Aspen: Silver, Skis, and the Second Act
Near Aspen, Colorado
Aspen sits at nearly eight thousand feet in a narrow valley carved by the Roaring Fork River, ringed by four ski mountains and framed to the south by the Maroon Bells, two peaks that top fourteen thousand feet and that are among the most photographed mountains in North America. The town you see today, with its boutiques and private jets and homes that sell for tens of millions of dollars, is the third version of Aspen, layered over two collapsed ones.
The first version was a silver mining boom, one of the richest in the American West. Silver discovered in the mountains above in the late eighteen seventies drew waves of miners and speculators, and then Jerome Wheeler, who had sold his stake in a New York department store to move his ambitions west. Wheeler built the Wheeler Opera House and the Hotel Jerome, both in eighteen eighty-nine, and at its peak in the early eighteen nineties Aspen had more than ten thousand residents, over two hundred active mines, and opera performances by touring New York companies. Then came the silver crash of eighteen ninety-three. The federal government stopped buying silver, prices collapsed, and the town emptied over the following decades. By the nineteen thirties barely seven hundred people remained.
The second version began with snow. Austrian ski instructor Friedl Pfeifer arrived in nineteen forty-five after serving in the United States Army's Tenth Mountain Division, saw what the surrounding terrain could offer skiers, and began building what became the longest chairlift in the world. The first official ski day was January twelfth, nineteen forty-seven. Chicago philanthropist Walter Paepcke invested heavily in the resort and brought a broader cultural vision, and by nineteen forty-nine the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation had drawn Albert Schweitzer, Artur Rubinstein, and some of the great minds of the Western world to a town still barely recovered from its post-mining depression.
What came next was something neither the miners nor the skiers had anticipated. Hunter S. Thompson ran for county sheriff here on a platform of sod-paved streets and renaming the town Fat City. John Denver wrote what became Colorado's state song after watching a meteor shower in the valley above. A music festival grew into one of the most prestigious summer programs in the world. And real estate prices climbed until Aspen became something closer to a private enclave than an open mountain town.
