Exiting Interstate 25 at Lake Avenue in Colorado Springs and heading uphill and west toward Cheyenne Mountain, the view through the windshield evolves – from a series of traffic lights and a swarm of retail signs to a leafy canopy. As Lake Avenue ends, The Broadmoor resort rises above the trees, with its flowered roundabout.

The drive is a revelation: that The Broadmoor is to Colorado Springs what the tiny nation of Vatican City is to the metropolis of Rome – a place set apart, a shimmering bubble of curated beauty where guests find room for contemplation and, in hard times, consolation.

Both the late founder and newer owner of The Broadmoor embrace a 1910 cowboy poem, “Out Where the West Begins,” bronzed at the hotel’s main entrance, offering a heartfelt howdy to those who make their way to the always-open front door of this outpost of Old West hospitality. The poem begins:

 

Out where the handclasp’s a little stronger,

Out where the smile dwells a little longer,

That’s where the West begins

 

The Broadmoor is a city within a city, a place that has developed its own rich history and culture in its 105-year existence. The hotel complex and sprawling grounds are immaculately kept, creating an air of perfection. An enormous and enormously busy staff works day and night to maintain that perfection. 

Guests have included the world’s richest and most famous, starting with John D. Rockefeller, who was the guest of honor at the Broadmoor’s private opening ceremony. Since then, the resort has regularly welcomed presidents – including Dwight D. Eisenhower and both Bushes – and Hollywood legends, from John Wayne to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Broadmoor covers 5,000 acres with three distinct hotel structures – Main, South and West – which have a combined 784 guest rooms and suites. Some 2,000 staff members keep things running, with more staff added in the summer. The hotel buildings encircle The Broadmoor’s scenic Cheyenne Lake, with its resident swans and close-ups of the Rockies, the structures united by their pretty-in-pink stucco.

Guests sometimes choose to stay instead in luxuriously rustic cabins that The Broadmoor opened in nearby wilderness: Cloud Camp atop Cheyenne Mountain’s The Horns peak, Emerald Valley Ranch deep in Pike National Forest and Fly Fishing Camp on a private stretch of river to the northwest, each of them a narrated Broadmoor drive away.

The resort has had just three private owners since it opened in 1918. First were its founders, Spencer and Julie Penrose, and later their foundation, El Pomar. Next came the Gaylord publishing family of Oklahoma, which also owns Opryland in Nashville. In 2011, Philip Anschutz – the namesake of the University of Colorado medical campus – purchased the Broadmoor for a reported $1 billion.

Running the Broadmoor is a monumental task, led by two executives: one a former Michigan girl who learned about family and hospitality in her father’s factory bar, and an aspiring Ohio golfer who rose through the ranks at a famed West Virginia resort.

Together, they apply their years of hospitality experiences to the logistics of leading the large staff of a place that seems more like an independent city than a resort.

The Broadmoor resort isn’t a city in a legal sense, but it has had the services typical of one. The Broadmoor at one time ran a one-car police force, its own water district, sanitation district, gas station, grocery, florist and pharmacy. However, all that is gone.

Among the Broadmoor structures that locals miss most is the original Broadmoor World Arena, built on the hotel grounds in 1939 and demolished in 1994, making way for Broadmoor West. From 1948 to 1976, the venue hosted U.S. and world figure skating championships. Among the skaters who helped make the arena famous is Peggy Fleming, a Cheyenne Mountain High School graduate who won U.S. and world skating titles and a gold medal at the 1968 Winter Olympic Games in Grenoble, France.

What’s newer at The Broadmoor: Café Julie’s, a coffee and confection shop in the main hotel building, where guests and visitors watch chocolatiers in action behind glass. Across Cheyenne Lake, in Broadmoor West, chefs prepare pasta for dishes served at The Broadmoor’s Italian restaurant, Ristorante Del Lago, in front of a rapt audience.

Consider Jack Damoli, the golfer, as The Broadmoor’s resolutely positive and proper mayor. His official title is president and chief executive officer. Damoli keeps his eye on continuous improvement of aging infrastructure – Broadmoor Main is more than 100 years old. That would explain why he doesn’t always have time for a weekly round of golf on The Broadmoor’s courses, though his Callaway bag of clubs stands ready in his office.

Think of Ann Alba, who worked in her father’s bar, as the fireball vice mayor. Alba spends most of her waking hours darting from place to place managing the day-to-day, keeping the hotel’s guests happy from reservation to arrival to departure and beyond. That requires a lot of cheerful patience, and sometimes bringing her fearsome hammer down on support staff who fall short, with a pat on the back and maybe a hug when they catch on or catch up.

It’s all a Sisyphean task for everyone involved, from the executive suite to the massive laundry operation, to sustain the Broadmoor Bubble – like rolling a boulder up a hill and doing it again the next day, employees reassuring each other that “we’re living the dream” of building guests’ lifelong memories.

Memories count. Alba keeps in regular contact with five-generation guest families – those that return generation after generation for photographs in the same places their forebears once stood, often in the mezzanine with Cheyenne Lake in the background, and for more memory making.

 

Broadmoor founder Spencer Penrose made his fortune in Colorado gold and Utah copper, and he invested his wealth in Colorado Springs. First, he completed the Pikes Peak Highway in 1916, as auto travel gained popularity. That same year Penrose started the Pikes Peak Hill Climb, the nation’s second-oldest auto race, behind the Indianapolis 500, to promote his highway. The Hill Climb ran its 100th race last summer.

Penrose completed The Broadmoor in 1918. He lured New York travelers west to the frontier property by hiring the designer of New York’s Central Park to design the grounds of his hotel, and the architectural firm that designed New York hotels.

Crisis struck soon after The Broadmoor opened its doors. First came the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, and then in 1920, the federal government banned the production, importation, transportation and sale of alcohol. Penrose denounced the law as unfair. Penrose’s guests wanted alcohol, so he served it to them anyway. Proof of it can be seen in the Main hotel, in Bottle Alley, a display next to the Broadmoor steakhouse La Taverne. Bottle Alley displays empty bottles that were stashed away during Prohibition and later exhumed.

A bottle of more recent vintage is also on display – an empty bottle of Jordan Cabernet autographed by George W. Bush, later the 43rd president of the United States. Bush told the Broadmoor staff that after viewing his bar bill, he never wanted to drink again, a vow he kept.

Penrose joined his guests in drink, and for etiquette’s sake, he made certain adjustments for it. He had lost an eye in an accident and, for social drinking, he ordered a blood-shot replacement to match his surviving eye. He would swap back and forth the blood-shot and a white one as needed.

As with alcohol policy, Penrose had an independent streak in his choice of politics, and friends. He voted straight Republican but counted a few Democrats as friends and allies. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat elected president four times, because Roosevelt supported repeal of Prohibition.

The Broadmoor community joined in Penrose’s stubbornly independent political streak. The hotel’s immediate neighbors and Penrose’s friends preferred not to pay taxes for Colorado Springs city services, so they opposed annexation. The Broadmoor community formed its own fire district in 1949 after Colorado Springs said its fire department wouldn’t respond to its calls. Like death and taxes, though, annexation was inevitable. The Broadmoor became part of Colorado Springs in 1980.

The Broadmoor Fire Department is still operating; Broadmoor-area residents keep voting to fund it. The hotel and the fire department do not report to each other; they are separate but work closely together. The fire station is the first to respond when the hotel calls on a dedicated line. It receives 1,000 calls a year, 80 percent of them medical.

The department has a four-minute response time for Broadmoor guests, said Chief and Paramedic Noel Perran, a 44-year veteran of the district, and fire chief since 2000. The fire district serves not just The Broadmoor but also 1,100 properties in the Broadmoor community.

The fire district also responds to calls from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. When a veterinary dentist prepared to clean the teeth of a Bengal tiger named George, the zoo needed a paramedic to run an IV to anesthetize the animal. Perran is a trained paramedic. He shaved a spot on the tiger’s haunch and started the IV.

With all of The Broadmoor resort’s deep history, there’s something else new: weekly chapel services.

On Sundays, Broadmoor guests and locals attend 9 a.m. services at the Pauline Chapel, the stand-alone church done in the same pink stucco as the hotel. Julie Penrose had the chapel built in 1919 and named it after her granddaughter.

The chapel is an experience important to Broadmoor owner Anschutz, because, as his favorite cowboy poem says, the Broadmoor is out West, “where there’s more of singing and less of sighing, where there’s more of giving and less of buying.”

Anschutz is a Presbyterian, a form of Christianity that, among other things, promotes orderliness. He asked a local friend in the faith to relaunch chapel services in 2012. Anschutz bought the red hymnals to place in the pews. The friend created an orderly 30-minute service.

The chapel marked the 10th anniversary of its reopening last June. Hotel guests and locals alike joined in singing from the Anschutz hymnals and then warmly greeted each other on the green, green grass of its precisely trimmed lawn.