879. Aspen, Pitkin County (CO63)

The drive into Aspen was not at all what I expected.  It was all a wide main road, highway-like even, until I hit the town and then the courthouse.  And look at the gorgeous beast of a courthouse it is!  All red brick and, considering the holiday, liberty or some kind of crap like that.  And then I looked around.  What the holy hipster heck was this place? 

I assumed it would be full of snooty money vacation types, and maybe that is the case in skiing season.  All I could see was the most scenester crap I had seen in a long time.  Oh, the money was there (I’d never seen a shop where you can buy a yacht before), but the restaurants and hotels gave the place an upscale tourist feel that felt somewhere between Austin and what I imagine an evening in trendier bits of Los Angeles would be like (I haven’t been there in twenty-five years, so if I’m wrong, meh).  If I had to sum up my feelings about the place, well, while I was walking down a side street, I heard a young woman talking loudly on the phone to a parent about how much she disliked Aspen and wanted to be back in Kansas City of all places.  I’m not sure if that should be considered weird or based, but it made perfect sense, standing there in a place that felt so authentically fake.  I don’t know if the people there wanted to be seen or just thought that is what cool was. 

And it was all contrasted against the backdrop of the forested mountains.  I have no doubt the locals with more money than God just like being that close to nature without being too close, but the entire place left a strange taste in my mouth.  Not a bad taste, mind you.  Just a strange taste that I didn’t entirely trust. 

As a little sidenote: I was sitting at a stoplight waiting for it to change to green when a trio of men passed in front of me.  I looked at the guy in the cowboy hat and thought to myself “Is that Taylor Sheridan?”  I shifted my attention to the guy walking beside him with a loose button down, “Because that’s definitely Kevin Costner.”

Behind the courthouse was one of the most popular caches in the county.  I wouldn’t call myself a John Denver fan, but at a minimum his stand with Frank Zappa and Dee Snyder against the PMRC earned my respect.  He loved Aspen.  Unfortunately, after his death he couldn’t be buried there so a large remembrance garden was built to honor him.  Because of the layout of the area, it was in a wood between the city proper and seemingly some of the more pedestrian but still well-to-do homes of Aspen.  And if it was similar to the Aspen he loved, before the fashion and the excess, I get it.  Even as the kids played in the stream (which was actually man-made) and the families talked, it was a nice spot of calm a few blocks from the hustle and bustle of the masses.  It was also host to a Virtual requiring finding certain song lyrics (scattered about were stones carved with his song lyrics) and a photo at the lyrics to his most famous song, Rocky Mountain High. 

As a laugh, the cache owners included the coordinates to the spot where he shot the album cover for those who might want to emulate it.  Had I world enough and time (and a photographer), I might have done it.  But I was tired and still had one more thing to accomplish before the day was over. 

I thought the end boss was going to be the drive into Aspen.  I was very, very wrong.  It was the drive out.  I had been lulled into a false sense of security, but it was brutally ripped away.  I drove the opposite direction from whence I had come into the worst of them all, the Independence Pass.  Imagine being on a two lane road that randomly speeds up and slows down with crazy hard turns of various types.  Imagine further that sometimes that two lane road sometimes narrows to less than two lanes but still has traffic both directions so you have to creep at a snail’s pace, requiring turning your side mirror inward to not touch another vehicle.  Imagine further still that sometimes you are on the very edge of a mountainside but other times there are pulloffs filled with cars and people (some there to hike, others to canoe, still others to swim) who can jump out at any time (my least favorite was the woman in her bathing suit walking her dog in both lanes of the road while there was traffic coming both ways).  And sometimes random vehicles, usually jeeps or trucks, would be navigating all this at a speed that would be the envy of NASCAR.  I drove all that.  And, of course, the entire thing goes over the Continental Divide, making it the second highest pass in Colorado and the second highest improved road as well, but only the fourth highest road overall.  I shudder to think what the unimproved roads must be like.  Was it worth it?

Maybe?  I did get one more Virtual at the highest point.  But I happily would have preferred an easier drive.  But from that point, it was (mostly) all downhill.  Like a boulder, I rolled on, inexorable, towards my date with destiny once I came to a stop in…