Photography by Stephen B. Chambers Architects, Stephanie Chambers

Paris may be the City of Light, but in the late 19th century Telluride was called the City of Lights. This remote Colorado village was the first town in the world to have electric streetlamps and enjoy widespread use of household power. Now, the town is once again on the forefront of technological innovation. The Telluride Science Research Center (TSRC) is shepherding a project to combine solar and hydrogen power. In a nutshell, the goal is to use the sun’s energy to inexpensively split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The resultant hydrogen can be stored and used to fuel vehicles, planes, and homes. This alternative energy source may even replace fossil fuels.

Unaware of this flurry of scientific activity, we leisurely walk the streets of a sleepy municipality that awaits its summer bluegrass music and film festivals. The sun here is indeed powerful. Our group of six applies copious swaths of sunscreen across exposed body parts. But the kind of illumination that we notice as we stroll the streets in summer are the beautiful flowers that stipple and freckle the rustic landscape.

It makes perfect sense to us. If you live in a harsh climate eight months of the year and the other four are a continuous spring, it’s a good idea to make the outdoors another room of your home to renew your spirits. Most of the long-timers here surround their homes with pocket-sized gardens under the cover of towering spruce, willows, and aspen trees. There are few lawns; the landscaping tends to be the consummate ‘rock garden’ with exotic lupine, columbine, poppies, and bachelor buttons alongside native plants with fanciful names like bunny brush, junegrass, beardtongue, and tufted hair. The resulting effect on tourists like us is wonderment. That the people survive the harshness of alpine winters is astonishing enough, but the plants render us silent with reverence that such hardy folk possess the hope to presume spring can happen again and again. Telluride, a model of nature and man, renewing and reinventing.