BLOG One Aspen Winter – The first turns of One Aspen Winter

The skiing turkey. Image:: Jeremy Swanson

One Aspen Winter | George Raptis

In the beginning…

For a skier living in Australia, summer is a frustrating season. Days at a desk are interrupted by friends’ Facebook postings about how awesome the snow is overseas. Every news report of airports closed because of another blizzard can only mean one thing. And every time your friend tells you how awesome it is to be surfing again, all you can think is “if only you knew…”

This used to be me, waiting for the week or two of skiing glory in January, only to return to the heat and have to wait for another 12 months to do it all again. Until I couldn’t take it any longer. So I quit my job and moved to Colorado –for One Aspen Winter

And now – here I am, in a log cabin, sitting by a fireplace roasting marshmallows, and powder hunting in one of skiing’s finest – Aspen, Colorado – bringing insights and the best of America’s most famous mountain town!

The arrival

You realise from the moment you get here that Aspen is full of experiences that you don’t have everyday. Gliding into a narrow airport surrounded by snow-covered mountains immediately gets your heart racing. No aerobridge here – just a foldout staircase, and then an endless sight of more white mountains – in the form of private jets parked side by side, as though to say “what took you so long to get here?”

Private jets lined up at Aspen Airport. Image:: George Raptis

Thanksgiving

Aspen’s opening weekend is not a traditional time for an Australian tourist to be in town – and is definitely a unique Aspen experience.They say every week here is different, and the week of Thanksgiving Holiday marks the traditional start to the season.

Aspen is all about expecting the unexpected, so while making first tracks down Aspen Mountain, what else would you expect to see but a turkey – yes a turkey- skiing beside you?

My Thanksgiving meal provided me with my first ‘local insight’ – at the Hickory House – a restaurant famous for the best ribs in Colorado and for a FREE Thanksgiving feed (where the last laugh was had over one skiing turkey). While a great choice for a meal and an initiation into Aspen locals, the experience also provided endless banter about which part of New Zealand I was born in, to which the only polite response is to query how long ago the locals in question had left Canada.

World Cup

Not content with concerts, opening parties and a mountain covered with snow, Aspen also throws in a stop on the FIS Women’s World Cup tour, which turns a traditional American town into a buzzing international ski resort. Like something out of Cold War spy games, those in the know are able to tour the ski tuning rooms, which are a ‘bunker’ in one of the hotel car parks, with tuners guarding secrets and feverishly preparing skis for that extra one tenth of a second on course.

The famous Hickory House. Image:: George Raptis

The people

What you soon learn in Aspen is that your trip will be made more enjoyable if you interact with the locals. Think of how you interact with people on public transport on the way to work – and then do the opposite! When a man I’d never met offered me to join him for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie at Jimmy’s – a local restaurant – my immediate acceptance turned into a new friendship with a guy who had spent a summer in Coogee, Sydney, some 25 years earlier. That man’s name was Jimmy, and had been scrawled across the walls in black marker by hundreds of visitors for decades before me. That place, and that guy, are part of Aspen folklore.

One Aspen Winter

This was only the beginning of an epic season ahead. One Aspen Winter is about giving you the inside word from someone on the ground (and the slopes of a few steep mountains). You’ll hear about the powder day that you’re missing, the parties and the places to be, as well as the people that make Aspen one of the world’s most unique mountain towns.

And all of it can be seen on www.oneaspenwinter.com (launching in December 2011), and followed on Twitter @oneaspenwinter

I used to be you, dreaming of the mountain life, until I left it all behind for One Aspen Winter!