Written by Anne Gilbert Coleman, as part of the Roaring Fork Research Scholarship for the Aspen Historical Society in 1996, the paper provides insights into the history of Aspen.

Introduction:

This project is a cultural and environmental history of skiing in Colorado, from 1860 to 1990. It focuses on the ways in which skiers have understood and altered Colorado’s mountain landscape, and on the relationship between downhill
skiing and constructions of class, gender, and ethnicity.
Nineteenth-century mountain community residents used “Norwegian snowshoes” to travel and recreate in Colorado’s Rockies. While these men and women understood their mountain landscape as Isolating and often dangerous,
wealthy tourists and outdoor enthusiasts saw it as scenic. During the 1920s and ’30s a new kind of skiing came to Colorado, associated with European resorts, competition, and cosmopolitan tourism. Alpine skiing’s urban enthusiasts used the Rockies as their playground while mountain town residents incorporated the sport into their communities by forming local clubs and developing a regional circuit of competitions. For both groups skiing proved to be a critical site for defining masculinity and femininity. Colorado ski areas sprouted up in the 1930s with the help of local communities, transportation networks, and the U.S. Forest Service. These areas remained local, however, until America’s post-war consumer and leisure culture took shape. Veterans of the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division, elite outdoorsmen who trained at Colorado’s Camp Hale, took advantage of this new economic and cultural context to form the core of Colorado’s ski industry. With the contradictory goals of creating a scenic, personal experience for as many people as
possible, ski area designers developed increasingly constructed resort landscapes. They pushed local residents to the periphery and crafted resort towns as mythical alpine villages, Victorian mining towns, western cowtowns, or some mixture of each. By the end of the 1960s destination resorts such as Aspen, Vail, and Steamboat Springs had their own distinct culture characterized by whiteness, wealth, fashion, fame, and sexiness. Destination resorts, moreover, have
successfully co-opted critiques from environmentalists, minority skiers, and snowboarders by incorporating their interests into resort landscapes and culture.