Freak Power: When Hunter Thompson Ran for Sheriff

Hunter S. Thompson moved to Woody Creek, five miles down the Roaring Fork Valley from Aspen, in the nineteen sixties, and he watched what was happening to the town with growing alarm. Developers and land speculators were beginning to transform what had been an inexpensive mountain community into something polished and expensive, and Thompson decided to do something about it.

In nineteen seventy, Thompson ran for Pitkin County Sheriff on what he called the Freak Power ticket, assembling a platform designed to stop development pressure and rattle the local establishment. He proposed tearing up Aspen's paved streets and replacing them with sod, to discourage automobile traffic and slow growth. He proposed renaming the town Fat City, a move calculated to drive away exactly the kind of wealthy developer who found the name Aspen so appealing. He called for decriminalizing drugs and making powerful real estate interests pay their fair share.

Thompson shaved his head bald for the campaign so he could refer to his crew-cut opponents as the long-hairs. The race turned out to be closer than anyone expected. The year before, his political ally Joe Edwards had lost the Aspen mayoral race by only six votes. But the Republican and Democratic parties in Pitkin County set aside their differences and joined forces against Thompson, and he lost the sheriff's race. He wrote about the campaign for Rolling Stone in a piece that helped define what he called Gonzo journalism, a form in which the reporter is not a detached observer but the center of the story. The development Thompson feared came anyway.