Colorado is a beautiful state, and I personally love living / working here. The design scene is rather small in the traditional product design, but there are a number of larger industries, especially in military, medical, and outdoors. Also countless startups (I think Boulder-Denver is #1 or #2 in number of startups / capita). While I only know a handful of IDers who work at consultancies, there are a good number of inhouse designers I know out here. The rocky mountain IDSA chapter is pretty active.