^ Promotional display at the Aspen Airport, c. 1960.

Awkward and startling growth gave ski areas a youthful bravado at the same time that it raised new questions for them to face. By 1970 Colorado's ski industry had gained size, confidence, and a full set of the problems that come with maturity and responsibility. Tenth Mountain Division veterans and investors used new available technology to build ski areas and attract post-war consumers, but their efforts remained tentative until skiers made it obvious they wanted more. The 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley, California spurred the growth of skiing all over the country, and ski business in Colorado rose 42% the season after the Olympics. When post-war lifts and ski areas could no longer handle the demand, ski areas were quick to expand old areas and build new ones. Skiers flocked to resort towns like Aspen to consume the local skiing, night life, and culture. Skiing thus became both a business and part of the tourist industry.

Aspen and its residents reaped the rewards and paid the price of being one of the earliest and best-known members of the Colorado ski industry. Its culture and music shaped the community and drew summer visitors in ways other resorts would emulate in later years. In the meantime, Aspen developed an image and attracted people that war-years residents could hardly recognize.

Colorado ski industry growth in the 1950s and 1960s staggered the imagination. One ski industry brochure pointed out that in 1945 "ski lifts, by today's standards, were slow and archaic. Accommodations were practically nil. Rarely did the skier spend anything more than a few hours and the price of a lift ticket at the area." That year, it went on, skiers spent about $50,000 at Colorado's two main ski areas, while in 1967 lifts and mountain facilities for the 29 ski areas now in the state represented an investment of $40,000,000. By 1970 skiing contributed to the entire state's economy, marking Colorado's entrance into the tourism business.

Equally amazing growth occurred in Aspen. Lift lines for the No. 1 and No. 2 lifts grew up to two hours long, and the Skiing Corporation had trouble preventing people from cutting the line. The Skiing Corporation responded by building the No. 3 lift from Tourtelotte Park to the Sundeck in 1954, and the No. 4 lift to the top of Little Nell in 1956. The Corporation's annual report for 1960 noted that "with the tremendous growth in the popularity of skiing, there have been years when our waiting lines sometimes exceeded 60 minutes, but the construction in the last few years has cured this, and even at the busiest time of the season during the past winter waiting lines did not exceed about 10 minutes on the most popular lifts. We feel such service is better than that offered in most other popular ski resorts in the United States and abroad. However we recognize that we must anticipate a growth of about 15% a year, and it is possible that more lift construction will be undertaken in 1962." In order to improve skiing on existing trails, the Corporation had started using caterpillar tractors with blades on the front to smooth the snow, followed by packing crews on skis. Like any growing industry, the Aspen Skiing Corporation utilized available technology to improve their product.

The Aspen Skiing Corporation was able to improve its product because the board of directors had decided almost from the start that profits would go towards expansion and development of the ski area's facilities rather than towards paying dividends. William Hodges, who had been president of the Skiing Corporation often along with George Berger during the late 1940s and early 1950s, loved to ski himself. He worked in Denver but belonged to the Arlberg Club and bought a house in Aspen so he and his family could spend as much time in town as possible. In 1958 D.R.C. Brown, a member of one of Aspen's original mining era families and an original investor in the Skiing Corporation, gave up his cattle ranching business, moved back to Aspen, and became the president of the Aspen Skiing Corporation. He would remain president for over 20 years and face more and more difficult problems as the Aspen Skiing Corporation grew during the 1960s.

^ Buttermilk Ski Area (right) and Aspen Highlands (upper left)

One of the biggest problems with Aspen Mountain's product was that only the most experienced skiers could appreciate it. Andre Roch had stressed the importance of building a challenging run that would draw competitors to the area, but once skiing grew as a sport for everyone, this attraction became a liability. Friedl Pfeifer, whose business was to teach people how to ski, felt particularly frustrated by the difficulty of Aspen Mountain. The Corporation widened and smoothed out the Little Nell area for beginners, but even that left a rather challenging slope, and Pfeifer worried that beginners and families with young children were choosing to vacation at other ski areas. In September of 1953 Pfeifer bought 300 acres of land at the foot of what would become known as Buttermilk Mountain in the hopes of turning it into a beginner-intermediate ski area that would be connected to Aspen Mountain. The Skiing Corporation did not take Pfeifer's offer to lease his land for expansion, however, and Pfeifer found himself developing a new ski area without the direct involvement of the Corporation. He and Art Pfister, who owned land adjoining Pfeifer's at the base of Buttermilk, formed a corporation to build a new ski area and agreed to split expenses for a T-bar and a restaurant.

Buttermilk ski area opened for business during the 1958-59 season, with a 4,000 foot Dopplemeyer T-bar that rose 720 vertical feet. Pfeifer, who was still owner and head of the Aspen Ski School with Fred Iselin, met his students at Rubey Park at the ski school meeting place and then bussed them to Buttermilk for lessons. Business during the first season was slow; Buttermilk was relatively unknown outside the Roaring Fork Valley. Lift manager Artur Kuen estimated their first season visits at only a few hundred skier-days. Business was good enough to merit limited expansion, though, and within the next few years Kuen moved the T-bar to Sterner (now Tiehack), and installed another T-bar on the bunny hill. In the effort to fund more building projects, Pfeifer recruited Robert O. Anderson, president of Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. and member of the Aspen Skiing Corporation board of directors, to become partners with him and Pfister. Anderson signed on and funded the construction of two chair lifts and the Cliffhouse restaurant at the top of the mountain, which opened in November 1962. That year an adult day ticket cost $5, or $3 for children, and the corporation advertised the mountain's "ultra-wide, two and three mile trails over marvelous terrain." In addition to having long, wide, gently-sloping trails, the Buttermilk owners worked to provide smooth skiing for its customers. To that end, they purchased a snowcat to groom trails, at about the same time that mechanical grooming equipment was smoothing snow on Aspen Mountain. Both areas thus entered the world of skiing as big business; they used available technology to attract business, and they used it to compete against other ski areas.

Competition between Buttermilk and Aspen Mountain remained low, however, because both Pfister and Anderson were on the board of directors for the Aspen Skiing Corporation as well as being partners in Buttermilk. The Aspen Skiing Corporation actually handled Buttermilk's ticket sales and marketing. The two skiing corporations came even closer together in the summer of 1963 when Friedl Pfeifer sold his interest in the Buttermilk Mountain Skiing Corporation and leased the ski area to the Aspen Skiing Corporation. He also gave up his rights to the ski school, which Fred Iselin would take over. The Aspen Skiing Corporation would continue to expand Buttermilk, building a chairlift on Buttermilk West to open more advanced terrain for the 1965-66 season. By this time the Aspen Skiing Corporation had expanded on Aspen Mountain and taken over management of the growing Buttermilk area. Business in the ski industry was getting bigger.

^ Whip Jones

Aspen's ski business was growing in more places than Aspen Mountain and Buttermilk. Aspen Highlands opened the same season that Buttermilk did, the product of primarily one man. Whipple Van Ness Jones first visited Aspen in the winter of 1947-48 to confirm the rumors he had heard about Aspen's new ski area. Raised in Wisconsin and graduated from Harvard Business School, Whip Jones returned in 1949 to attend the Goethe Bicentennial. He so enjoyed the event and Aspen in the summer that he bought a house from Walter Paepcke's son-in-law the next year and moved in during 1951. Four or five years later Jones decided to purchase some land where he could live and raise some horses, so he bought the Highlands base area property from Had Deane, who owned the T Lazy 7 ranch. Initially Jones had no intentions of running a ski area at all. His new neighbors introduced him to the idea in 1957. Had Deane, Dick Wright, and Pat Henry asked Jones if he would like to invest in a ski area proposal an Sievers Mountain behind Deane's property at the mouth of Willow Creek. Paul Hauk, the local Forest Service ranger, inspected the site and found the base area too cramped and the lower slopes too steep for a viable ski area. Hauk noticed, however, the skiing potential of the Highland Peak area behind Jones' property and encouraged Jones to consider developing a major ski area there. During the late 1950s, when ski areas were beginning to boom and few realized the degree of their environmental impact, the U.S. Forest Service played advocate rather than resisting ski area development. They encouraged Jones to build because Aspen Mountain had become too crowded.

Whip Jones thus set about discovering the potential of his backyard and the forest service land beyond it for skiing. In August and September 1957 Jones trekked up and down the mountainside with Hauk, Dick Durrance, Friedl Pfeifer, and Fred Iselin, who all gave positive reports on the area. After more visits by Forest Service people and studies by Durrance and other consultants, Whip Jones accepted a 30-year lease on approximately 4,200 acres of National Forest land and signed it on April 16, 1958. Jones had approached the Aspen Skiing Corporation that past September to see if they wanted to participate in the development of Highlands, but they did not. Then president William Hodges explained, as he had to Pfeifer, that the Aspen Skiing Corporation had its hands full managing Aspen Mountain. Like Pfeifer, Whip Jones decided to develop a ski area on his own. He hired Pete Seibert, a 10th Mountain Division veteran and ski racer, and Earl Eaton, former head of the ski patrol on Aspen Mountain. Both had been working at Loveland Basin and agreed to come to Highlands and lay out trails and lift line corridors. Seibert became mountain manager, Eaton organized the ski patrol, and Stein Erikson helped lay out trails and became head of the ski school. Aspen Highlands opened for the 1958-59 season with two chair lifts, a T-bar, and a short rope tow.

During its first season Highlands had almost 30,000 skier-visits, compared to 93,000 on Aspen Mountain and 16,400 on Buttermilk. Stein Erikson did much to promote Aspen Highlands as ski school director—he was a well-known racer from Norway who had first come to Aspen for the 1950 FIS championships and became famous for doing flips on skis. Jones attributed much of Highland's early growth to Erikson's notoriety, but no one could approach Fred Iselin's charm and charisma. Aspen Highlands continued its success, especially after Fred Iselin became director of the ski school during the 1964-65 season. Iselin had come from Switzerland in 1939 and taught skiing in Yosemite, Sun Valley, and finally Aspen. In addition to his skiing talents, Iselin had a capacity for humor that set him apart from every other ski instructor or spokesman. He had fun skiing and taught everyone else to have fun, too. Paul Hauk even attributed the change from dark to colorful ski fashions to Iselin. Aspen Highlands' success resulted from a variety of factors. It had new terrain in a time and place where skiing demand was outgrowing Aspen Mountain. It had famous, interesting ski school directors and lower rates than those of the Skiing Corporation. After 1959 it had a bus system to bring skiers from Aspen to Highlands and back, and it had more snowfall and a better view than both Aspen Mountain and Buttermilk.

As early as 1958 the Aspen area could boast of three different mountains on which visitors could ski, and three different ski companies to choose from. While the Aspen Skiing Corporation bought out Buttermilk in 1962, Aspen Highlands remained under Whip Jones' ownership and management until 1992. Expansion and competition characterize big business, and they characterized Aspen skiing during the 1960s. All three ski areas grew during that decade along with the national appeal of skiing. The U.S. Forest Service study of Colorado ski resources in 1959 concluded that "Colorado will need at least two new chair lifts each year to keep up with the current rate of increase in pleasure skiing." The study cited Denver and Aspen as the major growth areas in Colorado. Skiers supported the study's findings with their feet. Between 1958-59 and 1964-65 skier-visits to Aspen Mountain, Buttermilk, and Aspen Highlands soared. Buttermilk went from 16,400 to 87,500, Aspen Highlands grew from 30,000 to 68,000, and Aspen Mountain went from 93,000 to 174,000 skier-visits. By the 1968-69 season skier use of Aspen Highlands topped 145,000 and continued to rise during the 1970s.

Growth of this magnitude forced the once young and naive ski industry to grow up and make some changes. It had to come to terms, in other words, with its size. Already ski areas were competing with one another for business and investing more and more capital into ski lifts, restaurants, and grooming equipment in the process. By 1963 most Colorado ski areas belonged to the Rocky Mountain Ski Area Operators' Association, itself a result of ski industry growth and the need to establish policy. Members of this group faced problems and issues increasingly representative of big business. Insurance, insurance liability, lift inspection, long-range weather forecasting, ski instructor certification, relations with the Forest Service, and unions and labor disputes all required discussion. Members of the ski industry found themselves thrust into a world dominated more by issues of big business than the sport of skiing.

Promoters of Colorado's economy saw ski industry growth as only positive: investments and expansions by the ski industry led to more investments by skiers as they came to the state for vacation. Members of the ski industry, however, saw the need to make some adjustments. In March 1963 some members proposed the creation of another organization to address the problems and needs of ski areas in the 1960s—Ski Country USA. This new organization would address the need "for the unification of all ski areas in the Southern Rocky Mountain area." "Nowhere in the USA," the founder wrote, "is there grouped such a vast amount of ski country with so many well established, world famous ski areas and potential of so many more." The growth of skiing had not only created more ski areas across the state, but it led to a number of national organizations including the National Ski Patrol, the United States Ski Association, and the organization representing professional ski instructors. Ski Country USA would "be the general agency and coordinator for all ski business affiliated with this area—it could be the bureau of assistance and cooperation for the ski industry in Colorado and New Mexico." Ski Country USA would also address another major concern of most industries—advertising. More ski areas meant more competition, nationally and internationally in the case of skiing, and Ski Country USA would unite southern Rocky Mountain areas and promote them as a group, hopefully with support from the state. In a nutshell, Ski Country USA's object was to "combine the efforts of all businesses related to skiing in the area encompassing all members of the Rocky Mountain Ski Area Operators' Association." It would be a "mutual effort to promote, advertise, and sell skiing, lodging, transportation, et al in this area to the world. The prime motive is to bring skiers to Ski Country USA and the participation of all will benefit all." The birth of this organization marked the passage of the ski industry into adulthood.

^ municipal spread in the late 1960s and 70s

The town of Aspen could hardly remain unaffected by the changes on Aspen Mountain, the growing popularity of skiing, and the emergence of a mature ski industry. Its reputation as a town that had both excellent skiing and an interesting community drew people and dollars in amounts unprecedented since the silver era. A Denver paper characterized the town in 1966 as "Aspen, Where Everyone Skis," and listed the bank's ski-up window, the opening of condominiums, commercial buildings, new restaurants, and a hair dressing shop as evidence that skiing was changing the town. "If Colorado is the Ski Capital of the World," the author said, "then Aspen is the county seat." Aspen Airlines ran four flights daily from Denver in 1966, flying in those tourists that did not rent cars to get to Aspen. Land values rose along with tourism and new businesses; one elderly lady, the author explained, recently declined an offer of $90,000 for her hillside "shack" and homestead land, originally valued at $950. A good 30-foot lot—of which anyone wanting to build a house would need two—cost $7,500. Despite the then-exorbitant cost of land, Aspen's population had risen 40% from 1960 to 1965. This growth compelled the town to adopt an Aspen Area Master Plan in 1966 so they could control development.

During the 1960s Aspen's population rose in number and changed in character. This decade marked the ascension of the apres-ski world and Aspen's reputation as a fashionable town. Even Business Week noticed. In 1964 it ran an article entitled "Aspen's New Silver Lode: It's apres-ski, or the business of making skiers happy from the end of the ski run to the wee hours—and it's making Aspen and other ski spots happy, too." The maturity of the ski industry entailed more than the growth of ski areas themselves, it included the growth of restaurants, bars, hotels, and image—all necessary to attract and serve skiers on vacation. Aspen excelled at this aspect of the ski industry as well. Other ski areas in Colorado had big mountains and new facilities by the mid-1960s, but "for apres-ski—the festivities after the ski run—such peripatetic members of the 'jet set' and Aspen devotees as film star Jill St. John say it has no equal. 'You can spend two weeks in Aspen and hit a different place every night.' With 30 or so bars and restaurants in a hamlet of 2,500 permanent residents, the apres-ski game in Aspen is to find the 'in' place to be at the right hour." Night spots like the Red Onion, the Golden Horn, the Hotel Jerome, the Crystal Palace, the Abbey, Galena St. East, the Mother Lode, the Centre Bar, and the Copper Kettle entertained visitors with different combinations of food and music. Shopping at Elli's or Terese David and having tea at the Aspen Country Store also became part of the Aspen skiing scene.

Early Aspen residents had turned to skiing and winter recreation as a means for economic revival and a return to boom days, and they got their wish. Just as in 19th century mining towns, mining the miners—and now mining the skiers—proved more lucrative than anything else. The owner of the Crystal Palace explained "this is a cut-throat business here; to be successful you have to specialize." Werner Kuster bought the Red Onion in 1953 and spent $200,000 putting a new restaurant, bar, band stand, and dance floor. He measured the success of his business not only by the numbers of customers he served over the years, but who those customers were. Drawing people like Robert and Edward Kennedy to the Red Onion helped shape an image of Aspen as playground for the rich and famous. Aspen's reputation and its growing number of visitors combined in an accelerating cycle that constantly re-shaped the image of the town and attracted more skier-tourists. Businesses in Aspen including the Aspen Skiing Corporation thus marketed more than their products themselves; they marketed their famous customers. Gary Cooper's role became Jill St. John's, and today stars ranging from George Hamilton and Hunter Thompson to Jack Nicholson and Barbie Benton share the responsibility—unconscious or unwanted as it may be—of shaping Aspen's public image. Skier-tourists came to Aspen to consume a complicated mix of the landscape, the night life, and other visitors; they continue to do so today.

The variety of people that flocked to Aspen during the 1960s often startled residents who had lived there since the quiet years. Along with movie starts and vacationing skier-tourists came a group of people now known as ski bums. In 1965 they were just establishing their identity, and a Denver paper referred to them as "ski bums, ski-niks, or whatever you will call the young, generally broke, crowd that streams lemming-like to Aspen in the winter for a little work and a lot of skiing and kicks." Longtime resident Jim Blanning described the ski bum a bit differently, as a skier who might come to Aspen for several years and finally stay and establish himself, like dozens of the town's businessmen. A growing seasonal population of young skiers shaped the image of Aspen as much as a few celebrities did, causing a journalist from Life magazine to characterize Aspen as more of a frenzied party town than it actually was.

Aspen has been such a hotbed for controversy over its people and goings-on in part because of the variety of people who live there—a variety first established in the late 1940s and accelerated in the 1960s. In 1950 one author declared that "residents of Aspen defy any simple classification. Some were born there in tents or log cabins during the mining rush of the 1880s, some are grizzled prospectors who hung on after the silver boom collapsed, some are professional men who became fed up with city life, some are young couples with capital for a modest business and a passion for skiing, and a few are moneyed individuals who stopped off for a weekend of fun and stayed to buy a house." This author thus characterized the mix of quiet years residents, 10th Mountain Division veterans and ski enthusiasts, and those influenced by Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke's efforts to build a cultural center.

Ten years later Aspen's population grew even more varied. Many of the original residents from the quiet years found themselves priced out of the very community they had hoped to revive and so sold their land and moved down valley. Some of them remained though, working for the Aspen Skiing Corporation, running small ranches outside of town, or entering the tourist business themselves. Skiers and colleagues of the Paepckes who came to Aspen in the 1940s or early 1950s began to identify themselves as old-timers or locals by the 1960s, since they had been present for Aspen's initial entrance into the tourist economy. During the 1960s more people were coming and going to and from Aspen than ever before; in some ways those who had lived in town for 10 or 15 years really were old-timers. Class differences as well as length of residency divided Aspen's population in the 1940s and continued to do so increasingly through the 1960s. One man who had recently moved to Aspen from Connecticut in 1965 commented "the thing about Aspen is that you've got the working rich and the non-working rich, the working poor and the non-working poor. Throw in about 5,000 guest skiers with a complete turnover every five or six days and that's quite a mixture." By 1970 this mix included hippies as well, who threatened the community with their anti-establishment behavior and appearance. "The hippies at Aspen," one author wrote, "whether by appearance or way of life, have formed a sub-culture and succeeded in polarizing the town." This weird mix of residents and visitors, old-timers and outsiders, turned Aspen into a town with a distinct character and image at the same time that it introduced problems characteristic of most urban environments.

Those residents who had lived in Aspen since its quiet years noticed the changing population and usually pointed to the 1960s as the decade of biggest change. Vic Goodhard said "the changing of Aspen was kind of gradual until the 1960s, and then it really started popping." As owner of the garbage company Goodhard was probably in the best position to measure the growth of the town. "I couldn't keep up buying garbage trucks," he recalled, "because I had Snowmass and Aspen at the same time. Just trying to keep up. You didn't know what to plan for. All of a sudden, there were new places, bigger places that demanded more service, more people." At that point, locals noticed, Aspen became a town almost foreign in its composition and atmosphere. The town, like the Aspen Skiing Corporation, joined the tourist business and a ski industry geared to pleasing as many customers as possible. Many Aspen residents remember the days when "everybody knew everybody else," or "everyone called each other by their first name, no matter who they were." Or they remember Aspen before condominiums crept over the town like kudzu, making it possible for masses of people to experience Aspen's skiing and night life at once. Aspen's residents who lived there since the quiet years and those who came after World War II all had their own images of how they would like to see Aspen grow. Few of them imagined the type and degree of change that the 1960s would usher in.

^ Cross country skiing on the Snowmass golf course with Snowmass ski area in the back ground

All of the changes that Aspen and the ski industry experienced during the 1950s and 1960s culminated in the development of Snowmass-at-Aspen and its opening in December of 1967. This ski resort appeared where there had been only ranches before as a complete community and year-round resort, catering to destination skier-tourists. Big business management, finance, planning, advertising, and sales characterized every aspect of its construction and operation. Skiing magazine referred to its "heavyweight corporate proficiency;" another author predicted that "it may be that this most massive of American ski areas is really what American skiers have been anticipating, and at the same time dreading, for 20 years now—the Happening that would take place when American business "know how" (whatever that is) put its energies to work in the field of recreation." It was.

Snowmass was the brainchild of William Janss, a former Olympic skier and member of the California real estate-construction-cattle millionaire Janss family. He had contemplated building a ski resort, and in the late 1950s he landed his ski-equipped plane on the east ridge of Baldy Mountain. His winter resort would be there and in the Brush Creek valley below. Working through an Aspen realtor (Jimmy Moore), by 1961 Janss quietly purchased seven ranches in Brush Creek totaling 3,400 acres. After buying the base area land Janss announced his intention to develop Baldy Mountain and Burnt Mountain as a ski area. He signed a contract with the Aspen Skiing Corporation under which they would operate the ski area and open in the fall of 1967. Planners and developers cut some experimental trails in 1961 and began running snow cat skiing tours the next season. The 5,000 people who skied Snowmass' powder this way paid money and gave feedback that the developers would use to plan more trails. Over the next five years three private firms would invest $10 million. Snowmass Skiing Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Aspen Skiing Corporation, would build the lifts and manage the skiing. Janss Colorado Corporation, a subsidiary of Janss Investment Corporation, would develop and sell the real estate with the American Cement Corporation, which invested $4.5 million in the project.

More trail cutting began in 1963, and the next year master planning of the resort and its villages began. Construction of three lifts and Sam's Knob restaurant was finished by 1966, but the bulk of the building took place just the year before opening. Detailed planning prevailed over every aspect of the resort. Fritz Benedict designed a plan to select lodge, residence, and other sites "with full consideration as to view, relation to all other buildings, to roads, streams, and trees. All utilities at Snowmass are underground—no unsightly telephone or electric lines." This sounds like a mean feat for any resort, but the size of Snowmass made it phenomenal. By November of 1967 Snowmass was "a complete community with all utilities; five lodges, 120 condominium apartments, a dozen private residences; a conference center with a movie theater, outdoor ice rink and paddle tennis courts; four heated outdoor swimming pools, including one of Olympic size; 21 shops and boutiques, six restaurants." (Not including the five chairlifts and the restaurant on the mountain.) In order to coordinate so many construction projects Janss used computerized planning systems most often associated with aerospace technology, typical of the Janss "corporate giant of awesome efficiency" that similarly planned a community of 45,000 north of Los Angeles. Janss built an entire village in one year at Snowmass; he projected and planned to have ten, all of which would be complete, balanced, communities. Attention to detailed design did not stop at the village outskirts, either. Snowmass offered smooth, groomed runs as well as steeper, more challenging slopes; it had such a large mountain and extensive lift system that crowding would not be a problem.

Snowmass was more than a lot of terrain, lifts, lodging, and services. Janss and the Aspen Skiing Corporation planned it as a new kind of resort, similar in conception to Vail, which had opened in 1962. Snowmass was designed as a destination resort, a place where people would come for their vacation and spend at least a week. The ski area, ice skating rinks, paddle tennis courts, swimming pools, and a variety of restaurants and shops could occupy an entire family for weeks—even if they did not want to ski at all. A collection of old ranch buildings turned into an arts center added yet another activity to the area. Finally, Snowmass was a new kind of ski resort because it was build to attract tourists in the summer, as well. Horseback riding, hiking, fishing, and the village would provide investors with at least some income during the summer months when most ski areas lost money. The resort at Snowmass opened in December of 1967, complementing Aspen's multi-layered and diverse community with one that was completely constructed, all at once, with tourists and profits in mind.

When skiing became part of the tourist industry and skiers and tourists became one and the same people, their expectations of the mountains, the ski area, the town, and their experience changed. They behaved more like consumers of a finished product than like outdoorspeople or competitors, and seemed unreasonable to people who remembered skiing during the 1930s and 1940s. "The class of skier probably changed in the 1960s," Frank Dolinsek said. "They went from the rugged macho skier to the destination resort skier: 'I have to have my trail groomed like a billiard table.' And that costs. Then they come into the syndrome of 'Let's sue them. I can be going down a hill looking backwards, hit a tree, and I'll sue.' And that costs." George Tekoucich had an even lower tolerance for visiting skiers. Once a successful local racer with a reputation for going all-out, Tekoucich stopped racing after they put the lift in 1946. "Too many people," he said. These old-time Aspenites who came to work for the Aspen Skiing Corporation noticed changes in skiers and skiing that were symptomatic of Aspen's entrance into a maturing ski industry. Aspen as a community and the Skiing Corporation as a business faced new problems resulting from the economic growth and success of skiing that so many people had hoped for during 1930s.

Residents of Aspen and even members of the ski industry itself began noticing changes for the worse and problems that they would have to address. As early as 1966 Aspen business leaders recognized "the urgent need to provide low-cost housing for the school teachers, policemen, cooks, waiters and waitresses, and others who reside here to provide the service needs of the town." "With the high price on property values," they realized, "all present investment is turned toward catering and serving the visitor, with virtually no construction aimed at serving the needs of the service people." The tourist economy was taking over the town and attracting new kinds of people to Aspen. "These new residents," one Aspenite-since-1953 noted, "came not because they loved Aspen and the wilderness which surrounded it, not because they cherished the beauty and serenity and eccentricity of the place, not because they wanted to get off the treadmill called success but because they saw Aspen as a good place to make a buck." Aspen's success as a ski resort had linked the region directly to corporate and consumer capitalism.

^ DRC Brown

Rather than a welcome revival, growth by 1970 had become something potentially dangerous to Aspen and its people. D.R.C. Brown, president of the Aspen Skiing Corporation, was one of the few members of the ski industry to caution Aspenites about the dangers of over-development. Land prices that had risen enough to force most quiet year residents out of town rose even faster after the condominium craze hit town. "Sites near the ski hill were sold at exorbitant prices and most units were sold before construction even started," Brown recalled. "Aspen Highlands, then Buttermilk, then Snowmass came into the picture and developers started going further afield. All up and down the valley, land which was worth from $50 to $250 per acre as ranch land was selling for $1,000 to $5,000 per acre as potential sub-division land." These prices forced ranchers off their land and crowded a landscape once used primarily for grazing livestock. Housing developments outgrew the capacity of all four ski areas combined, creating the still unsolved dilemma of how to limit the number of people on the slopes and still maximize profits from real estate development. Even more problems arose from Aspen's success in the ski industry. Brown pointed out that "smog, sewage, trash, and garbage all increase as population increases. Unless these are properly handled, the environment which brought people to a resort in the first place will deteriorate, and to cope with these problems requires resources beyond the reach of the average small community." Popularity and crowding also led to traffic and parking dilemmas, exacerbated by the fact that more and more service workers had to commute to Aspen since they could not afford to live there.

In addition to raising problems within the town, development, expansion, and participation in the tourist industry presented the Aspen Skiing Corporation and Aspen Highland's Whip Jones with new bumps in the road. Insurance companies started becoming more careful about ski area inspections and courts held ski areas responsible in more and more accident cases. After the growth of the 1960s and the rise of the environmental movement, the U.S. Forest Service took a more critical role in the development and expansion of ski areas. They started demanding environmental impact statements for each proposed area or expansion on forest service land, and complicated the fee system for areas leasing federal land. Furthermore, competition among Colorado ski areas created a need to constantly improve lift and lodge facilities as well as slope maintenance. Each of these changes, as well as increased demand for services on the part of skier-tourists, raised the price of lift tickets and the cost of ski area development and expansion. These new hurdles finally quashed the proposed Little Annie ski area on the back of Aspen Mountain in the early 1980s and stalled the recently proposed Snowmass expansion. Ski corporations entered the world of big business to the extent that Aspen Highlands brought an anti-trust lawsuit against the Aspen Skiing Corporation and won $7.5 million in 1975. The Aspen Skiing Corporation changed management itself and left the days when its directors were avid skiers. 20th Century Fox bought out the Aspen Skiing Corporation in 1978, by which time the Corporation also owned the ski area at Breckenridge, Fortress near Banff, Canada, and holdings in Spain. In 1994 the Aspen Skiing Corporation—under its third owner since 20th Century Fox—bought out Whip Jones and Aspen Highlands. Distant corporate ownership, the problems of big business, and urban development issues now characterized an industry that, 50 years ago, barely existed.