“This woman was crying on the phone,” said my friend Mike, who works for a reservations company in Aspen. “She said it would be the first time she would not be in Aspen for Christmas in over 20 years.”
Mike said his client was so desperate to make it into Aspen she had tried to get a private jet at the last minute, but none was available. The Aspen Times reported that at least 29 flights were canceled last week, affecting about 2,000 Aspen-bound travelers.
I’ll resist the urge to say something trite and selfish like: “Stinks for them.” I will say it’s great for locals like me who enjoyed all that fresh powder last week, savoring those wide-open runs that didn’t have any tourists on them.
Part of the reason I live here is because I was one of those ski travelers growing up. That was in the early 1970s, before the Eisenhower Tunnel opened and before the days of four- wheel-drive SUVs. Getting here was always such an ordeal that by the time I was 8 years old, I had already decided it would be much easier to just move to Aspen when I grew up.
Every year we would fly out to Colorado, and every year it was a nightmare.
My family lived in Simsbury, Conn., so we would fly from Hartford/Springfield to Denver via Chicago. Whoever came up with that flight path obviously didn’t consider that these are the two worst weather cities in the U.S. If there wasn’t a problem getting into Denver, there was a problem in Chicago, where we would have to spend the night in some airport hotel without our luggage. We would buy oversized T-shirts in the hotel gift shop to sleep in and use those crummy little toothbrushes the airline used to give out with those complimentary cosmetic bags. As a kid, I always saw it of more as an adventure than a hassle, but my parents did not. It made them grouchy.
When I was really young, we went to Vail via a Greyhound bus from Denver. The chains on the tires kept us all in that awful haze between exhaustion and sleep, the clank-clank-clank that went on for hours as the bus slowly crept up Loveland Pass in the dark. My mom was terrified of mountain passes and would pound Valiums while my dad read a book and smoked cherry tobacco out of a pipe. It took hours to get there, delivering us like zombies to our respective hotels in the middle of the night.
My parents decided it would be easier to fly into Aspen. That year, we ended up spending the night in Chicago and Denver until our little twin-prop could finally take off, only to circle over the mountains for two hours in severe turbulence. Mom took more Valium than she should have and slept for two days. Dad’s skis never arrived, so he bought new ones. We enjoyed two magical weeks in Snowmass and never went back again.
Over the hassle of airplane travel, my parents bought a house in Stratton Mountain, Vt. That way, we could make the quick two-hour drive from Connecticut every weekend instead of once a year. We could enjoy long lift lines, icy slopes and frostbite. Sure, we would get great snow in Vermont that would last for all of two days before it rained. If you think I-70 is bad, try driving I-91 on a Friday, sharing the icy road with thousands of New Yorkers who don’t know how to drive, even in the most ideal conditions.
On one particularly freezing Sunday, my dad was chipping ice off the rear windshield with a little too much gusto and managed to put the ice scraper right through it. We stopped at a gas station where he taped it up with a little piece of cardboard and some duct tape. Ten minutes down the highway, little pieces of glass started to fall on our delicate little heads. We stopped again, this time realizing the whole window had to be knocked out. Some country mechanic helped us tape it up with thick plastic that didn’t hold and ended up blowing out onto the highway somewhere outside of Northampton, Mass.
Dad took the luggage out of the trunk and piled all of our clothes on top of my brother and me, hoping that would keep us from becoming hypothermic by the time we reached Connecticut.
When I turned 18, I applied to three schools: University of Denver, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Colorado State. I ended up at DU and dropped out halfway through my freshman year. “I came here to ski and I never get to ski,” I told my dad. He was not pleased.
In the six years it took me to graduate (eventually from CU/Boulder) I lived in Summit County, Steamboat and Jackson, Wyo., before eventually figuring out a way to live in the mountains full-time.
Even though it’s nice not having town overrun with tourists, I do feel their pain. No one knows better than travelers to Colorado that it’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
