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Once upon a time I didn’t know anything about skiing but I knew about Aspen.
I don’t remember how I knew. Just that I always knew about Aspen in the same way that I always knew about the moon or summertime or cats. Not like things I remember not knowing, things that upon discovery I struggled to lay atop my knownworld, things like algebra or the internet or recycling.
I don’t mean to say that I knew anything about Aspen, specifically. I only knew that there was skiing there. “There” being somewhere maybe in the Rocky Mountains. Probably Colorado, probably close to Yosemite. Or maybe Yellowstone. In my childmind these things all bunched together with Wyoming and Montana and horses and mountain lions and saloons and Denver and the Grand Canyon and train trestles and pronghorn and barbed-wire and stagecoaches to form someplace called “Out West.” And from a thousand miles away the Rockies defined Out West for me and skiing defined the Rockies and Aspen defined skiing.
The abstraction proved intractable. Aspen became skiing to me like the Super Bowl had become football - never mind that I had no interest in either. It would take 17 years before I found skiing and another 20 after that until I skied Aspen. I held off on skiing Aspen even after I learned that Aspen was not one ski area but four and that Buttermilk doubled as Forever-Greener and Flippity-Park X Games Radster and that Snowmass masses loved the Big Burn but Hanging Valley was the under-used expert zone that Brobot Carl eschewed for Ajax and that Highlands like Aspen Mountain had zero green runs and had finally brought Highlands Bowl inbounds but skiers still had to hike it. I saved Aspen until after I’d skied Caberfae and Boyne and the UP and Searchmont and Hunter and Cannon and Wildcat and Jay Peak and Killington and Stowe and Mad River Glen and Vail and Steamboat and Summit County Colorado and Summit County Utah and Little Cottonwood Canyon. I saved it because it turned out that I loved skiing too much and I feared how fragile that seed may be even buried so deep. If Aspen The Real weren’t My Aspen Imagined I wouldn’t have been able to stand it.
But skiers are like migratory birds. We know we must end up in a place without knowing exactly what that place is and we keep moving in the direction we’re called and eventually there we are.
And that first time seated backwise floating into the Colorado sky on the Silver Queen Gondola. Aspen on its Victorian grid, a town built right to the ski lifts. Or ski lifts I guess built from the edge of a town. A town leftover from another time. Airborne and rising the built sector mountain-framed and wilderness-bound grows at once smaller and more magnificent. If it’s easy to believe in Tolkien’s civilizations bound to natural glory it’s because places like Aspen are real.
Even if it’s only sort-of real. In Cartoon Aspen, which was my Aspen Imagined, the outcast rumbles in from Kansas in his brown rusted Chevy pickup and rents a top-floor bed in a three-story gingerbread crammed already with BeardBros and their gear and dogs and girlfriends. And he walks each morning to 1A with Olin 210s shoulder-slung and ski boots clip-clopping on the sidewalk and he lives on bread loaves and Kool-Aide but damnit he skis 135 days per winter and that’s all that matters.
Maybe in 1952, when Aspen-the-Abandoned-Mining-Town was cocooning into Aspen-the-Funky-End-of-the-Road-Ski-Town, a romantic tale so seductive that the ski-bum refugees who bore witness bolted the city forever to that moment. Became Aspen’s self-appointed pioneer-bum preserver-protectors, gentrifiers fencing the town from the gentrifying hoards. We can all be glad Thy-Pioneers-Of-Noble-Cause didn’t Moses-style bulldoze the brickwork and human-scaled city grid into a Le Corbusier paean to the automobile or 40 square blocks of parking lots. But in preserving Aspen as the retro-funky-iconoclastic Aspen that they wanted Aspen to stay, they inadvertently transformed Aspen into something else entirely: one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, an intact historic core cosplaying as a quaint mountain town but boxed in on every side with the obscene American architecture of the car-first 20th century, a place where no one can live save the extremely rich or extremely lucky.
Meanwhile, above the city blocks, Aspen the ski area has proven more adaptable than Aspen the Town. At least lately. Since opening the 153-acre mountaintop Hero’s expansion in 2023, Aspen Mountain has quietly modernized, razing its clunky and cobbled-together lift fleet in favor of giddy-up detachables better aligned with a brand name that, even in the age of Epic and Ikon and Vail and Instagram and Search-It-Up, is still synonymous with skiing. The renovation was long overdue. I’m not alone in my distorted-but-true-as-a-kernel Imagined Aspen before I’d skied Aspen. Everybody knows Aspen even if they don’t know Aspen. And if they know Aspen as a stand-in for skiing but don’t know Aspen as a place extant in 2026, they don’t expect to be greeted, upon arrival at this global icon of skiing, with a 55-year-old double chairlift with no safety bar.
That lift - 1A, “Shadow Mountain” on the trailmap - is, suddenly, gone, dismantled this summer to make way for a detachable chair that will load in town, but not until 2029 at the earliest. 1A’s removal followed the 2024 departure of the Gent’s Ridge quad - “The Couch” - to Montana’s Maverick ski area. Gone, too, are the extraordinary Bell Mountain double, parts of which dated to 1957, and the Little Nell quad, the mostly ignored clunker hiding behind the Silver Queen Gondola. In place of the latter two lifts, the extraordinary 2,661-vertical-foot Nell Bell detachable quad - set to be the second-tallest chairlift in America - will open this winter to shuttle skiers from the Gondola base to the summit of Bell Mountain in one lift ride.
All of these changes were envisioned, but not imminent, when I skied Aspen Mountain last February. Fortunately, I was able to take one last ride around a classic American mountain that is determined to evolve, no matter what’s happening in its eponymous town below.