“Paris, Barcelona, Rome, Machu Picchu are all lovely cities, but they are so yesterday,” reads Reader’s Digest Asia’s “15-under-the-radar places to visit in 2022.”
“In 2022, vow to go beyond the obvious, seek the road less travelled,” the line finishes.
Where to then?
Maybe Istanbul, Turkey, with its history, architecture and vibrant culture.
The seaside towns and forests of Calabria, Italy, sound divine, too.
Or maybe Durango, Colorado?
Durango is no stranger to making top lists, but being placed on Reader’s Digest Asia’s 2022 top 15 under-the-radar list with the likes of Durban, South Africa; Madeira Islands, Portugal; and Uvita, Costa Rica, might seem like a stretch. Durango is great, but is it that great?
No, according to a growing list of other top lists.
As Durango continues to land on top lists, the number of lists it doesn’t make also grows. It’s the nature of top lists, which are subjective and often influenced by tourism organizations. And maybe that’s OK. While the lists boost tourism and the local economy, they can also bring tourists who can overwhelm and clash with the community. It’s a fine balance that Durango increasingly navigates as its accolades and failures pile up.
The number of top lists that Durango doesn’t make is extensive.
USA Today’s “Best Ski Town of 2021” went to Red River, New Mexico. Only Breckenridge appeared on the list representing Colorado.
Durango failed to crack the top 10 for USA Today’s “Best Small Town for Adventure” in 2021. Again, only Breckenridge made the list from Colorado.
La Plata County ranked 99 in U.S. News & World Report’s healthiest communities rankings 2021, behind counties in Kansas, Illinois, South Dakota and Nebraska.
Best small cities for biking? Fifty best college towns? Travel and Leisure’s “10 Best Small Towns in Colorado”?
Nope.
Even in Outside, Durango only sneaked into “The 24 Best Mountain Towns in the U.S. Ranked” at 19.
“All of these lists are obviously very subjective,” said Tom Sluis, a spokesman for the city of Durango, who first moved to town in 1998.
“It gets down to a matter of perception and what these other entities are using for their criteria,” he said.
Critical thinkers are likely to understand the overt subjectivity of many top lists.
USA Today’s “Best Destination for Outdoor Enthusiasts” in 2015, in which Durango placed second, offered readers “a pool of 20 expert-selected nominees.” What criteria those experts used to develop that pool USA Today never specifies.
USA Today has done away with that short disclaimer in recent contests, opting instead for a list of experts below its “Best Small Town for Adventure in 2021.”
What qualifies these experts?
No one knows, though the long lists of their passions, the places they’ve visited and the publications they’ve written for must certainly qualify them.
Some publications like Hemispheres magazine with its “The 5 Most Festive Christmas Towns in the United States,” which Durango did make, or Parade magazine’s 50 best college towns, which Durango did not, never divulge how they make their rankings.
“Those top 10 lists, they’re popularity contests. They’re mercurial,” said Mike Smedley, a longtime Durango resident and chief deposit officer with Bank of the San Juans.
Of all the producers of top lists, U.S. News & World Report arguably tries to take the most objective and data-driven approach.
For its 150 best places to live list, which Durango was seemingly excluded from at least in part because it is not a metropolitan area, the publication outlines a rigorous methodology with metrics such as “Job Market Index,” “Housing Affordability Index” and “Desirability Index” complete with different weighting percentages (21.2%, 23.7% and 16.3%, respectively).
U.S. News & World Report has the data to back up its claims, but according to its own methodology, 3,600 people across the U.S. decided the desirability of each location, a far cry from the U.S.’ about 332 million people and less than one-fifth of Durango’s own population.
“It’s kind of like they’re click bait,” said Rachel Welsh, public relation and communications manager for Visit Durango. “(Publications) can’t have the same destinations on the list every year, so that’s how you will see Durango rotate on some lists.”
At the Durango Area Tourism Office, Welsh works with journalists from across the country and world, inviting them to Durango and pitching them the town and its businesses and people for stories.
Recently, the Durango area made Men’s Journal’s list of the 15 best running trails in America with the Colorado Trail at Molas Pass. Welsh saw that Men’s Journal was looking for the best places to trail run and pitched the Colorado Trail.
To promote the area, Visit Durango will also host journalists, creating itineraries for them in the hopes of receiving positive press.
“When we host media here, we tailor an itinerary to what their beat is,” Welsh said. “If someone is more outdoors-focused like Outside magazine, that includes water rafting and mountain biking. With high-end publications, that’s dinner at the Ore House and the hot springs.”
Publications constantly make lists to pull in readers, she said, so often Durango will find itself inadvertently on a list as a journalist works on another article.
Durango made Hemispheres’ list of most festive Christmas towns because the journalist had visited Durango while working on a larger story about scenic byways.
“Since he had been to Durango, it was easy to throw us into the Christmas town list,” she said.
Towns can put a lot of stock into the lists, but there’s little logic or uniformity that backs them up or standardizes them year after year.
“It flows with the news cycle and these publications have to keep it fresh,” Welsh said. “It’s exciting to be on these lists, but we can’t guarantee we’ll always be on them.”
Welsh said top lists can be fun and positive, but with all of the public relations maneuvering and marketing that goes into them, they often lack substance.
“It just doesn’t hold as much journalistic value as you think it would,” she said “It is almost the luck of the draw.”
“It’s hard to tell what the exact impact of these lists are,” Welsh said.
While the correlation between top lists and tourism is less than clear, the impacts are visible.
Making top lists boosts Durango’s economy by encouraging visitors and putting the town on the map for business.
“Any time you get some recognition for the (Durango) community, it puts the location on people’s radar,” said Jack Llewellyn, executive director of the Durango Chamber of Commerce. “I think it does give people an incentive to come and check out the community.”
“It’s essentially free PR for our town,” said Tim Walsworth, executive director of the Durango Business Improvement District. “It keeps Durango and the area top-of-mind with people who might want to visit here, might want to relocate here (or) might want to move a business here.”
Other impacts are neither good nor bad.
As a frequent destination on top mountain biking lists, including Bicycling’s recent list of the best places to learn how to mountain bike, Durango attracts many people searching for new terrain.
“I do see more user trails in the high country whereas previously you didn’t see as many people up there,” said Heath Garvey, buyer manager at Mountain Bike Specialists.
Garvey said he’s seen more bikers coming to Durango, but the density on trails is still nothing compared with the Front Range, where he lived for about a decade before returning to Durango in 2014.
“The amount of trail users up there is so much higher that I don’t see (overcrowding) as much here,” he said.
The growing popularity of Durango and its appearances on top lists have brought about more subtle changes, too.
“We used to have some pretty identifiable shoulder seasons and local merchants, particularly restaurants would offer two-for-one dining specials in the spring in the fall, and those were really looked forward to by locals,” said Eric Pierson, director of information services for the city of Durango.
“Those are long gone (and) the shoulder seasons have largely evaporated,” Pierson, who has lived in Durango for more than three decades, said.
Of course, constantly making top lists also has its negative impacts.
At a recent conference for travel journalists Welsh attended in New York City, a representative of Lake Tahoe spoke about being inundated with tourists after being featured on many pandemic-inspired travel lists.
“They just got completely flooded with tourists that they didn’t have the infrastructure to support,” Welsh said. “That was from all that mass press that they were getting from places like USA Today. That coverage is exciting, but if you’re in every single publication it can definitely have its negative effects.
“It’s important to change up those lists and make sure that they include other less visited towns so that one destination is just not bombarded,” she said
The myriad effects that top lists can have on smaller communities often leaves communities split in their support.
“I think you would probably find half the population happy to not be on any list at all and half the population very proud of the accomplishments that you can ascribe to Durango,” Sluis said.
“The ironic thing about these top 10 lists is that people get ticked when (the) town is put on them because they either disagree with it or they say, ‘Now more of those people are going to come here,’” Smedley said. “And yet in the same breath, if we don’t make a top 10 list, people get pissed because we’re not getting our due.
“Maybe we should be on the top 10 list of towns that hate and love top 10 lists,” he said.
For towns like Durango, top lists are often about striking a balance between the benefits that they bring and the consequences they can have if one place is overhyped.
“There’s that delicate line because if we get discovered, there’s kind of that, ‘Is (this) too much publicity?’” Llewellyn said. “We want to walk that line so we don’t get inundated, and we were inundated during the pandemic.”
Just as important is targeting a like-minded audience and aiming to make the top lists that bring in those visitors, Welsh said.
Welsh and Visit Durango target publications like Outside, Bicycling and Thrillist that attract adventurous, but environmentally minded visitors.
“I think it’s important to focus on reaching those niche demographics instead of just inviting absolutely everyone to come,” she said.
“It is a good thing that we’re not on every list all the time because that can also lead to overtourism,” she said.
Instead of worrying about the crush of tourists from making top lists, Durangoans should concern themselves with attracting responsible visitors, said Marty Grabijas, a longtime freelance writer for outdoor publications and the ski industry.
“I love to see people recreating outdoors,” he said. “The caveat is that people have to be respectful of everyone who lives here and they have to be respectful of the environment. As long as everyone does that, I think we can all play outdoors and we can handle a lot of people.”
While some residents may disdain the top lists and the tourists they bring, there is a sense among many Durangoans that the town will never return to under-the-radar status.
“Everybody likes to think that they're the last best-kept secret, but Durango was discovered long ago,” Pierson said.
As Durango continues to pile up the accolades, the wheels of exposure keep turning.
“It’s challenging once a place is on the map to put the brakes on that,” said David Taft, conservation director with San Juan Mountains Association. “Even if we were not placed on any more lists and the tourism department decided to take a vacation, people have found us.
“That ... has already been set in motion,” he said. “Ultimately, what we need is just more help managing the folks that are coming in, because they’re coming.”
ahannon@durangoherald.com
