World class dining is available in Telluride and Colorado's Wine Country. There are a variety of restaurants available in Cortez and Gunnison, outside of the National Parks. Durango is another spot for decent dining.
But if you really want to eat authentically in the region, it's not that difficult to eat like an Ancestral Puebloan. A trip to one of Southwestern Colorado's many farmers markets can provide a lot of the same ingredients the Ancestral Puebloans cultivated: garden corn, squash, pumpkins and beans. They also raised turkeys and hunted game. A visit to a small town butcher that processes wild game could add venison, elk, sage hens, ducks and geese to your menu. The Ancestral Puebloans gathered sunflower seeds and pinon nuts from the mesa tops; you can gather these ingredients a little easier at the local grocery store. Coarse-ground cornmeal could be added to the list, as native women used to spend long, grueling hours grinding grain on stone metates to have enough to eat. A majority of these ingredients are available in restaurants, since they are still heavily used today in Southwestern cuisine.
Harder to come by are staples of the Ancestral Puebloan diet like prickly pears and yucca fruit. Pickled clean of their spines, the buds of the prickly pear can be cooked and served, as can its fruit. Also called Spanish bayonette, the yucca could be eaten raw, cooked, or mixed with other ingredients. The yucca's white blossoms taste sweet and can be eaten raw. Today, prickly pear is available fresh, canned and as jelly and candy, while a Central American cousin of the Southwestern yucca can be bought diced and frozen. Both foods are usually available at gourmet and natural foods grocery stores.
However, the biggest difference between you and the Ancestral Puebloan is how easily you procure your meal and how much you get to eat. The master builders of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde spent the majority of each day simply eking out a subsistence diet.
The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Southwestern Colorado
Where To Stay & Best Hotels in Southwestern Colorado - updated May 2024
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Southwestern Colorado Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
