♪♪ Edgar: Winding your way up a beautiful Rocky Mountain road makes it easy to imagine what it might have been like when the first explorers from the East rode their horses through this striking Colorado landscape.

And when these early pioneers first arrived in the spectacular Box Canyon surrounded by 14,000-foot peaks and filled their canteens with water from the falls at the end of the valley, they might have sensed that they were not the first to lay eyes on this place.

For years, the Native American Ute Tribe had called this canyon sacred ground.

For reasons that need no explanation.

The discovery of precious metals turned this from a holy place into a mining town, and for generations, people have been coming here, searching, exploring, looking for gold, fresh powder, for a new lease on life.

These days, if you make that spectacular drive through the mountains, you might just find a rock and roll god conversing with the universe and be tempted to stay a while just to soak it all in.

This is our journey to one of the great small towns in America to find out how and why it's now become world-renowned for live music, film, and the arts.

This is Telluride, Colorado.

♪♪ ♪♪ Man: Ladies and gentlemen, once again -- "Music Voyager!"

Edgar: You may think you've heard everything, but the world is full of surprises.

And when you're hanging out with musicians, nothing is off limits.

Is this what you guys do every weekend?

-Every night.

-Every night!

-Yeah.

-My name is Jacob Edgar.

Music is my life, and life is short.

So crank up the volume and let the voyage begin.

[ Man singing in foreign language ] ♪♪ Telluride is a party town and one of the best happens every September.

Now in its 20th season, the Telluride Blues & Brews Festival has brought headliners such as Peter Frampton, B.B.

King, and George Clinton to this tiny town of 2,500 people.

But this year, it's an artist from Africa that grabs our ear.

Bombino.

♪♪ ♪♪ This guitar wizard hails from the Sahara Desert, an environment about as different from the Rocky Mountains as is possible on this planet.

It's discoveries like this that give this festival its trendsetting reputation.

And if the epic sounds and visuals aren't enough, Blues & Brews offers festival goers something extra.

Three hours of free beer comes with your ticket.

Wait, really?

You couldn't physically do this, but you have the option to taste over 150 different kinds of beers.

This is Steve Gumble, aka Gumby, and he made the ultimate follow-your-passion move over 20 years ago by starting the Blues & Brews Festival here in Telluride.

When I moved to Telluride in 1987, I was kind of just being a ski bum and skiing this beautiful mountain right here.

And lo and behold, Telluride Liquors became available.

Which is right here, this is Telluride Liquors.

Yep.

So I think I was spending a mortgage payment a month here.

So I decided I'd better buy the liquor store.

And that was my introduction to microbreweries.

What started as just a beer festival on Main Street quickly became much more, but Blues & Brews is just one of many music festivals that happen here.

The granddaddy of the music festivals, almost in the country, is the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which is over 40 years old.

Chamber Music has been here for a very long time.

Every weekend, there's something here in Telluride.

It's amazing.

It's actually a bit mind-boggling how much music gets made in this valley.

From the indie rock vibes of the RIDE Festival to the Telluride Jazz Festival to the singer-songwriter scene in the local bars, Telluride has a revolving music scene that's constantly refreshed with new talent.

This thriving music scene is one of the things that separates Telluride from other towns in the Rockies, and the setting where much of this musical magic takes place is truly unique.

We use our town park as the venue.

And the artists alone, like they're on tour, and they get to Telluride and there's some sort of decompression that happens, and it doesn't really even happen until they actually get on this stage and they look up.

Looking up, you can see the end of the valley in which Telluride sits.

The peaks are so close it feels like you can touch them.

And the town itself sits at almost 9,000 feet.

So the altitude and the unique quality of the sunlight here just creates a particular feeling, a euphoria even.

Or maybe that's just the beer.

To get up into some of the beauty, Steve takes us off-roading up to his favorite lookout spot right next to Bridal Veil Falls.

Naturally, we pop open a few custom-brewed beers from Steve's festival.

Ahh!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

That was my Tarzan.

What did you think?

And if the view and the brew wasn't special enough, Steve's got a musical surprise for us, as well.

Kipori "Baby Wolf" Woods is a blues guitar player, originally from New Orleans.

♪ I got a Cadillac ♪ ♪ Different roads every night ♪ ♪ Like a garage is too bit tight ♪ ♪ Never for set to fight ♪ How did you end up in the Telluride region?

I made a joke.

I said, "I'm a baby maker," and I actually made two babies.

So I ended up having to come here.

It wasn't a joke.

Who's laughing now, right?

Well, exactly.

♪ We can ride all night long in my Cadillac ♪ ♪♪ Edgar: Kipori has shared the stage with New Orleans legends such as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Neville Brothers, Wynton Marsalis, and others.

He's brought the flavor of the Big Easy to the Rocky Mountains.

♪♪ Steve tells me I should go visit his good friend, Chris Fish, the master brewer at the Telluride Brewing Company, a local spot that's been winning awards in beer competitions all over the country.

We asked Chris to tell us his secret for making batch after batch of his award-winning elixir.

Loud music makes better beer.

That's basically what it comes down to, the way we look around here.

That's true, right?

The rhythm somehow seeps into the canister.

It does.

It does.

And certain brews require certain bands.

Just like Steve, Chris has followed his passion in this beautiful place and found incredible success.

We've far exceeded our expectations already with just the amount of beer produced and the reception we've gotten from this great state of Colorado.

Chris' very specific use of hops and his insistence on letting his beer settle in tanks instead of filtering it are big reasons why his beer has a taste of its own.

Chris pours me a sample of the type of beer he's been brewing all day today.

Salud.

Salud.

And this is the Tempter.

Tempter IPA.

Yep.

Yeah, I could drink a lot of that.

Probably too much of that.

Our beers are described as being hop forward.

They're fairly hoppy, but they're not hop unbalanced.

No, no, no.

A got a bitterness to it, but not -- not overly bitter.

It's just a lot of, you know, it really fills your mouth with flavor.

Chris Fish is doing exactly what he wants to be doing in life, and he's doing it exactly where he wants to be.

And the quality and popularity of his beer is proof that this approach works.

♪♪ Driving through town, you might come across another guy named Roger Mason and his son, Roger Mason, who are also doing exactly what they want to be doing.

Who are you guys?

Who are we?

Ignore the men behind the camera.

They're like the Wizard of Oz.

Okay.

What camera?

Just don't pay any attention to them.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, now, you see that peak up there?

Yeah.

I took a leak off that peak.

Off the very top?

Off the very, very top.

That's the first life accomplishment you're going to tell me about.

Well, that's a Telluride moment.

Roger first came to Telluride in the 1970s to play the Bluegrass Festival with a musician named Peter Rowan.

Basically, I was a musician who painted.

After the music thing was over, I started painting, and there was no new construction or very little.

It looked like a mining town.

Right.

And I had a ball.

While Roger is painting right in the middle of the street, he also happens to be right outside a Telluride institution, the New Sheridan Hotel.

Part of my thing is a dialog with history.

Right.

In other words, this one's got stories, man.

I mean, I heard things that I shouldn't have been hearing running in the hallway, you know, stuff like that.

And I'm really not a kook, I swear.

[ As Richard Nixon ] I am not a kook.

Right.

Ask and I'll talk.

Roger has a lot of things to say about a lot of things.

This was the first electrically lit town in America, I think.

This is the place where the prices of real estate won't go down.

If I'm coherent enough to stand, I paint.

And he tells us how Butch Cassidy once robbed the local bank.

And Butch Cassidy stood right there and put a gun to a guy's head right there.

And I think they split with $18,000 worth of gold.

That was the payroll for all those miners.

And that was a lot of money back in those days.

I'm sure they weren't happy about it.

Roger tells me that all the old miners would come to this local theater to watch vaudeville and chase hookers.

The Sheridan Opera House is a landmark theater with a rich cultural history that's still used as a concert venue for local festivals.

And the balcony overlooking this old stage also happens to be where Roger's most intimate encounter with the unknown took place.

About 10:30.

There's no one in the building.

I felt as if someone had come up behind me.

I couldn't see anything.

My hair stood on end, and I left the building.

Whether or not you believe in ghosts, it's impossible not to feel the echoes of the past when you're anywhere near Main Street in Telluride.

But Main Street wouldn't even exist if not for the old mines, which Roger tells me were way up in the mountains above 10,000 feet.

There's still a lot of gold in that mountain.

With this in mind, we enlist the help of a guide to take us up to Tomboy, the old mining camp, to see if we can find some gold.

This is Richard Thorpe.

If I never go anywhere else other than here ever again, I'm totally okay with that.

In addition to being a ski instructor and avid outdoorsman, he happens to be a local expert on Tomboy.

What's commonly known as the Tomboy was really a consolidation of several large mines.

And those mines up in the hills at one time employed thousands of miners.

How's the drive?

Should I be -- Should I be nervous about anything?

Oh, probably not.

Probably not.

Yeah.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversation ] Bouncing along a road that's no more than two tire tracks carved into the side of a mountain is kind of a workout.

Just holding on can be exhausting.

♪♪ This is the ruins of the old Tomboy town site.

Now, where you see the little bit of brick right there... Richard tells me that the flat geography up here let them not only mine for gold and silver ore, but also process that ore into refined metals.

We're right around 11,500 right here.

And people lived here year round.

Year round.

Unbelievable.

Well, they had a good 40-year run here.

The other thing was, a lot of the engineering up here, it was a classic case of necessity making the mother of invention.

The aerial trams that they built up here, that was a precursor of chairlifts.

And those blues guitar players who today wail on electric guitars down at the Telluride music festivals have the mines to thank for bringing electricity to Telluride.

The need for electricity at those mines made Tomboy, and then Telluride, two of the first electrified towns in the world.

But at this point, we're more interested in seeing if there's still gold to be had.

Richard says there is, but it comes with a catch.

That's a mix of gold and copper.

So the reason that's still here is because the cost of getting the precious metals out of that rock is higher than the value of what's in the rock.

Oh, yeah.

Makes great souvenirs, though.

It does.

It's super heavy.

Yeah.

It's filled with metal.

Tomboy shut down in 1927, and the population of Telluride started a long decline that lasted until the ski boom of the 1970s.

Today, the miners are mostly gone, but we do hear about one mine on the other end of town that's become the base of operations for a totally different type of exploration.

We have a band playing here.

We have DJs outside.

We have a lot of my fire wheels and fire sculptures going and a bunch of burn barrels going and DJs, and it's usually like 300 to 500 people in here.

Meet Anton.

So how have you been?

Pretty good.

And this is Anton's mine.

Well, he doesn't own it, so maybe he's more of a mine caretaker.

Viditz-Ward: The property owners are artists and saw what I was doing.

What are you doing exactly?

I do large-scale pyrotechnic-type art.

Uh-huh.

Particularly, I'm kind of into these fire wheels.

Right.

So it's good to work amidst stone.

It's fireproof.

Yes.

I can't really light anything on fire here.

That's good.

Anton uses his welding skills to create massive metal sculptures that can be filled with burning wood.

He's been doing this for years and examples of his work are scattered around the outside of the mine.

These are basically just big toys, aren't they?

Yeah, they're kind of adult pyro toys.

Yeah, this is adult pyro toys.

Is this another sculpture?

This is a grease bomb.

It's essentially a mortar.

And we drop a can of beans into it and run away.

[ Laughs ] Why beans?

Why a can of beans?

Beans seem to make the best explosion.

It makes a big, huge mushroom cloud explosion.

♪♪ Anton's parties that he throws at the mine are really fund-raisers.

He's committed to turning this old mine into functional art studios for himself and a community of Telluride artists.

We've slowly been cleaning up these openings here.

Those are all salvaged windows.

We're big into dumpster diving, kind of feeding off the waste of town.

This is where I do most of my work.

Yeah.

This is the project I'm working on right now.

It is the Wheels of Zoroaster.

And this is all like a metal cage that we put firewood into and spin.

The mine itself was once quarried for limestone rock, so there's no secret gold back in the over 56,000 square feet of tunnels.

Is this unusual, a mine like this?

Or are they kind of dotted around the landscape?

This is unusual because most of the stuff is gold or silver or copper, and those are all really toxic and are usually like Superfund sites.

This has no tailings.

They just took the material away and that's it.

Because it's just stone.

Just stone.

Yeah.

Huh.

Yeah.

Very unusual, and it's very large.

Well, when the zombie apocalypse happens, you'll have plenty of escape vehicles.

Well, we're going to seal up the entrances and hide out in here.

That's a good point.

There's plenty of things to tinker around with.

After sun slipped behind the mountain, Anton was ready to show me one of his creations in action.

It's a piece that he's bringing to this year's Burning Man Festival, where he's one of a select few artists who are commissioned by the festival to create collaborative, community-oriented, and interactive works.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Anton isn't the only artist reaping the benefits of Telluride.

Back in the middle of town is the Stronghouse Artists Co-op, a publicly supported community arts space that houses studios and galleries for a wide range of artists.

They even have a rehearsal space and studio in the basement that local musicians like Claybrook Penn can utilize.

We share it.

We hopefully keep it kind of clean.

We volunteer some hours to keep it in good shape for other artists that come after us, hopefully.

It sounds like it might be a hub for -- It is a hub.

It is.

It's a vibrant place, and it inspires all of us, I think, to get our art out there.

♪ Oh, love ♪ ♪ Oh, oh ♪ ♪ Whoa, oh ♪ Edgar: Originally from the South, Claybrook has spent 10 years in the mountains of Colorado.

♪ The light gold ♪ ♪ As it falls through the trees ♪ ♪ And it shines on me ♪ ♪ And now it tells me ♪ ♪ The sky may fly so high ♪ ♪ Good Lord, I can't believe my eyes ♪ Edgar: Her music blends Southern Gothic storytelling with a deep appreciation for American roots music.

Her recordings range from bluegrass to soul to gritty Southern rock.

But today we're treated to an unplugged version of one of her original songs.

♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ Edgar: Just down the street is a different sort of artist hub, the Ah Haa School for the Arts, which encourages the town's youngest residents' artistic efforts and provides art classes for adults, as well.

One of the school's volunteers also happens to be a successful producer/director of documentary films.

How does it feel to be on the other side of the camera for a change?

[ Chuckles ] Kind of sucks.

[ Laughs ] "Kind of sucks."

I'd much rather be either -- either operating the camera, doing audio, or... Suzan is a local resident who makes acclaimed documentary films and is involved with the two major film festivals that happen every year, the Telluride Film Festival and the Mountainfilm Festival.

There's a really strong film community here, which seems unlikely because there's only, I don't know, 2,500 people that live in Telluride.

People here are very generous and we're incredibly thankful and very gracious of their support.

Right.

So let's be blunt.

This is a great place for people to meet at cocktail parties, filmmakers and producers, financiers.

Yeah.

Connect, interact, and make things happen.

Absolutely.

Simply put, there's a lot of support for creativity in Telluride.

And it's not just in downtown.

More and more concerts and events are being staged up in Mountain Village, an entire second community that's built around the ski and golf resort area, and it's directly connected to the streets of historic Telluride by a free gondola.

Mountain Village is the kind of place where, if you order a panini at the golf course clubhouse, it's going to be made fresh by an Italian chef from Bormio.

Cheers.

Salute.

Salute.

Chef Nico spends his summer at the golf course, and in the winter, runs a restaurant on the top of the mountain called Alpino Vino.

Probably is the highest restaurant in North America.

Really?

Yeah.

It's very high.

Almost 12,000 feet.

We bring up live lobster from Maine.

Wait, that's not traditionally alpine, though.

Yeah, it's great alpine.

The best part of Nico's gig is that he gets to ski every day just to get to and from work.

We enjoy the fresh powder almost every day when it's there.

Because you get there first, right?

You got this privilege, yeah.

♪♪ If you can get food this good on the links or on the slopes, I'm curious what we'll find at one of the top restaurants in town.

So we hop on a gondola from Mountain Village and ride down to Telluride with Chef Chad, whose restaurant, Cosmopolitan, is right by the base of the gondola.

Yeah, we built the restaurant before the gondola was built, and I saw this sort of coming.

So I moved from Vail to here because I thought this gondola was going to be a game changer, and it was.

One of the other perks for Chad being in Telluride are the wild mushrooms.

They're so plentiful in the mountains during the summer that there's now an entire festival every August.

The Mushroom Festival is probably the biggest reason why I know so much about mushrooms.

We have an inspector who has been licensed to inspect mushrooms to see if they're edible or not.

The mushrooms aren't out yet, but Chad has just gotten in a shipment of locally grown fresh produce that he's promised to turn into something delicious.

And it turns out local and fresh food has always been a big deal in Telluride.

The name the Cosmopolitan was not about the drink.

It was about a restaurant that was actually here in the late 1800s, and it actually had live trout tanks.

So, in the 1800s... Wow.

...the miners were actually having fish so fresh, it was alive when they ordered it.

Wow.

So that tells you something about Telluride and food.

Chad is really into cooking slow and low -- low heat over a long time.

So while he whips up a dish...

It's called chicken and the egg.

...I sit at the bar and drink some corn-infused mezcal that Chad and local liquor importer Dylan Sloan say we'll pair wonderfully with his appetizer.

Not tequila.

Mezcal.

While it's smooth enough to drink straight, Dylan insists I try it in a cocktail for this tasting.

So explain to me what went into this cocktail.

Well, it's mostly corn-infused mezcal.

There's a little St-Germain liqueur, fresh lemon, a little bit of local honey simple syrup, shaken and served over ice with a sal de gusano rim.

Which is this right here, sal de gusano.

Now this -- You'll have to explain this to me because sal de gusano means "worm salt."

Yeah, exactly.

So does that mean what I think it means?

Exactly that.

There is ground, toasted worms right there in the salt.

But it all blends perfectly.

Not just the cocktail, but the food -- fresh chicken, a slow poached egg, fried polenta and fresh greens, combined with the mezcal, creates a sum even greater than the parts.

Chad brings out more courses and the mezcal keeps flowing.

Did I mention it's 11:00 in the morning?

Wow.

Great food, exceptional festivals, creative local characters, stunning natural beauty.

Even after a short visit, it's easy to see why many people who ended up in Telluride over the years have never left.

It's a seductive place where a sense of adventure and exploration is embedded in the local spirit.

This is a town where people forge their own paths and follow their passions doing what they want to be doing, most of the time, even if that means doing things a little bit differently.

They don't affectionately call it "to Hell, you ride" for nothing.

♪♪ Telluride has a rhythm of its own, and if you manage to make your way to this little Shangri-la in the Rockies, you might just find yourself playing along.

♪♪ ♪ It's fall in Colorado ♪ ♪ And the days are getting shorter and shorter ♪ ♪♪ Shadows from the aspens growing longer ♪ On the path in front of me ♪ ♪♪ ♪ I feel a little sad ♪ ♪ And the snow starts to fall from the sky ♪ ♪♪ ♪ My skis come out of storage ♪ ♪ Facilitating my ability to fly ♪ ♪♪