Pros: Mountains! Nature access—it's a 90m drive to Rocky Mountain National Park, and plenty of world-class skiing, hiking, climbing, fishing, etc. within an hour or three. Culture is laid-back, friendly, and outdoorsy. It's a progressive oasis—if you're from Utah, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, and you feel constrained by the culture you're living in, Denver's probably your closest escape. A fair number of neighborhoods (especially immediately east and northwest of downtown) are walkable enough to live without a car, though you'll want one to get out of the city. It's cheaper than California or the Northeast, with a huge, busy airport with international flights to most anywhere. We have all four seasons and they're all nice—more sunny days than Florida. I still laugh when I see six inches of dry snow on my car's windshield, walk up to it and _blow it off_ instead of spending an hour shoveling. Food and drink scene is good and getting rapidly better. I genuinely love living here, and it's got better over the years—when I arrived a bit over a decade ago, had planned on sticking it out for twoish years and then either bouncing out to a coast or leaving the states again. But here I still am, and glad of it!
Cons: it's a progressive _oasis_; once you leave the Front Range, it's your choice of Utah, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming...definitely different from a coastal megalopolis, it's far to other population centers. Denver's the biggest city around, but if you're used to NYC/LAX/Chicago it'll feel cozy-small. Middle of the country means international flights to the rest of the global north are basically over the pole (and looooong). It's actually pretty expensive; it'll look cheap compared to SF or NYC but our housing market's been on a run. No ocean (though flights are cheap). Drivers are _atrocious_; rare is the unblown red light. Our produce is improving, but still nowhere near as fresh as you'll get further south. Startup scene is okay? Denver Startup Week is solid & Boulder has tons of startups per capita, but we don't have the same level of VC access as more well-known hubs. And the tech jobs here are plentiful, but don't pay as well as on a coast—remote working is definitely the way to go.