A letter from a local
Under the glitter, the best mountain town infrastructure alive.
Ignore the fur coats. Working Aspen gets four mountains on one pass — Ajax rising straight off the mall, Highlands' bowl hike for the faithful — plus the Rio Grande Trail running car-free down-valley and the Maroon Bells, the most photographed peaks in North America, twenty-five minutes up Castle Creek.
Summer is the local's payoff: Independence Pass climbing and road rides, the Roaring Fork's gold-medal trout water through town, Smuggler Mountain's morning hike where the whole town says hi to itself before nine.
Housing is a lottery, sometimes literally — most of us live down-valley and commute the trail. The mountains do not know what anything costs. That's the loophole.
— Theo