Back in the ‘90s, when writer Hunter S. Thompson held court at the just outside of Aspen, he’d often rail against the “greedheads.” I grew up in Aspen, and sometimes my dad took me there to look at all the dollar bills on the wall.
He made sure a picture of me and my first bull elk joined pictures in the bar of ski bums in head-to-toe denim. Nowadays the bills are $100s and the pictures on the walls look like fashion shoots. What would Hunter Thompson think? Likely, that the greedheads had won.
Most of the West’s resort towns have undergone something of an Aspenification, and that includes Aspen’s bedroom communities of Basalt, Carbondale and Rifle that send workers to the ski lifts and restaurants. When I was young, my family bounced around Aspen-area trailer parks and even lived in the office of a horse stable at the base of Aspen Highlands Ski Resort. The cabin had no running water, and the only heat was a wood stove.
We’d sled down the hill hanging on to our groceries and water jugs. When I was eight, my mom was able to buy a deed-restricted condo in Aspen. Even then we needed to add a roommate to afford our 740 square foot, two-bedroom apartment, one of us sleeping on the day-bed in the living room.
Dad called it “condo-bondage,” and a love of horses, hunting and open spaces pushed him farther down-valley before he settled in Silt, over an hour from Aspen. I spent my middle-school years there, living with my dad in the early 1990s, and it felt like a di.
