Get an ADT-Monitored Home Security System in Aspen, Colorado

Aspen is a home rule municipality that is the county chair and the most populous municipality of Pitkin County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 7,004 at the 2020 United States Census. Aspen is in a remote Place of the Rocky Mountains’ Sawatch Range and Elk Mountains, along the Roaring Fork River at an height just under 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above sea level on the Western Slope, 11 miles (18 km) west of the Continental Divide. Aspen is now a allocation of the Glenwood Springs, CO Micropolitan Statistical Area.

Founded as a mining camp during the Colorado Silver Boom and far ahead named Aspen for the abundance of aspen trees in the area, the city boomed during the 1880s, its first decade. The boom ended as soon as the Panic of 1893 led to a collapse of the silver market. For the neighboring half-century, known as “the quiet years”, the population steadily declined, reaching a nadir of fewer than 1000 by 1930. Aspen’s fortunes recovered in the mid-20th century when adjoining Aspen Mountain was developed into a ski resort, and industrialist Walter Paepcke bought many properties in the city in the 1950s and redeveloped them. Today it is home to three institutions, two of which Paepcke helped found, that have international importance: the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Aspen Institute, and the Aspen Center for Physics.

In the late 20th century, the town became a popular retreat for celebrities. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson worked out of a downtown hotel and ran unsuccessfully for county sheriff. Singer John Denver wrote two songs very nearly Aspen after settling there. Both figures popularized Aspen in the middle of the counter-cultural teenage years of the 1970s as an ideal place to live, and the city continued to ensue even as it gained notoriety for some of the era’s hedonistic excesses (particularly its drug culture).