Inside ASPEN: The Old Mining Town Where Billionaires Fly In for Winter

In this video, we explore Aspen, the old silver camp at the end of a high valley in the Colorado Rockies that became the most expensive ski town on earth, where red-brick Victorian blocks press against the foot of Aspen Mountain, the average detached house sold for about 18 million dollars in the third quarter of 2025, and the airport counted more than 220 aircraft movements a day in the week after Christmas.

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We begin with receipts from Red Mountain. In April 2024 the casino developer Steve Wynn and the trading pioneer Thomas Peterffy paid 108 million dollars for a house on Willoughby Way, the highest price ever paid for a home in Colorado. The record it broke, 77 million for Owl Creek Ranch, had stood for four days. The seller, the waste management billionaire Patrick Dovigi, had paid 72.5 million in 2021. A 2014 ranking counted at least fifty billionaires with a stake in the valley, led by Charles Koch, and on Christmas Eve 2025 Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos were photographed shopping at Gucci downtown while almost nobody in the store seemed to care.

Then we go back to silver fever in Ute City. Prospectors crossed into Ute hunting land in 1879 and found silver, and in 1880 the promoter B. Clark Wheeler laid out the town and renamed it Aspen. Jerome B. Wheeler, the president of Macy's, poured money into the mines and built the Wheeler Opera House and the Hotel Jerome, which opened in 1889. More than ten thousand people lived here, with six newspapers and electric lights, until the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the Panic of 1893 emptied the town. A year later the Smuggler Mine produced a 2,340-pound silver nugget, the largest ever mined. By 1930 only 705 people remained, and during Prohibition the Jerome's bar served milkshakes with bourbon, still remembered as the Aspen Crud.

Next comes a box maker's mountain utopia. Elizabeth Paepcke of Chicago found the sleeping town in 1939, and in 1945 she brought her husband, Walter, head of the Container Corporation of America. With the Austrian ski instructor Friedl Pfeifer and the Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer, the Paepckes formed the Aspen Skiing Corporation in 1946 and opened Lift-1 that December. In 1949 a twenty-day Goethe Bicentennial in a tent designed by Eero Saarinen brought Albert Schweitzer and Artur Rubinstein to town, leading to the Aspen Music Festival and, in 1950, the Aspen Institute. Gary Cooper kept a cabin on Red Mountain, and John Ford shot winter scenes for The Searchers here. In 1989 The Little Nell opened at the base of Aspen Mountain, named after a mining claim that honored a lady of the night.

After that we meet Freak Power and flying champagne. In 1970 Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff from Woody Creek, promising to tear up the streets and rename the town Fat City to scare off developers, and lost. Twentieth Century Fox bought the ski company in 1978, Marvin Davis took it private in 1981, and the Crown family of Chicago took full control in 1993. At Cloud Nine on Aspen Highlands, guests sprayed sixty to eighty bottles of champagne on the biggest days in the mid-2010s, even after the cheapest bottle was priced at 125 dollars. Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell keep a ranch in Old Snowmass, and Kevin Costner has owned land in the valley since the late 1990s. Prince Bandar bin Sultan listed his Hala Ranch for 135 million dollars in 2006 and sold it to John Paulson in 2012 for 49 million, and in July 2026 an auction for Bill Koch's Elk Mountain Lodge ended at about 33.5 million.

Finally, we open the deed restriction machine. Since the mid-1970s the city and Pitkin County have reserved homes for the local workforce, and as of 2023 about 46 percent of homes inside the city limits were deed-restricted. Most workers still commute up from Basalt, Carbondale and Glenwood Springs. On April 4, 2027, the airport is scheduled to close for about seven and a half months while its runway is rebuilt, widened and shifted eighty feet west, reopening in November before ski season. Jim Crown, who led the ski company for three decades, died in June 2023, and the four mountains, Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk and Snowmass, still run on one ticket.

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