The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A US resort with big terrain – and tall stories
As Aspen in Colorado opens a vast new ski area, Gabriella Le Breton tells the tale of its transformation from boho utopia to billionaires’ playground
When I first moved to Aspen in 2000 at the age of 23, 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 something of a budget-busting hotspot. Unemployed and broke, I spent my first nights in America’s most glamorous resort sleeping on the floor of a soonto-be-demolished hotel. I winced at having to pay £177 for a three-day lift pass (a fraction of the cost today).
A few weeks in, having bagged a job at a mountain restaurant – my salary was a season lift pass – and a room in shared 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 his favourite watering holes, including 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 5,600acre ski area – was opening a new 153acre area of skiable terrain, it was time to return to see what had 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 (3,415m) Aspen Mountain since 1985, supersizing the total ski area of its mostly advanced pistes by 22 per cent. For the most part north-facing, the new runs are all above 10,000ft (3,048m) and comprise ungroomed double-diamond tree runs or bump fields, except for two blue cat tracks.
Arriving on the day when the furthest reaches of Hero’s were opened, I joined whooping locals exploring the densely wooded area. Initially known as Pandora’s, it was renamed Hero’s last summer after the sudden death of James “Jim” Crown, whose family owns the Aspen Skiing Company.
Most of Hero’s trails are named in memory of local legends like Jim, including 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 from the 1960s – for apple strudel. It was packed with locals, including ski patroller Steve “Chopper” Cohen, his emotions still raw after introducing the Cory Bob run to Cory’s widow and daughter. For all Aspen’s excessive wealth, what makes it unique is a connection to people – not least its freewheeling creatives and eccentrics.
Aspen was transformed in the 1940s by the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke and his wife Elizabeth. The former mining town became 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 had long since warned me that the town had changed “irrevocably” since the days of my youth 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.
Over truffle fries at Ajax Tavern on my first night back, I found myself sitting next to a TikTok sensation rather than a gonzo journalist. Boomer the Landcloud, a coiffed canine influencer worth over $1 million, was guest of honour at the $1,985-a-night Little Nell hotel, along with actors 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 per month. It is claimed that local homeowners now include 106 billionaires (compared with a mere 36 in London).
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 chef Andreas Fischbacher into Cloud Nine Alpine Bistro, which served raclette, fondue and schnapps, with occasional tabletop dancing and popping of champagne corks. By 2016, as the venue emerged from a $1.2million (£944,630) refit, champagne spraying was anticipated, if not obligatory. Today, 2pm lunch slots require a minimum reservation fee of $250 (£197) per person – although the $750 (£590) Bespoke Package is preferred. Cases of Veuve Cliquot worth $140 (£110) a bottle can be pre-ordered for spraying.
Sharing a chairlift with Tim Mutrie, a former ski patroller, we fondly recalled less curated Cloud Nine celebrations. “You have to wonder if there aren’t better uses for that money than soaking the rafters of an old patrol hut,” he reflected. “But hey, we got to have our Aspen party back in the day. Who are we to stop others having theirs?”