Denver to Summit County Car Service

810 feet below Breckenridge

Silverthorne sits at 8,790 feet. Frisco is at 9,026. Dillon is at 9,111.

Now compare those with what surrounds them. Keystone’s base is 9,280. Breckenridge is 9,600. Copper Mountain is 9,712. Arapahoe Basin is 10,780. Silverthorne is 810 feet below Breckenridge, which is both a resort and a town with plenty of beds in it — so the choice here is between two bedrooms, not between a bedroom and a chairlift.

That 810 feet is worth planning around. Doctors advise gaining no more than 1,000 feet of sleeping elevation per night above 8,000 feet, and nobody flying into Denver manages it: the gain from the airport is 3,510 feet to Silverthorne and 4,320 feet to Breckenridge. Both blow through the guidance. But 810 of those feet are the part you actually get to choose, and you choose them when you book the room. There is more on how that plays out in our guide to altitude on a Colorado ski trip.

The drive itself reaches 11,158 feet at the Eisenhower Tunnel, about 60 miles west of Denver, and then loses more than 2,000 feet putting you in the valley. The two bores are not identical: the westbound Eisenhower runs 1.693 miles, the eastbound Johnson 1.697.

Three towns, four mountains

Frisco, Silverthorne and Dillon sit within a few minutes of each other around the same reservoir, and they function as one place with three sets of signage. Together they put Keystone, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain and Arapahoe Basin within short driving distance of a single bed. The town of Frisco puts Vail at 26 miles.

That is the reason groups who cannot agree on a mountain end up here. One booking, four options, decided at breakfast.

The towns themselves are small: 2,913 people in Frisco, 4,402 in Silverthorne, 1,064 in Dillon at the 2020 census. In February those numbers stop meaning anything.

You may not need a car once you arrive

Summit County runs its own bus system, the Summit Stage, and it is free to ride within the county. No fare box, no pass.

If you are staying in the valley, that changes the arithmetic on a rental car. Four days of parking, scraping windows and driving mountain roads at altitude, against a bus that costs nothing. Book the transfer in, ride the Stage, book the transfer out.

The reservoir the towns are built around

Dillon Reservoir is not a scenic pond. It holds 257,304 acre-feet across 3,233 acres, with 26.8 miles of shoreline, and it is the largest reservoir Denver Water owns — roughly 40 percent of the city’s entire supply.

The water does not reach Denver downhill. It goes east through the Roberts Tunnel, bored under the Continental Divide, and comes out on the other side of the mountains. The reservoir first filled in 1965, and the three towns arranged themselves around the new shoreline afterwards.

Two stops worth knowing about

The Outlets at Silverthorne run about 40 stores directly off the interstate. That makes them the default answer when a flight lands in the morning and the room is not ready.

Frisco’s Main Street still has its original buildings. The schoolhouse went up in 1902 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places, part of the town’s historic park.

Sunday afternoon is the trip that goes wrong

The drive up is rarely the problem. The drive back is.

Eastbound I-70 on a Sunday peaks between 3 and 6 PM, and CDOT puts the start of the build-up as early as 11:30 in the morning. Three of the four known chokepoints are ahead of you leaving the valley — the tunnel approach, the Georgetown to Silver Plume corridor and the Floyd Hill descent. The fourth is Vail Pass, which is behind you, and which sends its traffic into yours at Copper.

Miss the window and a 90-minute drive stops being 90 minutes, with a flight at the end of it. Work the departure backwards from your gate rather than forwards from checkout. On a peak Sunday that usually means leaving the valley before lunch.