I flew with a guy within the last year who drove in from a small farm town in eastern Colorado. He said that it was about a 2 hr drive, but you’d occasionally have to plan ahead a little more due to winter weather. His argument was that he couldn’t stand living in the sea of humanity near any hub and that a 2 hour drive is less time than practically any commute by air after factoring in driving time to an airport and having a backup flight. He also never had to worry about pass rider seniority, jumpseat availability, or system delays. Made sense to me.

 

Or buying property within 1 hour of Denver, which is a lot like buying property in the Bay Area. Seems like a smart decision. And most of the year that’s a really chill drive.

 

It’s better than commuting by air, forget about that. I25 sucks once you hit Fort Collins and you can take the toll around Denver to the airport if you choose to do so. I’d say it would be fine. I live 40 mins west of DIA but that’s because I prefer turns and two day trips.

 

Nobody’s flying passengers CYS-DEN at the moment so you’d be driving for sure.

FWIW I’ve been trying to convince my SO to move to Cheyenne for a few years. She was raised in Northern Colorado and steadfastly refuses to move to Wyoming. She has some concerns about education and being “far away” from things (specialty craft stores, etc etc). I’m not sure they’re legitimate concerns, but I can’t get her to budge, even with all the afformentioned advantages of living in Wyoming. Property values in Cheyenne have increased lately but it’s not quite a clone of California like Denver-Fort Collins is. And of course the state income tax situation, though Colorado’s state income tax is better than can be said of a lot of our other bases.

I-25 south of Fort Collins was mentioned earlier. It sucks and has been under construction for seems like a decade now, but it’s still two lanes from Fort Collins to mile marker 244 (about 20 miles south of Fort Collins). Once you hit Fort Collins there’s usually a lot of cars on the road during normal hours. It’s usually ok, it’s not anything like SoCal traffic, but if there’s an accident in the perpetual construction zone in Loveland, you’re screwed. From Cheyenne, if you find out about the accident ahead of time, you may be able to cut through Greeley and take less of a delay. I do Fort Collins to Denver a lot at 4-5 am or 10-11 pm and it’s usually not too bad. Traffic north of Fort Collins is usually smooth. You’re only going to see traffic between Fort Collins and Cheyenne if there’s an accident or construction.

The toll road to the Denver Airport (E470) splits off from I-25 at mile marker 228. It costs $8-9 one way to or from the airport to I-25 and on a perfect day in Denver taking the toll road to the airport saves you 20 minutes and a lot of stress. In normal traffic it saves you 30-40 minutes because having to go thru Denver to get to the airport sucks big time. At rush hour it might save you more.

I’ve spent a lot of time in wintry places to include years in AK/Northern Canada and the most sketchy winter driving I’ve done has been in Colorado and Wyoming, including the stretch from Denver to Fort Collins on I-25. If you get dry snow and wind the vis drops to almost 0 but people in lifted pickups will still pass you at freeway speed, reducing the already crap visibility to nil. Also had a morning after a bad storm where I stopped counting the abandoned slide offs between Denver and Fort Collins once I hit about three dozen. Cars, trucks, city buses, it was bad.

As always, YMMV. There are a lot of attractive things about Wyoming, and so long as you don’t have get-there-itis in a Winter storm or its aftermath, and are willing to pay for the toll road at least when the Denver traffic is bad, the drive should be manageable.

 

Just to be clear, you can not take the toll road from Ft Collins. There is a whole bunch of 1-25 to drive from Ft Collins to the toll road. It’s like 40 miles south of Ft Collins to E-470 (the toll road).

That being said Cheyenne to DEN is totally doable. I know several pilots who do it.