Destination: Colorado : A Mile High, and Rising : As Denver reinvents itself, it’s not only the city’s skyline that’s changing. New attractions are vying with the mountains for visitors’ attention.

It’s a symphony night. The lights of the downtown skyline twinkle, the snow-blanketed Rockies stagger in the distance and subterranean metallic groans rise from the innards of the U.S. Mint in the heart of downtown. I sit a few blocks away in Boettcher Concert Hall, surrounded by the modern geometry of the Denver Performing Arts Complex, waiting.

On the west edge of The Plex--that’s the local language--Cherry Creek trickles in darkness and the city’s foremost bicycle path, beside it, lies idle for a change. Two long blocks to the northeast, Denverites are settling down to dinner in restaurants along the pedestrian 16th Street Mall, spine of downtown. Down in LoDo--that’s Lower Downtown--the skeleton of a new baseball stadium is casting moon shadows on the surrounding scruffy neighborhood, and young folks are likely raising a din in a handful of brew pubs.

Here in the hall, members of the Denver Brass and the Colorado Symphony Brass have finished with their Strauss and Gabrieli; the Mussorgsky is yet to come. But hold on. They’ve announced an addition to the program. Here comes a man named Lou Malandra to the microphone. With a poem.

It’s his poem, and it’s about . . . the new airport.

“Natives and Nomads,” he intones. “You who build these great white pyramid-like tents for the travelers of the world to gather/ A paradise for people and planes/ Carved by your mighty arm from out of the dust/ Sweat and toil, your constant companions . . .”

It continues for more than 100 lines, and Malandra, the poet laureate of Denver International Airport, delivers them all in a clear, loud voice. There’s applause, and intermission, and Mussorgsky. Finally we all file out into the cold night, and I wander toward my hotel through downtown Denver and its various improvements-in-progress, trying to superimpose this experience on another American big city.

A paean to JFK airport at New York’s Carnegie Hall? Variations on a theme of public library renovation at the Los Angeles Music Center? A BART overture at the San Francisco Opera House?

Maybe the difference is that those other cities have irretrievably settled into their identities, while Denver remains raw-boned and unfinished, self-conscious, boosterish, still a sort of frontier town after 135 years. Or maybe I just wandered into Boettcher Concert Hall on an odd night when I visited last April.

This much, anyway, is true: Denver is revising itself, amid large and unexpected obstacles.

Most obviously, there is that enormous--and enormously late--new airport on the edge of town. (See accompanying box, right.) There is the city’s recently arrived baseball franchise, the Rockies, which inspired spectacular fan support last year in its first season, then tested fans’ patience by falling into strike idleness this year along with the rest of the major leagues. In 1995, 50,000-seat Coors Field is scheduled to open in Lower Downtown, setting in motion a scramble toward gentrification in a neighborhood with more than a few homeless in its alleys.

There is the relocation of Elitch Gardens, an amusement park that next year will move its gardens, fountains and rides from a 104-year-old, 29-acre site in northwest Denver to a 58-acre space on the edge of downtown. City officials have also thrown their weight behind a $116 million cross-town light rail system, scheduled to open Oct. 7, despite public opinion that is divided, at best.

Nobody’s blocking the ski slopes, anyway. Within a short westward drive or commuter flight (more feasible in winter) stand some of the world’s most popular ski resorts, which become a major Denver preoccupation as fall edges toward winter. Vail, 119 miles west of the new airport, drew more than 1.5 million skiers during the 1993-94 season. Breckenridge, 101 miles out, drew 1.2 million. Keystone (91 miles), Steamboat Springs (173 miles) and Winter Park (99 miles), each drew more than a million. Snow willing, the skiing can be relied upon.

Still, any traveler who lands here these days is bound to be surprised one way or another, and probably none will be more surprised than those who thought they already knew the place.

Denver began in 1859, after a few glinting flakes of gold turned up at the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek. Enduring the usual challenges of fortune-hunting settlers in the West--floods, fires, battles with the natives--Denver’s pioneers assembled a boom town. By the turn of the century, it was full of Victorian architecture and acclaimed a sophisticated city. These days the city’s population is about 470,000, with another 1.4 million in surrounding counties, and the boom-and-bust cycles continue: After exploding with development a decade ago, the city slumped severely in the late 1980s, and began another recovery a few years ago, accompanied by the now-predictable arrival of fleeing Angelenos and attendant worries about inflated real estate prices.

I arrived on the last day of March and stayed four nights at the Brown Palace Hotel, an 1892 stone Victorian triangle of a building at Broadway and Tremont Place. It has fancy stonework, a pricey restaurant and elaborate cast-iron railings surrounding an atrium nine stories high. My room--$95 a night under a spring weekend special--overlooked another reminder of turn-of-the-century Denver, the Navarre Building.

Over its first 90 years, the three-story building held a boarding house, a gambling den, a bordello and a restaurant. Since 1983, it has held the Museum of Western Art and a collection of bronzes and landscapes by Albert Bierstadt, Charles Russell, Frederic Remington, Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Rockwell and others. But step down to the basement level, and you’re transported to bordello days: You see the remnants of a passage that ran under the street 100 years ago, which was purportedly used by prosperous hotel guests seeking secret egress and entrance into the brothel.

If you’re downtown and have time to see only one museum in town, however, that one should be the Denver Art Museum. The building itself is a 10-story shell that resembles a medieval castle redesigned by George Jetson. Inside, it houses one of the world’s finest collections of Native American artwork and artifacts, and displays it boldly and provocatively.

After wandering through hundreds of pre-Columbian sculptures there, and then scores of woodwork samples from the 19th Century, and then various 20th-Century displays, I found myself facing a brightly colored Warholesque image of John Wayne’s face next to a quotation. The work, part of a temporary exhibit since dismantled, was titled “Wayne’s World” and was made in 1992 by a Tlingit named Jesse Cooday. The image was fairly striking, but the artist’s point lay in the accompanying quotation attributed to Wayne:

“I don’t feel we did them wrong in taking this great country from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

Two long blocks from the art museum stands Colorado’s state Capitol building. The golden-domed structure dominates downtown, its halls full of marble and murals and, on the day I looked in, time-killing legislators. Though Colorado’s legislature is in session only 120 days a year, these lawmakers were between meetings, and several of them had gathered around a piano in a corner of the paperwork-strewn meeting room to sing “Sentimental Journey” and “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” Upstairs, there was a free observation deck with broad views. Outside, a plaque set into the Capitol steps indicated which step was precisely 5,280 feet above sea level--that is, a mile high.

(State politics, at least on the subject of sexual orientation, are more tranquil now than they were a year ago. Amendment 2, the ballot measure blocking city and state officials from making laws to protect homosexuals from discrimination, was approved by voters statewide in late 1992. But in December of last year, it was declared unconstitutional by a Denver District Court judge, effectively ending a nationwide campaign to boycott Colorado as a vacation destination.)

The U.S. Mint, at 320 W. Colfax Ave. and Delaware Street, presses out more than 5 billion coins yearly, stores gold bullion, stocks rare coins in its gift shop and issues those strange subterranean groans. (Free tours are available from 8 a.m.-2:45 p.m. on weekdays. Local tel. 844-3582.)

For shoppers, there’s Larimer Square, a dolled-up historic preservation project with restaurants, nightclubs, art galleries and boutiques in handsome, 12-year-old buildings of two and three stories. A block away, on 16th Street, stands The Shops at Tabor Center, a glass-enclosed mall with 80 resident stores and restaurants. The city’s biggest and most upscale mall, the 140-store Cherry Creek Shopping Center, is in an affluent and very walkable neighborhood a few miles southwest of downtown and is neighbored by The Tattered Cover, one of the largest independent bookstores in the nation.

For students of history, the Molly Brown House at 1340 Pennsylvania on Capitol Hill, shows off its 1889 stonework and exhibits inside tell the tale of the Denver woman whose “unsinkability” in the Titanic disaster inspired a Broadway musical and a film (tel. 832-4092). Across town in the down-at-the-heels Five Points area, the Black American West Museum at 3091 California St. is open Wednesday through Sunday and devoted to the story of the African American cowboy (tel. 292-2566).

For cyclists, the most prominent among scores of paths are the five-mile-long Cherry Creek Bike Path and the 12-mile-long Platte River Greenway, which intersect at Confluence Park near downtown.

One place to rent a bike is The Bike Broker at 1440 Market St., where Ken Whelpdale at the counter quoted me rates of $15 for a half-day, $20 for a full day and $25 for a 24-hour period. Should anyone need to consult Whelpdale directly, he gives his official title as “head road-bike geek.”

The city has always been an ardent sports town, heartily backing the Broncos and the Nuggets, and patronizing a sporting goods store--Gart Bros., at 10th and Broadway, downtown--said to be the largest in the world.

Sooner or later a Denver visitor runs into the original Rockies, jagged with boulders and white with snow.

Climb the 93 steps to the Capitol building observation deck, look to the west and there they lie, beyond the ambitious columns of City Hall and the sharp-angled walls of the Denver Museum of Art--and on the other side, it must be said, of some serious big-city smog.

More than 50 peaks in Colorado rise above 14,000 feet, and at least three are visible from the Capitol. (There’s another broad view from the hilltop grass rectangle of Cranmer Park at First Avenue and Bel Aire Street, where a horizon map labels the most notable peaks.)

Many Denverites say they enjoy the place most not for itself, but for the access it gives them to the mountains for skiing, hiking, camping, mountain-biking.

For those so inclined, there is also drinking (The Coors brewery, which offers free tours, is in Golden, 12 miles to the west) and casino gambling in the old mining towns of Central City and Blackhawk (35 miles west of Denver).

There’s even prospecting. One morning on an aimless drive near Golden, I pulled off the highway at a riverside view point, and saw below an expressionless man with a pan, silently sifting dirt from the stream. If he was having any luck, he wasn’t saying.

Most of my mountain experience came from an afternoon and evening around Boulder, 30 miles northwest of downtown Denver.

There the air is cleaner, the real estate costlier, the panhandlers rarer. The University of Colorado dominates town, and the local population is young, tanned and heavily equipped with in-line skates, bicycles and other implements of outdoor sport.

On the way to a late lunch, I was button-holed by a young man pushing a petition to legalize marijuana, and even he looked clean-cut and athletic enough to pass for an Air Force cadet on holiday from Colorado Springs.

From lunch, a friend and I zoomed out of town along Boulder Creek and into Roosevelt National Forest, with evergreen slopes and stone-walled cabins flashing by, a barn decorated with antlers and then a half-frozen reservoir, which a single fisherman had to himself. All this about an hour from downtown Denver.

“Even in the worst of times, Colorado’s not a bad place to be. You’ve got the mountains, and they’re free,” Tom Smart, a 51-year-old Denver native, told me the next day.

“We probably go every other weekend to bike, hike or climb.”

Over the last few years, Smart said, he and his wife, Suzy Thevenet, have together climbed more than a dozen of the state’s 14,000-foot mountains.

You know, he said, there are more than 50 of them in the state.

I told him I’d heard that. When we finished chatting, Smart and Thevenet strapped on their helmets, climbed back onto their bicycles and pedaled out of Larimer Square for the home stretch of the day’s casual 20-mile ride. A proper Denver exit.

GUIDEBOOK: Up to Denver

Getting there: United and Continental airlines fly nonstop to Denver from LAX. Restricted round-trip fares on both carriers begin at $179.

Where to stay: The snazzy Brown Palace Hotel (321 17th St., Denver, volo. 80202; telephone 303-297-3111) is costly--published rates of $159-$199 for a double room--but weekend discount rates start at $95.

Across the street, the Comfort Inn (401 17th St., Denver 80202; tel. 303-296-0400) offers more Spartan quarters for $75-$80 per double room, or $54 on weekend nights.

The Queen Anne Inn (2147 Tremont Place, Denver 80205; tel. 303-296-6666), the city’s best-known B&B;, is a well-kept, 14-room melding of two 19th-Century homes near downtown; double rooms (each with private bath) run $75-$125.

Where to eat: The Zenith (1735 Arapahoe; local tel. 820-2800) is nouveau Western, with items such as roasted Colorado buffalo and smoked sweet corn soup with barbecued shrimp; dinner entrees $10-$22.50. Josephina’s (1433 Larimer St.; tel. 623-0166) is a lively Italian place on Larimer Square; dinner entrees $8-$16. La Bonne Soupe (1512 Larimer St.; tel. 303-595-9169) is an unpretentious French bistro; dinner entrees $5.95-$15.95. Up in Boulder, the 14th Street Bar & Grill (1400 Pearl St.; tel. 444-5854) is bright, informal and in the middle of things; dinner entrees: $13.95-$16.95.

For more information: Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau, 1555 S. California St., Suite 300, Denver, Colo. 80202-4264; tel. (303) 892-1112.