Author Archives: Tim Cooney

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.

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.”

Lawsuit leads to financial troubles, before fire fries flotation mill.

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.

The Fry-Ark grew out of post-World War II optimism when government championed big projects and environmentalism was a seedling.

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.

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.

34 years ago on March 31, a monumental avalanche wrote a tragic chapter in Aspen history

The first prospectors up Lincoln Creek in the early 1880s faced avalanches, unstable explosives, cave-ins, and odyssey-like distances to marginal medical care.