I hear ya, but think about this for a minute, too:

I lived 3 minutes (max, usually done on a bike in winter) from Marquette mountain

I live an hour and a half from the closest ski area in Colorado, without the parking lot on the interstate that you can expect on any given weekend day.

Now, you might say that it's possible to get a job in the mountains in Colorado, and it's true, I had them...however, they don't pay much, ski town culture can really bite and the matter of fact is that if you want to earn a living and be in the Rockies you'll either live on the Front Range of Colorado or the Wasatch Front in Utah.

I can get to some decent backcountry skiing in 40 minutes, but with the stop and go line of traffic heading to the hills from Denver every weekend morning even the close BC turns where nobody goes are an hour and a half away, doubling the usual drive time.

The rock climbing is good, and I did plenty of it, but Colorado and Utah are hot and dry in the summer, and there is absolutely no water and no way of escaping it. To live an play, you live in a city, which means traffic, smog (yes, both the Wasatch Front and the Front Range have terrible pollution problems with smog and inversions) and tons of crime (I never thought I would want to carry a handgun with me, but I do here).

There's actually WAY more snow in Michigan. People in Michigan ski more, get out more, have a more friendly, neighborly attitude and are generally more pleasant to be around. People in Denver are as varied as those in NYC and tons of them are a PITA and the road rage is unimaginably bad.

So, yeah, if you want to give up simple, comfortable, clean livin' for an armpit city just so you can wait in line 2.5 hours every saturday to ski at a resort that while, yes, it has 2,000' vertical you only get to ski 2,000' all day because you spend so much time in the lift lines with Texans that can't ski, rich people who think they can ski but can't (and wear the shiniest suits you will ever see), then that's fine.

Oh, did I mention that we're so low on water that the streams are warming to a level that is toxic for the trout? So, there goes the fishing, too.

Like I said, tho, the climbing is extraordinary, the whitewater is good for about 2 months and the mountain biking is, much to my chagrin, pretty good. Then again, Marquette had the monster park and has some of the most amazing riding I've seen in my life.

I dunno, you'll have to try it and see, I guess