My cultural pilgrimage to the Rocky Mountains began more than 20 years ago, a few steps from my door in the East Village of Manhattan. The poet Allen Ginsberg was staging one of the regular readings at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, featuring his Buddhist-inspired verse. As he fielded queries after the reading, he mentioned that he was decamping to teach at something called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in, of all places, Boulder, Colo.

Poetry in Boulder? Until then, I had envisioned the town as a high-altitude boot camp, where every resident dressed in colorful spandex and went hiking, biking and climbing with grim determination. When it came to culture, it was hard to imagine anything more profound than the “Mork and Mindy” house, whose exterior is featured in the TV series. But Ginsberg insisted that Boulder was actually brimming with progressive artists, writers and musicians. It used to be called “the Athens of the West,” he enthused.

So as an Amazonian heat wave descended on New York a year ago, I decided to finally make the expedition to the Rockies to answer a question: How does culture thrive in a world of free-climbers and triathletes, who one might think are more concerned with perfectly formed abs than deeper questions of the soul? Or has Boulder’s very intimacy with the great outdoors created a cultural scene all its own?

Arriving on a hot but blissfully dry July night was a disorienting experience, and not just because of the thin alpine air. At first glance, Boulder seemed dreamily pleasant, as clean and orderly as a Swiss resort, but not exactly in bohemian ferment.