🇺🇸 United States · Rocky Mountains
Aspen is one of the most exclusive and recognizable mountain destinations in the United States: a former silver mining town in the Colorado Rockies that has become a byword for elite skiing, glamour and cultural life. Set in the Roaring Fork valley, at nearly 2,500 meters of altitude and ringed by peaks above 4,000 meters, it pairs a historic core of Victorian streets with luxury boutiques, fine-dining restaurants and a festival calendar that keeps it alive all year.
The heart of the destination is its skiing: four mountains run by Aspen Snowmass —Aspen Mountain (Ajax), Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk and Snowmass— offering everything from gentle beginner runs to the legendary Highland Bowl for experts. But Aspen is far more than snow: in summer it becomes an ideal base for hiking, cycling and the famous Maroon Bells, possibly the most photographed mountains in North America.
This guide covers the essentials of Aspen with a practical eye: the four ski areas and the lift-pass system, the Maroon Bells and their regulated access, the historic center and its museums, how to get there from Denver or by flying straight into Aspen, and where to stay and eat in one of the priciest but also loveliest places in the Rockies. Aspen is a luxury, but it is also a master class in how an old mining town managed to reinvent itself.
Aspen was born in 1879 as a mining camp during the Colorado silver rush, and grew into one of the richest silver towns in the country until the collapse of the silver price in 1893 plunged it into decades of decline (the 'quiet years'). It was reborn from the 1940s on, when Walter Paepcke and his wife Elizabeth imagined it as a ski center and, above all, a center of culture and thought (the 'Aspen Idea'): body, mind and spirit. Out of that came the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Rocky Mountain state: land of the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapaho, of the ancestral ruins of Mesa Verde, forged by the gold and silver rushes, today a skiing mecca with Aspen and Vail and home to a fast-growing Denver.
Read the history of Colorado →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In 1930, Aspen had around 700 inhabitants, boarded-up Victorian houses and a past almost nobody wanted to remember. Today it is one of the most expensive zip codes in the United States, where a ski house comfortably tops ten million dollars. Between those two Aspens —the ghost town and the jet-set paradise— sits one of the most astonishing stories of boom, ruin and resurrection in the American West, and it all began with a white metal.
Long before Aspen existed, the valley of the Roaring Fork River, in the Colorado Rockies, was the territory of the Ute people, who moved through these mountains following the game and the seasons. The pressure of colonization and mining would displace them from the region over the course of the 19th century, in a process that culminated in the forced expulsion of the Ute from much of Colorado after the treaties and conflicts of the 1860s and 1880s.
Modern Aspen was born out of silver. In 1879, at the height of the Colorado mining rush, prospectors who had crossed over from the Leadville basin found rich silver deposits on these slopes. The camp that sprang up was first called Ute City, and in 1880 it was renamed Aspen for the abundant quaking aspens that cover the mountains and that turn the landscape gold in fall.
The settlement grew fast. The arrival of the railroad in 1887 —first the Denver & Rio Grande and then the Colorado Midland— connected Aspen to the markets and sent its prosperity soaring. By then it was no longer an improvised camp but a town in full expansion, competing to become one of the great mining capitals of the West.
In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Aspen lived its heyday. It became one of the largest silver-producing districts in the United States, with legendary mines such as the Smuggler, which in 1894 yielded the largest silver nugget ever extracted. The population passed 10,000 or 12,000 inhabitants, an enormous figure for the time in such a remote region.
Silver wealth built a town that was surprisingly cosmopolitan for a place at nearly 2,500 meters of altitude deep in the mountains: it had electric lighting very early, a streetcar, hospitals, banks, newspapers, schools and buildings of real stature. Two jewels of that golden age still preside over downtown: the Hotel Jerome, opened in 1889 by Jerome B. Wheeler, and the Wheeler Opera House, also from 1889, both restored and in full use.
It was an era of overflowing optimism, in which Aspen seemed destined for a brilliant future. But its economy depended almost entirely on a single metal, and that dependence made it extremely vulnerable to the swings of national monetary policy.
In 1893, the United States Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the law that obliged the government to buy large quantities of silver. With the artificial demand gone, the price of the metal collapsed. For a town built entirely on silver, the effect was devastating: the mines closed one after another, the jobs evaporated and the population fled in search of work.
So began what Aspen itself calls its 'quiet years', a long half-century of decline that stretched to the 1940s. The population fell from more than ten thousand inhabitants to barely a few hundred. Many Victorian houses stood empty or sold for a pittance; some were demolished and others simply aged in silence.
Paradoxically, that decline saved Aspen's character. Since there was no money to build or modernize, the Victorian historic core survived almost intact, frozen in time. When the rebirth arrived decades later, the town still had a soul —and an architecture— to reinvent.
Aspen's rebirth began timidly with skiing. In the 1930s a handful of enthusiasts put up a first rudimentary lift, and during the Second World War the soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division, trained nearby at Camp Hale, discovered the potential of these slopes; several would return afterward to drive the ski industry. In 1946 Aspen Mountain opened with what was then the longest chairlift in the world.
The real leap, however, came from the Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke and his wife Elizabeth, who visited Aspen in the 1940s and saw in it something more than a ski resort. They imagined a place where body, mind and spirit would be cultivated together: the so-called 'Aspen Idea'. Out of that vision came, around 1949 and 1950, the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Music Festival and School and the Aspen Skiing Company.
From then on, Aspen established itself as a unique destination combining elite sport with first-rate culture. In the following decades the mountains of Buttermilk, Aspen Highlands and Snowmass were added, completing the great ski area, while festivals of ideas, music, film and food drew an international audience.
From the second half of the 20th century, Aspen became a byword for glamour and exclusivity. Celebrities, magnates and figures from politics and the arts adopted the town as a retreat, and property prices shot up until it was one of the most expensive places in the United States. The journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who lived in the area, even ran for county sheriff in 1970 on a countercultural platform, an episode that is part of local folklore.
That success also brought tensions that persist today: the cost of housing pushes out the workers who hold up the local economy, who have to live in the towns downvalley (Basalt, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs) and commute every day. Managing growth, environmental sustainability and the balance between luxury and community are constant debates.
Even so, Aspen keeps its double character intact: a paradise of snow and mountain sport, and a capital of ideas. Every summer the Aspen Ideas Festival brings together leaders from all over the world, the Music Festival fills the Benedict tent with classical music and the Food & Wine Classic celebrates fine cooking. Few old mining towns can boast a second life this brilliant.