Given its reputation, I expected Aspen to be considerably more hippie friendly than it is. I don't know why I thought this, because I have been to Aspen before. Aspen is a monumental shrine to wealth, clothed in the false modesty of a self-conscious homage to America's small town past. It is the Potemkin Village of the post-consumer culture. The place always puts me in mind of the "American" restaurants abroad--it looks like a diner, and the menu sounds like a diner, but when the food comes the chili cheesedog is made with bratwurst and limburger, and they've slathered your french fries with mayonnaise.
Outside of the downtown, as far as I have been able to tell, Aspen has no sidewalks. All of the restaurants cost a fortune for mediocre, but lovingly described, food (none of it, alas, vegan). The Radio Shack is tucked unobtrusively into a basement, lest anyone discover that people here need batteries and cordless phones. And everyone in the town looks eerily alike, as if you had stumbled into a lost sequence from the Village of the Damned. They have the same tans, the same deliberately not-too-attractive preppy clothes, and all appear to have their hair cut by the same barber. It's Nantucket-Over-Mountain.
I find something disturbing about places this affluent, this sheltered. It's a place where wealthy people talk unironically about the problems of the world, while lobbying frantically to ensure that they stay several thousand miles away.
You were expecting Durango. You got Aspen. Durango really is a fun place, and it has a steam locamotive!
Too much money from people who don't actually live there makes it that way.
Are you sure all of those people who looked "eerily alike" wasn't everyone who was in town for the McArdle Family Reunion?
The place always puts me in mind of the "American" restaurants abroad--it looks like a diner, and the menu sounds like a diner, but when the food comes the chili cheesedog is made with bratwurst and limburger, and they've slathered your french fries with mayonnaise.
Not that those foods are authentically American in any event. Chili dog = Mexican + German; French fries = Belgian.
Chili is absolutely not mexican in any way shape or form, and is probably as close to an authentically american dish as one can get.
My uncle has lived in Aspen since the 70s, and there was a more hippie, laid back side to it. His girlfriend was vegetarian and macrobiotic way back when, and he definitely was the first relative I had to know what a vegan was.
There's a bit of a hippie side to Aspen, but it's mostly faded. Aspen is still very pro-marijuana. They also do cool things like let visitors borrow a dog from the no-kill city shelter for a hike or a walk.
That being said, you won't find a lot of the old Aspen in Aspen. It's too expensive! The rest of Western Colorado is pretty cool, though.
If you're traveling through Denver, I highly recommend Watercourse foods. Best vegan food in Colorado!
Given its reputation, I expected Aspen to be considerably more hippie friendly than it is. I don't know why I thought this, because I have been to Aspen before.
You were confusing Aspen with Boulder.
Nope, she was confusing Aspen with Telluride.
Note to new readers: this post was actually written by someone else who commandeered her keyboard while the real Jane Galt was out looking for the richest person there in order to present them with a gold bar.
While you're in Western Colorado, are you going to visit Ouray (YOUR'-ay)? According to the Rand Institute, the little valley it's situated in provided Ayn Rand the inspiration for Galt's Gulch. It's really pretty. You shouldn't miss your near-pseudonamesake's valley's prototype. (NOTE: They still use U.S. Dollars there. No gold bars or anything.)
Aspen is what happens when you have rigid zoning controls.
You get a nice place, and the yuppies move in and drive up the prices. See Long Island, Cape Cod etc.
You can't, AFAIK, even have a wood burning fireplace or stove-- the air pollution problem from the existing ones is too great.
The result is the Walt Disney version of an American town.
Affluent though. When I was in high school, it was where my classmates got their first introductions to cocaine (then a drug of affluent users, only-- street price was 5-10 times what it is now).
There's no easy answer to that because none of us wants to give up the ability to live someplace nice, and prevent other people from destroying that by building Big Box stores, endless condos etc. See Collingwood Ontario for how to ruin a nice rural community (and Thornbury Ontario, further down the lake, for one not so yet ruined).
Have you read The Atlantic lately? It's not exactly the Okefenokee Times. If someone could turn The Atlantic into a town, it would probably look exactly like Aspen.
Why is literary elitism ok, while actually living according to the values of literary elitism is some sort of no-no?
DC pundit disease begins when you start to over=romanticize the hardscrabble lives of so-called ordinary Americans.
Ours is a diverse country; your identity is that you are an elite; better to accept it than to start down the ugly road of self-loathing.
David Brooks called, he wants his schtick back.
Is Aspen like a Whole Foods?
I shop different food stores, and most of the other stores have what looks like regular every-day people in them. Whole Foods, on the other hand, seems to have customers ordered up from Central Casting. Talk about stereotypes, who are these people anyway, and how come I never see them at Pick and Save?
My wife likes the Whole Foods bread, and we look wistfully over all the other food items, and I tell my wife that if I ever invent something and the royalties start coming in, we can buy other items there.
I am of Near Eastern heritage, and a little bit more into "making a scene" than my wife of Western European heritage. I tease her that one of these days in the Whole Foods I was going to blurt out, "Look honey, these prices are no higher than those of the Pick and Save after anothere year of the Bush-Bernanke economic policy" to test the reaction.
Aspen is fake, no question, but the scenery is good. One thing about rich people is that they tend to go places that are actually attractve, or were before they littered these places with watch stores and second homes.
There is another side to Aspen, but to see it you would have to find the places where the ski bums and seasonal labor go. Like the store that sells secondhand ski gear. For obvious reasons, Aspen is a good place to pick up lightly used ski equipment at a substantial discount (but I have no idea if this store is even open in the summer).
Failing that, the best thing to do in Aspen is go hiking, or cross-country skiing in the winter. Anything that involves actual physical exertion gets you out in the scenery, and weeds out the posers that look like they were ordered from a catalog.
Next time head down the Roaring fork valley to Basalt. Just as beautiful but with real people and less disneyesque. I recommend The riverside tavern if you want to have a beer or two with excavators or tile guys while watching a river.
lampwick
Go to the Haye-on-Wye literary festival (small town in Welsh Borders) or the Edinburgh Fringe for the 'elite' in a less pictureseque setting.
You'll find many of your fellow attendees do not come from the upper-middle-class ghetto. Retired schoolteachers, or 'ordinary' people who happen to like books and authors, fringe theatre etc.
Aspen may conform to some image of the average Atlantic reader as a self-regarding Beltway pundit, but the reality is that people who read for ideas are widely spread, and many of us live in suburbs with SUVs (OK, we live in a British row house and drive a Ford Focus estate car and work in planning for local government).
The reason to have your conference in Aspen is it is a nice place, and not too distracting, vs., say Las Vegas. But you can't from that stereotype who attends (other than that they have the money, and the time off, to do so).