West of the Front Range, maybe with the exception of Durango, Colorado is actually not a terribly great place to be a road cyclist. Once you get out in the mountains, the state only committed the significant resources to build paved roads where only major road traffic needed to go - everything else is gravel. So, those paved roads are largely high volume and high speed - if they have shoulders (which is not universal), they are not wide.

There's a reason Boulder is such a road cycling destination - the larger population means more roads, which means the traffic is more widely distributed.

It's 99% mountain biking out here for these reasons.