In a time when second homes were few and short-term rental referred to skis, Aspen abided comfortably with cars. A legendary, mischief-making doctor brought a sports-car race to town in the early 1950s.

Author Archives: Tim Cooney
Tim Cooney is an Aspen freelance writer and former ski patroller. Among others, the Aspen Daily News, The Aspen Times, The Avalanche Review, Aspen Sojourner, Ski and Powder Magazine have published his work. His Aspen Journalism story “Taming the Snow Beast” won 2018 best story/picture combination from Colorado Press Association. He has a bachelor’s degree in government and philosophy from University of Denver.
From wagon road to two-lane: Aspen’s history by car, part one
Once celebrated in 1906 Aspen as the transition from horse and buggy to metropolitan, the circumnavigation of the first car through town brought looky-loos into the streets. Who then would have imagined that 116 years later Main Street would be gridlocked with “tin Lizzies.”
Unbridled optimism meets mining realities
Lawsuit leads to financial troubles, before fire fries flotation mill.
Pioneer pluck in Hunter Creek
After meeting the man who’d earlier laid out the claim at the top of today’s Little Nell where the first silver ore outcroppings were discovered, Staats eyed straight across to Smuggler where the same lime and silver had surfaced. By his reckoning, rich claims should be found in Hunter Creek.
Town of Ruedi submerged by reservoir, but not by history
The Fry-Ark grew out of post-World War II optimism when government championed big projects and environmentalism was a seedling.
Big bore in hard times
Aspen locals in 1930 welcomed the work on a big dam-and-tunnel project on Independence Pass, but the community grew to miss the water in the river.
Aspen’s rich history of befouling the Fork
As Aspen evolved from a bucolic high-mountain meadow to an industrial city, pollution began to flow directly into the Roaring Fork River and its tributaries.
Dewatering the Smuggler Mountain mines
The object of multiple dives between October 1910 and January 1911 into the debris-clogged mine was to rebuild the pump at the bottom of the Free Silver shaft on the 12th level.
Taming the snow beast
34 years ago on March 31, a monumental avalanche wrote a tragic chapter in Aspen history
Pitkin’s boastful gulch
The first prospectors up Lincoln Creek in the early 1880s faced avalanches, unstable explosives, cave-ins, and odyssey-like distances to marginal medical care.