Friedl Pfeifer and the Longest Chairlift in the World
Near Aspen, Colorado
Friedl Pfeifer arrived in Aspen on October sixteenth, nineteen forty-five, having just been discharged from the United States Army's Tenth Mountain Division, a specialized alpine warfare unit that had trained in the Colorado Rockies and fought in the mountains of northern Italy. Pfeifer was Austrian, a champion skier, and when he surveyed the terrain surrounding Aspen he saw what others had missed during five decades of decline: a mountain that could anchor one of the great ski destinations in the country.
He began building immediately. The chairlift he helped bring to life would climb Aspen Mountain along a route that made it, when it opened, the longest chairlift in the world by vertical rise. The first passengers rode it in December of nineteen forty-six, and the official opening day came in January of nineteen forty-seven. Walter Paepcke, the Chicago businessman and philanthropist who would go on to found the Aspen Institute, invested heavily in the resort, seeing skiing as the engine that could revive a dying town.
The Tenth Mountain Division connection ran deeper than Pfeifer alone. Soldiers who had trained on Colorado slopes came home from the war with an appetite for mountain terrain, and many returned to settle in Colorado ski towns in the years that followed. The mountain he built a lift on became the first of four that now ring the valley.
