Glitz Hits Rockies : Ski Towns: On Fast Run Downhill?

There’s trouble in paradise. Funky Aspen has become glitzy Aspen, a celebrity-filled Hollywood East, where it’s easy to get a Maine lobster dinner delivered to your million-dollar condo but tough to find a grilled cheese sandwich.

“We’re out of control,” says one local, and many worried Aspenites tend to agree.

The battle for the soul--and future--of Aspen is not unique. Throughout the Rocky Mountain West other old mining towns also are facing a mid-life crisis as downhill skiing becomes a pastime of the affluent. With the money has come rampant development. With the development, soaring property prices. And with the prices, changing life styles beset by hints of urbanization.

Pollution has become so serious in Aspen that some new condos are being built without fireplaces and a local ordinance dictates on which days residents can use existing fireplaces.

Long Commute

Affordable housing is so scarce--the average sale price for a house was $921,000 here last year--that workers must commute an hour or more to their homes in other towns “down valley,” creating mammoth traffic jams on Highway 82.

The battle between developers and slow-growth advocates is so contentious that the Grand Aspen Hotel was closed for four hours the other day because of a bomb threat. Its owner, Washington, D.C., developer Mohammed Hadid, recently won a bitter fight and received approval to build a 292-room Ritz-Carlton Hotel at the base of Ajax mountain here.

This is hardly the Colorado Rocky Mountain high of which Aspen resident John Denver sings. To the dismay of many Aspenites, their town has become a trendy, mink-clad resort. The old bowling alley has become Boogie’s diner, where Elvis Presley’s ’55 Corvette is on display. The tattered old Jerome Hotel has been exquisitely remodeled and now offers $295 peak-season rooms and limousine service.

A Tough Choice

However, not all of the locals want to face the tough choice such changes present: To keep the flavor of the old Aspen they are going to have to sacrifice the gilded appeal of the new Aspen.

John Kaiser, a sheet metal contractor, sat at the bar of the Elks Lodge the other evening, talking about this dilemma. A sign over the bar advised: “An Elk is a gentleman. Please remove your hat. No profane language.” Kaiser, hatless and cussless, said the Elks own the square block where the club is located and had turned down a developer’s offer of $11 million for it. The Elks had CD’s maturing so fast from their rental income, he said, that they could hardly find enough banks to hold them.

“I see people coming in and trashing up the town, and no, I don’t like it,” he said. “This is my home. But what’s happening is putting food on my table and making it possible for me to live here. Of course, what’s really changed is the people we get here. They used to come to Aspen with long hair. Now they come with trust funds.”

Before the money started pouring in--and commercial jets started arriving at Sardy Field from Dallas, Los Angeles and Chicago--Aspen was the Bohemia of the Rockies. This is where journalist Hunter Thompson ran for sheriff and the cabbie driving you in from the airport might be an architect and it was hard to find a bartender without a college degree. In those days there was still more fur in the Yukon than you saw on Aspen’s streets and the Hickory House, a favorite gathering spot for Aspenites, had yet to print its first bumper sticker, proudly declaring, “We serve local riffraff.”

“Aspen used to attract characters, people who had already done something interesting with their lives,” said bartender Brian O’Neill, who gave up teaching in Massachusetts for an unsuccessful career as a thoroughbred racehorse owner. “Now we’re getting more of the ‘let’s-be-noticed’ crowd. We’ve lost the unique characters that used to move here, so I guess you could say we’ve lost the battle as well.”

Like most of the Rockies’ ski towns--some of whose downtown districts have been declared National Historical Landmarks--Aspen has stringent building restrictions and the physical changes have been tasteful. But a variance here, a variance there, another all-weather mall filled with pricey shops, a few more restaurants serving Colorado trout from Idaho, and pretty soon the charm of individual communities is usurped by a theme-park atmosphere of look-alike resorts.

Pseudo-Victorian

One Aspen trademark is the huge pseudo-Victorian houses that have replaced miner’s homes on the west end of town. They are beautifully built in every detail but are second homes, empty except for a few weeks a year.

“People come here wanting to be part of Aspen on one hand and on the other, wanting to show off (their wealth),” said Aspen’s mayor, William Stirling, a real estate broker and critic of uncontrolled growth. “They see Aspen as romantic and lovely and then, after buying, instead of protecting its integrity, they end up threatening the qualities that attracted them in the first place.”

The stakes are high for towns such as Aspen, where policemen drive white Saabs and the Winterskol ski festival, once a community undertaking, is now sponsored by Audi. The ski industry--though experiencing little growth nationally--generates more than $6 billion annually for eight western mountain states. In Colorado, skiing is a $1.9-billion business that employs 45,000 people. Colorado’s 27 ski resorts account for 5% of the nation’s ski areas, yet sell 20% of its lift tickets.

Upgrading Facilities

So in order to compete with each other and with warm-weather destinations for a market that is not growing, ski companies are forced to invest megabucks in faster lifts, new trails and snow-grooming tractors, fancier accommodations, better facilities. And to keep pace with what the ski operators are offering, the towns themselves indirectly are forced to become more upscale. Of every skier’s dollar spent in Colorado, according to one survey, only 20 cents goes to the ski company; the rest is spent in town and on transportation.

Vail, a star-studded, Bavarian-style village, has grown so fast it does not even have a cemetery. Beaver Creek had its best month ever in December for real estate sales. Two developers have announced plans for a $35-million resort in the tiny Colorado mountain town of Edwards. Breckenridge, whose ski company was recently purchased by Japanese investors, has a Hilton Hotel, a weekend population of 25,000 (only 1,400 of whom are permanent residents)--and an activist citizens’ group that in December helped defeat plans for a 26,000-square-foot mall on Main Street.

“We’ve got a choice of preserving old town or just blowing it away,” said Rebecca Waugh, head of Breckenridge’s historical society, “and I think we’re winning. The money hasn’t come into Breckenridge the way it has in Aspen. Once it does, there’s not much you can do. The money will talk when it arrives.”

Big money has not yet arrived in Telluride either, an isolated town (population 1,047) where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid robbed their first bank, in 1889. Located in the San Juan Mountains, 120 miles southwest of Aspen, Telluride is what Aspen was 20 years ago and locals are asking if compromising the future is inevitable.

‘Old Song and Dance’

“I’ve heard the old song and dance that Telluride doesn’t want to be another Aspen,” said former miner Bill Mahoney, who has lived in Telluride for 58 years, “but the thing is, it’s following all the same steps, so there’s just no other way for it to happen.”

Telluride opened its first airport--the highest commercial airport in the nation at 9,100 feet--three winters ago. The old miners hall has been turned into condominiums and an elegant mountain village, with a planned population of 3,500, is under construction near the ski lifts. In the office of the Telluride Ski Co., the activity board lists the properties available and the hometowns of recent purchasers: Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Tampa.

When Mahoney’s father died, he left his family a $1,000 life insurance policy and $200 cash. (His house, built in 1931 for $50, sold seven years ago for $130,000.) Mahoney himself paid only $5 for the lot he built his house on in 1959, and the city block he later purchased for $135 fetched $75,000 a few years ago. So he, too, has benefited from the discovery of the western skiing towns, but he wonders whether that prosperity won’t eventually end the Mahoneys’ Telluride heritage.

“In my father’s day, you could make it on your own,” he said. “No more. I sell my stuff to some stranger, you can forget the program. If I don’t leave my grandchildren something--a piece of property or my house--they’re not going to be able to stay here. As simple as that.”