How Aspen supersized ski holidays in America
When I first moved to Aspen aged 23 in January 2000 it was not, as my friends asserted, to bag a rich husband. Instead, it was to discover a utopian “island in the sky” described to me in vivid detail by a couple of trekkers I met in Nepal – even back then, Colorado’s world-famous ski resort was the stuff of legend.
It was also turning into a budget-busting hotspot. Unemployed and broke, I spent my first nights in America’s most glamorous resort sleeping on the floor of a soon-to-be-demolished hotel. I winced as I paid £177 for a three-day lift pass (today, that amount won’t even buy you a one-day ticket on a weekend).
A few weeks in, having bagged a job at a mountain restaurant – paid in the form of a season lift pass – and a room in shared employee housing, I raised a beer to my new life at the Hard Rock Café (now closed) with a scruffy chap, whose razor-sharp cynicism couldn’t hide his deep affection for Aspen. After he left, the barman revealed that my companion had been Hunter S Thompson, the notorious gonzo journalist. Over the next two years, I enjoyed several margarita-infused chats with Thompson at some of his favourite watering holes, including the Hotel Jerome’s J-Bar and the tumbledown Woody Creek Tavern, listening to his rants about the town’s chronic problems of overt capitalism and rising house prices.
Over two decades later, when news broke that Aspen Mountain, one of four mountains in the resort’s 5,600-acre ski area, was opening a new 150-acre area of skiable terrain, it was time to return to see what has changed in this fabled corner of Colorado.
The Hero’s terrain, serviced by a new high-speed chairlift, is the first to be added to the 11,212ft-high (3,415m) Aspen Mountain since 1985, supersizing its total ski area of its mostly advanced terrain by 22 per cent. Mostly north-facing, the new runs are all above 10,000ft (3,048m) and ungroomed double-diamond tree runs or bump fields, except for two blue cat tracks that funnel the trails down to the lift.
Arriving on the first day that the farthest reaches of Hero’s were opened, two friends and I joined other whooping locals exploring the densely wooded area. Initially known as Pandora’s, the area was renamed to Hero’s last summer to reflect the sudden death of James “Jim” Crown, whose family owns the Aspen Skiing Company. In addition to Jim’s, most of Hero’s trails are named in memory of local legends, including the ski patrollers Cory Brettman and Eric Kinsman and Aspen’s first female ski instructor, Elli Iselin.
Having bushwhacked our way through a few steep, tightly-gladed runs, we stopped at Bonnies – a rare independently owned restaurant dating to the 1960s – for apple strudel. It was packed with locals. They included the ski patroller Steve “Chopper” Cohen, his emotions still raw after introducing the Cory Bob run to Cory’s widow and daughter the previous day. For all Aspen’s excessive glamour and wealth, it’s a connection to people that makes it unique with a culture of character that has long harboured freewheeling creatives and eccentrics.
Aspen was transformed in the 1940s – by the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke and his wife Elizabeth – from a former mining town into a hub for wealthy, freethinking art and culture lovers with a penchant for skiing. The Paepcke’s “Aspen Idea” lives on today – as well as laying claim to some of the world’s best slopes, Aspen’s 6,833 residents boast a globally acclaimed ballet, symphony opera, theatre and art museum on their heated pavements.
Friends have long since warned me that the town had changed “irrevocably” since those youthful seasons I spent here and, sure enough, most of my ski bum hangouts – Little Annie’s, Jimmy’s, Main St Bakery – are now gone, replaced by oyster bars, designer boutiques and cafés selling avocado toast and champagne.
My first night back in town, over truffle fries at Ajax Tavern, I found myself sitting next to a TikTok sensation rather than a cynical journalist. Boomer the Landcloud, a coiffed canine influencer worth over $1million, was guest of honour at the $1,985-a-night Little Nell hotel, along with Woody Harrelson and Cameron Diaz. I couldn’t help but wonder what my old acquaintance Thompson, whose ashes were blasted out of a cannon across Woody Creek by Johnny Depp in 2005, would have made of a town where the average price of a family home is now $14.8million and rentals are snapped up at $35,000 a month? Where it’s claimed that local homeowners include 106 billionaires (in comparison with London’s 36)?
Aspen’s evolution could be encapsulated in the development of one property alone, Cloud Nine. A timber ski patrol hut built in the 1960s on Highlands mountain, Cloud Nine was immortalised in the 1970s when ski patrollers like Mac Smith (who is still working on the team today) captivated crowds as they jumped over the hut towing their “blood wagons” (rescue sledges) with heroic flamboyance.
In 1999, the hut was transformed by the Austrian-born chef Andreas Fischbacher into Cloud Nine Alpine Bistro, which served raclette, fondue and schnapps, with occasional tabletop dancing and popping of champagne. By 2016, as the venue emerged from a $1.2million (£944,630) refurbishment, champagne spraying was anticipated, if not obligatory. Today, 2pm lunch slots require a prepaid minimum $250 (£197) per person reservation fee – although the $750 (£590) Bespoke Package is preferred – with cases of $140-a bottle (£110) Veuve Clicquot pre-ordered as standard for spraying.
Sharing a chairlift with Tim Mutrie, a former ski patroller turned art installer, we fondly recalled less-curated Cloud Nine celebrations. “You’ve got to wonder if there aren’t better uses for that money than soaking the rafters of an old patrol hut,” reflected Mutrie. “But hey, we got to have our Aspen party back in the day, who are we to stop others having theirs?”
Essentials
Travel to Aspen with United Airlines (united.com), which flies direct to Denver from London Heathrow, with connecting flights to Aspen from £1,110 return. A week’s stay for two in a double room at The Little Nell (thelittlenell.com), Aspen’s only ski-in/ski-out hotel, costs from $10,610.39 (£8,353), including five-day lift passes for both guests and shared airport transfers. For more information about Aspen, visit aspensnowmass.com.
