ASPEN

In the 1960s I was vacationing in Morocco when a stranger walked up to me in the bazaar at Marrakech.

“You must be from Aspen,” he said. How had he guessed? Was it simply the hiking boots I wore, or by some osmosis had I become the place, perpetually windblown, my cheeks baked brown and my nose burned red like the Pitkin County dirt and rocks, as easy to spot as the Maroon Bells?

“You just looked like it,” he said. The Aspen Skiing Corp. will be celebrating its 40th anniversary this season, and there will be a lot of looking back. I left Aspen in 1982 after living there for 16 years. I did some looking back of my own when I returned recently. It was a process of rediscovery and a chance to assess the changes and prospects.

It was 1953 when I first saw Aspen. I drove with five other Dartmouth students nonstop from Hanover, N.H., in a station wagon for a spring ski trip. We took out the back seats and lay a mattress over our boots and skis. Three stretched out and slept while three sat in front. We drove in two-hour shifts. It took us 48 hours to travel the 2,000 miles.

I had $125 and a box filled with canned food, crackers and peanut butter. My share of the gas was $30.

I had planned to sleep in the car, but spent only one night there, the rest on the floor of a room the others had rented.

With the $95 that was left, I was able to ski for two weeks. We were always among the first on the lift in the morning and the last at the end of the day. We skied top to bottom, except for occasional sprawls in Spar Gulch to gasp for air.

As in all skiers’ fairy tales, it snowed at night and the sun shone during the day (I swear).

By the time I got back to Hanover and climbed the four flights to my room in Topliff Hall I was faint with hunger. My sunburned skin was coming off in big flakes, but I was madly in love with Aspen.

Three Dirt Streets

Aspen still had three dirt streets then. The only restaurants were the Golden Horn, the Red Onion and the Hotel Jerome. You could buy beer and see ski movies at the Roaring Fork Dormitory, too.

No stoplights yet.

I thought it was paradise and when, in 1965, I heard about a job there, I jumped at it even though it meant my pay would be cut in half.

I rented a log cabin for $95 a month.

It was a place of such overwhelming physical beauty, the sky so blue, the air so clear, it seemed you could count the needles on a pine tree all the way across the valley.

I watched the sun slant through dancing afternoon dust above the tables in the Jerome Bar, and watched my eyelashes magnified on the inside of my sunglasses as I rode the ski lifts.

Before the lifts opened and after they closed, I climbed Heart Attack Hill and skied the chutes on Independence Pass. One year you could see figure eights that Bob Craig and I made down Fourth of July Bowl through half of the summer.

I climbed Mt. Sopris and rode Jeeps up to the snowfield in Montezuma Basin.

Skied Almost Daily

During the season I skied nearly every day in the early years. After a while it became every sunny day, then every powder day. Finally, it was whenever.

I hiked and camped and caught trout for breakfast, heard the bugling of elk, fed horses, irrigated fields and planted aspen trees and lodgepole pines.

I wrote stories and played music, celebrated and survived the ‘60s, the full moons and the deep silences of the all-night snows.

In the beginning, the city was small enough that I knew most of the locals. Oh, the free spirits.

Freddie Fisher, who had been a member of the Spike Jones Band, never skied because, he said, “I’m too poor to go up and too smart to come down.”

Fred Iselin, head of the ski school at Aspen Highlands, said, “When I started skiing my face was smooth and my pants were baggy. Now my pants are smooth and my face is baggy.” Fisher and Iselin are dead now.

More People Came

As the years passed, more and more people came. Like drops of rain falling into a pool, they spread in concentric circles. Some bumped the circle I was in, but there were others I never touched.

Meantime, the streets were paved. Stoplights were put in to control increasing numbers of vehicles. The fumes and the smoke from fireplaces created air pollution. More lodges, bars and restaurants were built.

I resisted every change. How could paradise be improved?

The growth was too much for some. They left.

“All the good people have gone,” some of my friends said. They hadn’t. Good people were coming all the time.

I saw a horse ridden through the Red Onion, in the old bar and out the new. I bumped into John Wayne at the Mother Lode and Timothy Leary at a Christmas party.

Buckminster Fuller filled a notebook with linked triangles as I interviewed him at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. He wore a watch on both wrists, one for where he was and one for where he was going. “The universe is shaped like a pyramid,” he said.

No Big Deal

I sat beside George Shearing on a piano bench and hitched a ride to town from White Horse Springs with John Denver. I rode up the chairlift with Buddy Hackett.

No big deal. Celebrities go relatively unnoticed in Aspen. Locals are used to them, unimpressed, or respect their privacy.

Denver, Jack Nicholson, Jill St. John, Jimmy Buffet and Goldie Hawn are among the stars who have homes here.

A concern for quality of life and a balance between the physical and cultural has long been a tradition in Aspen. The International Design Conference, the Aspen Music Festival, Ballet West and other summer programs round out the year and the person.

The balance in individual lives can be precarious, however. Physical adventure does not come without risk. Skiers break legs. Climbers fall. Use can become abuse. Beer sales and divorce rates are high. There are grand masters of trivial pursuits, but no pursuit is trivial.

From the time I first saw Aspen until I went to live elsewhere, the number of bars and restaurants had grown from three to more than 80.

The occasion was particularly special when Nick Lebby and his wife, Sarah, opened La Cocina because he was a “waiter-made-good.” The restaurant is still a favorite, with its combination of blue corn tortillas, beautiful waitresses and reasonable prices.

18,000 Tourist Beds

The count of tourist beds grew to 10,000, with another 8,000 at Snowmass.

Development at Snowmass was another change I resisted. I never wanted any more people, any more buildings or any less wilderness.

Snowmass was the unspoiled Brush Creek Valley, ending at Loey Ringquist’s Faraway Ranch. But when the Janss Corp. invited the press to ski the Big Burn by Sno-Cat to see where the lifts would be built, my resistance melted somewhat.

I entered the trail-naming contest, too, along with everyone else that I knew. The prize was a $10,000 lot at Melton Ranch. One of the winning names was “Velvet Falls.” The house that’s on the lot now would sell for about $500,000.

I helped potter Brad Reed build a kiln at Anderson Ranch, where Snowmass developers had decided to put an arts and crafts center to provide a balanced life for its residents in the manner of Aspen.

I remember hot-air balloon races at Snowmass. Breakfast on the golf course at dawn. Dozens of balloons pasted in the air like surrealistic ornaments until bursts of gas, like dragon’s breath, gave them life like prehistoric creatures. Whimsically, they would disappear behind a ridge or a white peak and reappear somewhere else.

Now Unicorn Balloon Co. maintains a fleet of balloons to take tourists up. More than 2,000 people paid $150 each for a ride last year.

More Than Mere Skiing

In fact, there is a lot more to do at Snowmass than ski. Nightly sleighs take visitors to a cabin that was built in the 1890s for a barbecue and country music. There are naturalist-guided snowshoe tours.

Krabloonik Kennels is the largest, full-time working dog-sled kennel in the world. Teams of 13 huskies, descendants of the “Sgt. Preston of the Yukon” dog-sled team, pull visitors in sleds that are handmade by Dan McEachen. It’s $80 for half a day, including lunch.

Members and Villa and Lodge guests at the Snowmass Club have a full-service athletic club at their disposal. Guests play tennis year-round in a translucent bubble. Individual fitness programs are offered, including the Personal Fitness Profile, developed by the Arizona Heart Institute and designed to improve athletic performance, eating habits and overall fitness.

In June, 1985, the Snowmass Conference Center, largest such facility in the Colorado Rockies, opened. The ballroom, largest in the Rockies, seats 1,385 theater-style.

In going back to Aspen I was struck not so much by growth as by renaissance, not the number of new lights but their twinkle.

Lodgings Refurbished

After I moved, the Jerome Hotel and the Wheeler Opera House were refurbished. The Hotel Lenado was built. Sardy House opened as a bed-and-breakfast lodge. The Independence Square Hotel was remodeled.

The city spent $4.5 million to restore the Wheeler Opera House. James Levine, Lillian Gish, Moses Pendelton and Lily Tomlin were among those who came for the reopening in May, 1984.

Dick Butera spent $4.5 million of private money to renovate the Hotel Jerome, a restoration that was complete to the smallest detail, using as many original fixtures as possible.

Part of the revitalization I felt has to do with an increased involvement of the community in cultural events.

While I was there Dave Schappert, called by trumpeter Miles Davis “one of the best piano players since Bill Evans,” performed in concert at the Wheeler Opera House.

Schappert has lived in Roaring Fork Valley for many years in a self-imposed obscurity. He made a living by tuning pianos, mine included.

Galleries, theaters, revues, film premieres and festivals have gradually been added to the better-known cultural attractions.

Cross-Country Connections

Something like fusion is taking place with skiing, too. The separate areas--Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk and Snowmass--are being joined by a branching network of cross-country trails.

Like many a person at 40, Aspen took a good look in the mirror and decided it was time to preserve what was left of the old and, at the same time, try some new things to spice life up a bit.

The Aspen Skiing Co. will build a 92-room luxury hotel at the base of Little Nell next year, and is spending $16.5 million, the most ever in a single year, on improvements.

The new six-passenger Silver Queen gondola speeds skiers to the sun deck on Aspen Mountain in 13 minutes.

A seven-kilometer cross-country loop already links the Snowmass Club Touring Center with the Snowmass Village Mall. With more than 30 kilometers of trails surrounding the Snowmass Club and another eight kilometers linking the Snowmass Club with Buttermilk Mountain over the Owl Creek Trail, Snowmass alone has more than 25 miles of maintained trails.

More than 90% of the lodging at Snowmass is right on the slope. Snowmass has more than 1,500 acres of alpine ski terrain.

Snowmass has two new high-speed quad chairlifts this winter for 22% greater uphill capacity. At Aspen Mountain, adding the gondola and converting a double chair to a quad and speeding up another quad have increased uphill capacity by a full third.

Expert Terrain Added

Aspen Mountain added 70 acres of expert terrain last season, raising its total to 620. Its 70 trails stretch over 23 miles, all rated difficult to more difficult.

Although the cost of a single-day adult lift ticket has gone up to $29, you can theoretically get in more skiing because of the increase in uphill capacity if your legs hold out.

You can ski Snowmass, Aspen and Buttermilk mountains for $27 a day this year with the purchase of a six-of-seven days, three-area lift ticket for $162.

Aspen Airways changed its name to United Express and will be flying nonstop, 86-passenger jets from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Aspen from Dec. 27 to March 14.

The central reservation service of Aspen Resort Assn. at (303) 925-9000 represents most lodges, apartments and condominiums. They have a brochure including package plans based on seven-night stays.

Another brochure tells of additional condominiums available through Condominium Rental Managements, (800) 321-7025.

Snowmass information and lodging reservations are available from the Snowmass Resort Assn. at (303) 923-2010.

Of course, if I were to go back as a tourist, I might stay at the Jerome, or maybe the O. J. Wheeler Suite in the East wing of Sardy House on Main Street.

At $360 a night, with two bedrooms, a whirlpool bath, steam shower, stereo, VCR and bar and a view of Aspen Mountain, it would be just the place to eat my crackers and peanut butter.