DataJunkie and climbhoser make some valid points but they are missing some of the history that comes with what has gone on in Denver that has brought us to where we are.

Denver has always been a forward looking city. We were too far south and the mountains to the west were too rugged to make train travel practical but we got the railroad to come here anyway. A lot of Denver's magic has to do with the wealth that lies in the mountains to the west. Lots of people characterized Denver as a 'Cowtown'. Abilene, Dodge City and Chicago are 'cowtowns'. Denver was built on mining! And because of that there has aways been a willingness to embrace science to get the stuff out of the ground. Science means education and education means a higher standard of living which means people with time and money to pursue pastimes that involve the outdoors. Living on the porch of one of the greatest outdoors places in the world doesn't hurt either.

In the late 1800 and early 1900, Denver was a center for tuberculoses treatments. People came here for the dry clean air and being 'outside' became the norm. There is even a house style in Denver where the porch is integral to the house living space along with huge windows that can be opened to let the outside inside.

At about the same time we also had a visionary head of the Denver Parks department, George Cranmer. He wanted to make Denver into a city of parks and he succeeded spectacularly. We have hundreds of parks of all sizes within the city and the City and County of Denver even owns thousands more acres in the surrounding mountains. The parks are very important to the people of the area and, with the exception of Montebello, every neighborhood in Denver has at least one large park and several smaller ones.

Another piece of the puzzle was the 1965 flood of the Platte River. Denver has always had flood problems with either the Platte or Cherry Creek. Sudden thunderstorms can send walls of water down those rivers that have nearly wiped out the city. Cherry Creek was tamed with a reservoir before 1965 but the Platte wasn't. The Platte flooded to record levels then, taking out bridges, houses, and business all along its run through Denver. When the waters drained away, Joe Shoemaker had the vision to reclaim the land with an open space that wouldn't be built on to avoid the destruction again. Thus was born the Platte River Greenway. In the first few years (probably 10), it wasn't anything special. It had a park at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the Platte and stretched a few miles in either direction. But as the years went by, it stretched further and further. Cherry Creek already was entrenched through the city and was easy enough to add a bike path along the bottom. Other municipalities along the Platte started to hook into the Greenway and to send spurs east and west along their drainages. By the mid90's the Greenway stretched from well over 40 miles from north to south and had dozens of other trails taking off from it. There are literally hundreds of miles of trails within the Metro area and more being added all the time.

With all that mileage available, people just started to ride. And, as climbhoser said, we are an outdoorsy athletic bunch of people. When you have 300 days of sunshine a year, 11 inches of annual precipitation that mostly occurs in 20 minute rainstorms of ferocious intensity, winters where the temperatures may be cold once in a while but you can have January days in the 70s, where summers may hit 100 F but the humidity falls to single digits, why wouldn't you ride?

Can it be repeated elsewhere? It's kind of hard to bottle lightning but you can always try!