Beaver Creek or Mammoth Lakes?

Neither town has a beach. In high summer, Mammoth Lakes at least gives you real lakes to swim in: Horseshoe Lake in the Lakes Basin and the larger, slightly warmer Crowley Lake, though the water stays cold.

At Beaver Creek, your choices are a heated hotel pool or the small, chilly swimming area at Nottingham Lake down in Avon.

Beaver Creek eats the more ambitious of the two. It has elk, Colorado lamb and trout on long wine lists, and mountain lodges you reach by chairlift or snowcat sleigh for dinner. The menus are refined, if rather alike, and the taquerias and brewpubs of Avon and Edwards give you a cheaper option.

Mammoth Lakes is plainer: hearty breakfasts, burgers, pizza and tacos, steakhouses and beer brewed in town. It is filling after a day outside, but meals here are fuel rather than an occasion, and some places cut back in spring and autumn.

Both are modern resorts with almost nothing to see, so the difference is small and lies in what little there is. Beaver Creek offers a handsome planned village of stone and timber with outdoor art around its plaza. Mammoth has a log-cabin museum telling its mining-camp past. For real heritage, both need a drive out.

Mammoth Lakes has a little more life after dark. The bars near the lifts fill up for après-ski, locals and skiers share the brewery taprooms, and long weekends in the ski season can run late.

Beaver Creek was built to be calm. A drink by a fire pit on the plaza and a hotel lounge are usually the whole evening, and anyone wanting more drives to Vail.

Both are first-rate mountain bases, so the choice is about landscape. Beaver Creek is classic Colorado Rockies: famously uncrowded groomed runs and glades linked to Bachelor Gulch and Arrowhead, with Vail next door. In summer you'll find aspen forest, the Gore Range, and gold-medal fly-fishing and rafting on the Eagle and Colorado Rivers.

Mammoth's setting is wilder and stranger: volcanic ground, granite-ringed lakes, the basalt columns of Devils Postpile, the tufa towers of Mono Lake and Tioga Pass into the Yosemite high country. Its ski season also often runs into early summer.

Beaver Creek has more within easy reach. Vail is twenty minutes away, and within about an hour you can be in the Victorian silver town of Leadville, the gold-rush centre of Breckenridge or the spa town of Glenwood Springs. The towns are pleasant if rather similar.

Mammoth's outings are fewer and further apart along the highway. Its best ones are more striking, though: the preserved ghost town of Bodie and the sober wartime history of Manzanar.

Both work well for outdoor families with children, and both have little to offer on a stormy day. Beaver Creek is the more pampered: a large ski school, an outdoor ice rink, warm cookies when the lifts close and a car-free plaza where older children can roam.

Mammoth is looser and more outdoorsy, with a snow tubing hill, and rowing boats and trout fishing in the Lakes Basin in summer. Condominiums with kitchens make it easy, but getting to the trailheads usually means driving.

Both are easy on skis and awkward beyond them. Beaver Creek is the more compact: a pedestrian core, outdoor escalators, many ski-in ski-out lodgings and Eagle airport about half an hour away, though Denver is a long mountain drive.

Mammoth sprawls along a few roads around its compact Village. The gondola and winter shuttles cover a ski stay, and a summer trolley and shuttle reach the Lakes Basin and Reds Meadow. Everything else in the Eastern Sierra needs a car.

Beaver Creek is the better place for a browse on a rest day. Its plaza has galleries of bronze sculpture and landscape painting, western boots and leather, jewellery and luxury ski wear, though the choice is narrow and costly.

Mammoth's shops are for gear: good ski, climbing and fly-fishing stores and rental outlets, with some landscape photography and souvenirs around the Village.

Neither town is cheap, but Beaver Creek leaves you very little room to cut costs. The beds near the lifts are mostly luxury hotels and large condos, and passes, rental, lessons and meals on the mountain all sit at the top of the market. You can trim the bill by sleeping in Avon or Edwards, booking passes early or coming outside the ski season, but even a summer stay remains firmly upmarket.

Mammoth Lakes is easier on the wallet, and the gap grows once the snow has gone. In the peak ski weeks its lift tickets and rooms are just as steep. In summer, though, the trails, lakes and scenic drives that fill the days cost almost nothing, and room rates ease in spring and autumn. Cooking in a condominium helps, but only partly, because the town's groceries carry resort prices too.

Beaver Creek has far more to offer here. The Vilar Performing Arts Center runs touring concerts, comedy and dance in both winter and summer. In summer, the Bravo! Vail festival brings leading orchestras to the open-air amphitheatre twenty minutes away, with the Vail Dance Festival alongside.

Mammoth's offer is homegrown: a community theatre company on the college campus, a long-running jazz festival and chamber concerts in a meadow. It makes a pleasant evening out, but it is not something to plan a trip around.

Both make it easy to unwind, but in different ways. Beaver Creek pampers you, with some of the largest resort spas in the Rockies, hot tubs in the snow and the grand old hot-springs pool at Glenwood Springs an hour away.

Mammoth's speciality is rougher and more memorable: undeveloped hot pools out in the sagebrush, reached by dirt road, with the Sierra across the valley. You'll find hotel spas in town for more comfort.