Ski preview: Three cool ways to do Aspen.
After a day of skiing Aspen Mountain, I sipped Champagne at a packed slope-side party, then bumped into Ivanka Trump in a hotel elevator. On the street, I passed fur coat boutiques, a couple of reality-show celebrities and a tent staffed with models pitching a private jet service. Had I had truly arrived? But just a couple of blocks away, storefronts featured tie-dyes and crystals, and a basement bar offered 35-cent wings and $1.50 Budweiser specials. The only “fur” in this bar was the stuffing leaking from duct-taped jackets, and chatter from locals focused on used bicycles rather than new jets.
That’s the thing about Aspen. Each time it fulfills one stereotype, it confounds you with another. I discovered during a recent visit that no matter which way you turn, Aspen can be a high-end jet-setting destination, a hard-core
ski bum retreat or a kidfriendly campground.
The good life
Aspen often is synonymous with the good life, the place to rub elbows with the rich and famous, to experience the best of the best, from fashion to nightlife, lodging and food. And if you have an unlimited budget (or wisely watch Internet deals), you can get a hearty helping of the jet-set lifestyle.
With slope-side lodging at five-star hotels such asAspen’s Little Nell going for upward of $1,000 a night, lift tickets running well over $100 a day, and $50 entrees the norm at top restaurants, Aspen provides plenty of diversions for the 1 percenters. But the money does deliver results, as the area attracts top chefs, award-winning hotel designers, extensive service staffs and, oh yeah, there are the mountains.
Snowmass Mountain earns its name, with more than 3,300 acres of skiable terrain, a vertigoinducing 4,400-foot vertical descent, all accessed by an array of 21 lifts. The expansive mountain is peppered with lavish lodges, as well as the top-rated on-mountain restaurant Gwyn’s High Alpine, where $25 will buy you a blackened ahi entree with a side dish of spectacular scenery from the deck.
Aspen Mountain, also known as Ajax, features challenging steep runs and postcard views over the city, but nonexperts can still enjoy the views from intermediate terrain near the summit. And where else but Aspen can you expect to find a popup Champagne bar on the slopes? Its changing location announced daily on Twitter, the mobile Oasis bar serves bottles and glasses of bubbly under bright orange umbrellas to skiers who thirst to toast each other’s fabulousness in the middle of a slope.
This season, Snowmass has been shelling out the big bucks as well, dropping more than $13 million into its new midmountain Elk Camp restaurant with seating for 300. Skiers can then burn off the calories and splurge on their turns in the newly opened Burnt Mountain terrain, which had previously been open only for backcountry adventurers.
Later at night in the apres-apres scene, the in crowd hits the notorious Caribou Club, a plush old-school lounge and dance club whose aging clientele sports more touch-up work than a ski repair shop. A taxi driver advised me the best way to meet women there is to “just tell them you own a private jet.”
And if you do happen to own a jet, be sure to buy the new Mountain Collective Pass, which includes tickets and deals
you can use at Aspen — and when you hop to the partner resorts at Alta, Utah; Jackson Hole, Wyo.; and Squaw Valley.
Gonzo adventures
For those of us flying economy class, Aspen might seem like a daunting destination, but just a short schuss off the beaten tracks lies a pure skiing spot still in touch with its counterculture skibum heritage and a launching pad for gonzo adventures.
At an undisclosed clearing hidden off of a ski run at Snowmass, broken whiskey bottles hang from tree branches, bullets have somehow been hammered into the trunks, and photos of guns, knives and Hells Angels jackets flutter in the wind.
Welcome to the shrine of celebrated local Hunter S. Thompson, the departed spirit of Aspen’s Freak Power movement. Every longtime resident and bartender has a story to share about the gonzo journalist’s life in Aspen.
“He hit me in the head with a fork once!” bragged one local real estate agent to me.
At one of Thompson’s regular watering holes, the Hotel Jerome, I enjoyed an Aspen Crud cocktail, a morning bourbon mixed with milk shake. Near Thompson’s estate, I stopped by his old haunt the Woody Creek Tavern, which, far from the glitz of the Caribou Club, has a vibe more like Sanford and Son’s junk shop, but with cheap burritos and margaritas “too powerful to serve by the pitcher.”
The gonzo life in Aspen extends to the slopes. At the top of Aspen Highlands resort, hard-core skiers eschew fat-cat luxuries such as ski lifts to trudge up a windblasted, ice-covered ridge over 700 vertical feet into the double black diamond chutes of Highland Bowl. These slopes are too steep for snowcats to plow, so after a big snow, wild-eyed volunteers gather in a boot-stomping, heart-palpitating, lung-bursting frenzy to personally pack the powder and save a few bucks off lift tickets.
At Buttermilk resort, home of the X Games, crazed snowboarders fling themselves like jets from the edges of jumps the size of aircraft carriers, sometimes landing in a wince-inducing rag-doll explosion of limbs and gear.
At the base of Aspen Mountain one night, I watched a big-air competition during which skiers and boarders launched into total darkness like shiny neon bats, hoping to cover the 60foot gap to the landing area. The halftime entertainment included a combination beer-chugging, hill-climbing race that involved shrieking faceplants and the flailing falls of cheerfully drunken snow swine.
Still later, the dreadlock and hula hoop set packed Aspen’s streets for a music festival serving cheap grub and draft beer, where medicinal smoke clouded the air in front of the very same high-priced boutiques I thought defined the town earlier in the day.
Kids are all right
Between all the highpriced glam and the gonzo ski bumming, you wouldn’t think Aspen would be a great place to take the kids. And yet arriving at the base villages at Snowmass and Buttermilk at the start of a ski day feels as if you’ve come to an alpine Disneyland thronged with snowsuited grommets, complete with Max the Moose, a kid-friendly fuzzy costumed purple apparition straight out of a Thomson acid trip.
At Buttermilk, a gently sloped, family-friendly mountain (safely segregated from its extreme X Games terrain), kids are separated into Powder Pandas and Grizzlies and actually ride a “ski school” to ski school — a little red schoolhouse on skis pulled by an ATV to reach the learners’ area of magic carpet conveyers and a mob of insanely cheerful instructors.
At Snowmass, the massive indoor hive of the Treehouse Adventure Center serves as a “onestop drop-off” combination day care facility, indoor fun camp and high-energy holding area for up to 300 children as young as 8 weeks old. Areas are separated by age groups, each with its own day care personnel and licensed nurses, along with an impressive array of activities, crafts, snack areas and a labyrinth of play structures that had me wishing I could shrink myself back to pint-size for a day.
On the mountains, group and individual lessons are split by age and skill levels, including family learning programs that may or may not promote togetherness, but will always be good for a few laughs. And the best part of all is that kids 6 years and under ski for free.
Off the slopes, the Aspen Recreation Center ( just outside town) provides access to a slew of kid-friendly activity areas, from an ice skating rink to play houses for a $15 daily fee, with additional kids and tots classes available for minimal fees with reservations. Add to a family trip some guided snowshoe tours, snowcat sing-along expeditions and marshmallow roasts round a campfire in Snowmass village, and you’d think Aspen was designed purely as a winter camp for little kids.
In the end, Aspen really is a choose-your-own adventure campground, which just happens to have some of the best skiing on Earth — it doesn’t matter if you prefer it with hot dogs and PBR in a basement, Champagne and caviar in a penthouse, or some gummy bears in a playhouse.