Moab or Winter Park, Colorado?

Neither town is a place for a swimming trip. In the summer heat, Moab's options are desert ones: Mill Creek's shallow pools, Ken's Lake, and sandbars on a fast, silty, cold Colorado River. Winter Park's lakes around Grand Lake and Granby stay cold from snowmelt and suit paddling better, though the hot springs pools down the valley give it warm water that Moab lacks.

Both towns eat the same way: hearty, casual food after a day outdoors, a couple of breweries and a few more ambitious dinner rooms. The difference is in flavour and season.

Moab's cooking leans Southwestern, and its choice thins out in the quiet winter. Winter Park serves elk, trout and green chile, and is busiest in ski season. In Moab, Utah's stricter alcohol rules also make a drink with dinner more formal.

Moab has more of the past to look at, even if the town itself offers little. Petroglyphs left by Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont peoples line the cliffs along Potash Road and Kane Creek, there are dinosaur trackways nearby, and the small Museum of Moab covers geology and settlement.

Winter Park's heritage is thinner: the railway story of the Moffat Tunnel and a ranch museum in Fraser. Anyone wanting galleries there has to drive to Denver.

Neither town stays up late, but Winter Park has more of an evening. Après-ski at the base village and the taprooms along the main road get loud and cheerful on winter weekends.

Moab's brewpubs fill with bikers and rafters and are mostly quiet by eleven. Its dark, star-filled desert sky is a night-time pleasure of its own.

Both are first-rate outdoor bases of very different kinds, and Moab's is the more remarkable. Arches starts minutes from town and Canyonlands and Dead Horse Point are under an hour away. The Slickrock Trail, the Whole Enchilada descent, canyoneering and rafting on the Colorado make it a world centre for desert sport.

Winter Park is alpine. In winter it has two linked ski mountains, Winter Park and Mary Jane, plus cross-country track and backcountry slopes on Berthoud Pass. In summer it has a lift-served bike park, forest singletrack, and the moose and high tundra of Rocky Mountain National Park. Choose it when snow or cool mountain air is the point.

Winter Park has much better outings. Georgetown and Idaho Springs, with their Victorian brick streets and narrow-gauge railway, are about an hour away over the pass. Grand Lake has its wooden boardwalk, and Denver's museums are within reach when the roads are clear.

From Moab, a day out mostly means more landscape or small towns such as Bluff and Green River. The best cultural trip is the long drive south to Edge of the Cedars and the towers of Hovenweep.

Winter Park is built for families in a way Moab is not. Its compact village keeps lodgings, lessons and lifts close together, and there are activities for children in every season. The catch is altitude, which can bring headaches and poor sleep for the first night or two.

Moab rewards active school-age children who like scrambling on rock, with short walks to Sand Dune Arch, dinosaur tracks and Junior Ranger programmes. It is harder with toddlers, because of the summer heat, the hours in the car and the many unfenced viewpoints.

A ski week in Winter Park can be done without driving, because the free shuttle links the ski base, the town and Fraser. Trailheads, Grand Lake and the national park still need a car, though, and the road in from Denver crosses Berthoud Pass.

In Moab you need a car for almost everything. Only Main Street and the bike path to the Arches entrance work without one. Everything else means long desert roads, dirt tracks or an outfitter's shuttle.

Moab's Main Street sells the desert: rock shops full of geodes, fossils and minerals, and a few galleries with Southwestern art, Navajo jewellery and weavings that are worth taking home. Winter Park's shops serve the mountain instead, renting and tuning skis and snowboards and selling bikes and outdoor clothing in the base village and along the main road. Either town will replace a forgotten hat or a spare tyre, but neither has fashion or department stores, and from Winter Park that means a drive to Denver.

Moab is easier on a budget, mainly because of the land around it. One park entry covers a week, and the best of the desert costs nothing to enjoy, though its motels charge resort prices for simple rooms in spring and autumn.

In ski season, Winter Park piles up lift tickets, rentals, lessons and resort-priced meals. Condos with kitchens in Fraser soften the bill. Both towns are much cheaper off-peak, Moab in winter and Winter Park in summer.

Moab puts its live music into one long-established chamber festival at the end of summer. Some of its concerts take place in canyon grottoes reached by boat, an evening that is hard to find anywhere else. Winter Park spreads its music more thinly across the summer, with free concerts on the grass of the town park and the occasional festival.

Outside those weeks, both come down to a band in a bar: a brewpub in Moab, an après-ski bar in Winter Park. Neither has a theatre or a concert hall, but Denver is near enough to Winter Park for an evening at a show.

Winter Park is the more restful of the two. Its cold, clean air and quiet forest are made for unwinding, especially in late spring and autumn, and a few spas in the resort deal with sore legs.

Moab has no bathing tradition and only a few small massage studios, and its days are hot and start early. Its calm comes from desert evenings with the cliffs turning red, or from a cabin up in the La Sal Mountains.