visiting and the history of the Cherokee people, but also how the two fit together.
Groups can take in the long history of the Cherokee people at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, see what life was like in a Cherokee settlement before the migration at the Oconaluftee Indian Village and the Mountain Farm Museum and shop for handcrafted gifts at the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual.
Groups visiting in the summer can have an even more immersive experience of Cherokee culture at the annual powwow and the Festival of Native Peoples in July or at the summerlong “Unto the Hills” production. Cherokee actors perform stories of Cherokee legends, and dances from festivals and weddings for visitors each summer.
