Lifestyles of the Rich and Not-so-famous… a 50-year-old friend who is a good skier reported to our chat group from Aspen. What does it cost to spend a week with the elite? For two parents and two adult children in a rented 2BR timeshare, the basic cost (airfare plus lodging) for mid-March was about $15,000 thanks to his wife, a business genius. If a mere mortal were to arrange this it would be $30,000. “St Regis nearby is $2400 a night, which is not the peak rate.” Note that this trip was booked before the ski season started, so the prices don’t reflect that fact that Colorado had no snow this year.
- To save time, the family’s tickets were straight into the Aspen airport.
- Tailwinds too strong for a landing in Aspen, so they are diverting to Grand Junction – that is a 2-3 hour drive
- 20kt gusting 30
- These small mountainous airports are bad news
- And that is why I prefer SLC to all of them
- But [wife] was hell bent on “trying out Aspen”
- I have to say the turbulence right now is like on the Katana [Diamond DA20, a paper airplane, basically, in its response to wind]
- Given the 3:30am wake up call, this trip is going to be a hoot now
- They will need multiple buses to send this plane full of skiers with their gear
- My friend used to vacation in Aspen all the time and I remember that he got stuck here because of the weather at least twice. Planes depart SLC pretty much in any weather. One time he was in Aspen with his kids for four days waiting for a flight. Couldn’t get a car rental because everything was rented, car services were all booked.
- Just arrived in our hotel. 4 hours after landing
- A guy told [wife] that we were lucky we got to grand junction; People were arriving in Ubers without their bags from Denver
(I personally would have booked a flight into Denver (“mile-high”), spent a night or two adjusting to higher altitude, and then proceeded 3.5 hours by car up to Aspen, 8,000′ above sea level.)
What’s the experience?
- Aspen is about stopping to ski early because your salesman at David Yurman called you because your diamonds were ready for pick up
- they definitely do have snow on slopes, just not as much as usual. Better than a good day on the East Coast
- Ikon passes were $5k for 4 people [lift tickets]
- [wife] is raving about the Franke coffee machine [in the condo]
- Skiing is ok. Not as bad as we thought it would be. Icy at the bottom. Not crowded.
- It is kind of a small mountain. Snowmass and Buttermilk are nearby but require a shuttle
- I think I know who likes it: it is guys whose wives don’t ski
- So they are bored in all other locations. Here they can go shopping or sit in restaurants. If you have a wife who doesn’t ski and bitches at you, then she will drive you nuts in Utah.
- Women are visibly prettier.
- too few slopes. They arent bad but Snowbird is a lot better
- [daughter] just ran for 40 minutes at her usual pace here and said that it was noticeably harder because of the altitude
How about the elites?
- Very few non whites. [quoting wife] “I just saw my first Asian just now. She was with a white dude, so the type that wants to be white”. Racism and stereotyping are rampant here
- You have people dressed in furs on the top of the mountain – they actually dress up and go up there with their shopping bags
- [wife] grabbed our skis from the valet and some woman in the elevator looked at her and said “why are you moving your own stuff…?” Implying that bell staff is supposed to bring it all to our room. We are clearly not used to the luxury lifestyle. These time shares are all run like hotels.
- You should see some of the houses being built on the hills here. Like the Hamptons
- Speaking of well-to-do people… Aspen sucks overall. all these dressed up people get old pretty quickly. restaurants are very nice but that’s the only advantage. after i ski all day, i really want to just be in bed or order in. we ordered in twice already.
Getting back home:
- Aspen airport doesn’t disappoint on departure. We have been sitting on the ground for an hour because of “quite a few arrivals”
- Embraer is being thrown around by rising air like a Diamond Katana
- Honestly, I think Aspen is beyond overrated
Final answer?
[wife] might disagree but I think Aspen sucks. Definitely not for you guys. Since you don’t dress up in furs and blow $1k for dinner “to see and be seen”. I was moderately connected to these people and still am to some extent as you saw from my friend’s photos for example, but I don’t go to their parties, which are boring as f*ck. Regarding skiing Aspen is overall inferior to Utah and Vail. Not because all runs suck – there are a few good ones, but overall it is way too small. It is for a green/blue run crowd and has some harder ones so that experienced people can feel that the vacation didn’t totally suck. It is mostly about the town. This is literally it. I think one can cover this entire map in one day of skiing.
What if you wanted to live with dignity in Aspen? “A Robert A.M. Stern-Designed Home on Aspen’s Red Mountain Asks $70 Million” (WSJ):
Frederic “Rick” Bourke, the co-founder of the Dooney & Bourke accessories brand, is putting his Robert A.M. Stern-designed home in Aspen, Colo., on the market for $70 million.
Completed around 1993, the roughly 11,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom house is built horizontally along a rock face on Red Mountain, with tawny-beige stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base.
Bourke acquired the roughly 3.5-acre Aspen property in the late 1980s. The lot sits high on Red Mountain, about 800 feet above downtown. He asked Stern to design a family home there.
[from the big house to The Big House] Bourke’s neighbor in Aspen was businessman Viktor Kozeny. In 2009, Bourke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for engaging in a scheme with Kozeny to bribe Azerbaijan government officials. Bourke spent almost a year in prison starting in 2013.
Here’s the VFR chart for the airport, a 8440′ and surrounded by mountains high enough that the FAA says not to fly below 14,600′ (you could still hit a mountain, though, with an altimeter reading of 14,600′ in the winter because the Earth’s atmosphere contracts in the cold and the true altitude is lower than what is indicated):
Airlines have a custom RNAV (RNP) N Runway 15 that supposedly takes them down to about 540′ above the runway before they need to be able to look out the window and see. The lowest approach available to general aviation, including the elites in their private jets, requires the pilots to see the runway when 2100′ above it (up to 91 knots approach speed; Cessna or Cirrus) or 2400′ above (91-120 knots; a lot of rabble-class bizjets) or 3200′ above (121-140 knots; the Big Iron for the Big Shots). This is actually more restrictive than ordinary visual (VFR) flying, which can be done with a ceiling of 1000′.
(In the plate below, notice that the approach features a second localizer that isn’t associated with any runway. This provides guidance for the missed approach. Imagine the consequences, especially in the pre-GPS days, of the obvious mistake of failing to switch the frequency or of forgetting how to use the back course of a localizer, something that the typical instrument-rated pilot might do in training and then never again.)
There’s also a GPS approach that has similar minimums for jets:
> Ikon passes were $5k for 4 people
To boost predictable revenue, all the resorts are pushing season passes (or at least multi day passes purchased months in advance) at the instead of single day passes. A day pass at Whistler is now over $300 all-in.
Haven’t lived in Aspen, but was in Fort Collins near the university area, some of the observations are true about that as well.
> Racism and stereotyping are rampant here. […]
Could be. But some really cool people as well. My prof had lived all his almost life in CO, is a bit of a hippie, with a great sense of humour. Also, South Park is in CO.
> Women are visibly prettier.
LOL! True, I chalk it to being close to Nature.
> just ran for 40 minutes at her usual pace here and said that it was noticeably harder because of the altitude […]
Yeah, many people need a vaporizer to not bleed from their noses. Many trails to run in the FC area. I did a lot of running there.
Sorry, meant to post it at the bottom.
The only question is how do we start business to tap this “elite rich people” markets?
What type of business?
What do they buy?
Where do they shop?
What is their main purchase driver?
Who is the decision maker?
There is obviously a certain percentage of people in the US that are doing more than very well, top 5%? top 3%?
Or is it better to target the bottom 40% on food stamps and go for the mass market?
Would be more amusing if you were allowed to give the names of these zillionaires. At least it’s amusing to see the social pressure on general aviators to get there at any cost. Blancolirio just covers the crashes but doesn’t know the number of billionaires that Greenspun does & doesn’t have any exposure to the social pressure they’re under.
Skiing is kind of a crazy activity. It costs a fortune so you feel like you need to spend the whole day doing it. But do a lot of people really want to ski, or do anything, for 6-8 hours? I guess the ski pass isn’t a big expense in this whole adventure, but it seems like they should be offering hourly passes rather than multi-day passes.
Also, the complaints about the number of slopes? How much variety do you need? With a few slopes, isn’t every time you go down them sufficiently unique?
Slopes are getting familiar quickly. It is like mountain climbing. It takes time to get down from a high peak, so 8 hours seems adequate, especially if lodge time is involved.
Skiing is a crazy activity – high risk and high cost. I’ve been using the Slopes app for a while, and this year they’ve come up with a business case calculator that amortizes the ticket costs on a per run basis assuming the skier remembers to turn it on in the morning and critically turn it off before jumping back in the car or shuttle. For this correspondent, who’s averaging less than 15 days of skiing per year, the cost per run comes down to $5-6 at best.
Anecdotally, resorts in Europe used to allow skiers over 70 (mostly) to ski for free, and now US resorts are following the same model (see https://seniorsskiing.com/ for data points or query your preferred LLM for supporting information). It seems like a shrewd move that counts on attracting skiing aficionados that typically would have above average purchasing power and drag along family members that will be long term paying customers (see for example https://www.thetraveler.org/how-ski-retirees-are-rewriting-luxury-ski-travel/).
I am not sure. Epic now sells no restriction 6 day pass for under $600, and it includes 10 free guests. Also you can buy Epic passes by putting $49 down.
Could Icon be so more expensive then Epic?
I mostly agree with the tone of the post—Aspen is absolutely about the lifestyle—but several of the implied premises don’t quite hold up under the numbers. My running joke for the past decade has been that Aspen is the best place to go see the largest number of men wearing fur coats in the 21st century. As a not-rich and not-famous regular at Aspen/Snowmass over the past 15 years, I can contribute a few quick corrections and additions:
1. The Ikon Pass is owned by Aspen’s own operating company
The Ikon Pass is run by Alterra Mountain Company, which is the same privately held ski‑resort conglomerate that owns and operates Aspen/Snowmass (the four mountains: Aspen, Snowmass, Buttermilk, and Highlands). So the “corporate” pass‑pushing the commenter notes isn’t some distant megacorp; it’s the very company that runs Aspen’s lifts and owns the terrain.
That’s why the “$5k for 4 people” Ikon lift‑ticket cost you mention is essentially a season‑style pass for the whole Aspen/Snowmass system, not just a data‑point about Aspen Mountain.
2. Shuttling freely among the four mountains is easy
The complaint that “Snowmass and Buttermilk are nearby but require a shuttle” is technically true, but in practice the system is very skier‑friendly once you’re on the ground. Aspen/Snowmass runs a free 4‑Mountain Shuttle bus that connects all four base villages (Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands, Snowmass, and Buttermilk) and runs every 15–20 minutes during peak season.
So an Aspen‑based trip is rarely just “Aspen Mountain”; it’s effectively a multi‑mountain ski area where you can hop between Aspen, Highlands, Buttermilk, and Snowmass without paying for separate tickets beyond the Ikon or base pass.
3. Aspen Mountain and Aspen Highlands could be better linked
Historically, Aspen has left a lot of physical connectivity on the table. There’s no in‑bounds lift between Aspen Mountain and Aspen Highlands; the only way you “link” them today is via the town‑to‑base bus or expert‑only backcountry‑style ridgeline routes.
That said, Aspen’s master‑plan discussions have already floated major investments potentially including new lifts, glading, and even a gondola or tramway connecting Highlands to Aspen Mountain and/or Buttermilk in the longer term.
From a skier perspective, the half‑joking “Aspen sucks” verdict overlooks the fact that much of the looseness between mountains is by design, not by accident. The real-world constraint isn’t engineering; it’s land use, private ownership, and the preferences of the very people who make Aspen home.
4. The “elite” crowd is already satisfied with the status quo
The rich professionals and second‑home owners who anchor Aspen’s winter economy are, for the most part, perfectly happy with the current setup: limited slopes at Aspen Mountain, a tight town base, and a relatively small, exclusive footprint.
They’re paying for exclusivity and lifestyle, not for a “max‑run‑count” megazone. The fact that the terrain is constrained, and that Aspen Mountain doesn’t feel like a Utah‑style behemoth, is part of the product. If Aspen Mountain were opened up to a mass‑market, high‑throughput lift system, the dynamics that attract that crowd—the scarcity, the cachet, the “see and be seen” vibe—would change.
5. Skier numbers and the Ikon / daily‑ticket math
Over the last 15 years, North American skier days have been steadily rising, driven partly by higher‑income, higher‑education demographics and partly by the pass‑economy model. Resorts have responded by pushing season passes and advance multi‑day books (Ikon, Epic, etc.) because they’re far more predictable and profitable than walk‑in day tickets.
Here is a rough way to sanity‑check the Ikon vs. daily‑ticket math: at Aspen/Snowmass, a full‑price adult day ticket in peak season runs roughly $250–$300. The Ikon Base+ Pass (for Aspen/Snowmass plus 47 other destinations) is about $1,200–$1,300 in the current season, and Aspen‑specific passes or add‑ons are in the same ballpark.
So the break‑even point is just 4–5 days of peak‑price skiing at Aspen/Snowmass. If you’re a regular skier, even a couple of trips per season easily makes the pass cheaper than daily tickets. If you’re a once‑every‑few‑years visitor, the pass is overkill—but the model is clearly aimed at frequent, affluent skiers, not the “once‑a‑decade” crowd.
At the end of the day, Aspen is what it is: a small, exclusive mountain wrapped in a big‑money lifestyle. If you’re judging it by Utah‑style megaresort metrics, it will always feel “too small.” But if you treat it as one bite of a much larger, pass‑tied ecosystem—with Aspen Mountain as the prestige core and Snowmass, Buttermilk, and Highlands as its heavily subsidized cousins—that becomes a lot more rational.
It’s not any better in the summertime.
“3.5 hours by car up to Aspen”
The pure unbridled optimism you have of this drive time would be better spent just flying into Aspen. You cannot do that trip reliably in 3.5 hrs if there is snow worth skiing. Everything about I70 is screwed up now (too many people moved to CO).
Also, $30k sounds like you could go to the Swiss Alps for less and have a better time. Am I wrong?
Love that airport. One winter quarter I worked at a hotel in Snowmass as a bellman. Was two hours past my 68 hr private check ride. Got checked out by the chief pilot to rent their 172 after 4 local hours. I flew up and down the range. The chief pilot invited me to ride right seat with him when he flew charters in their T-210 and 414. It was great.
I think I know who likes it: it is guys whose wives don’t ski
So they are bored in all other locations. Here they can go shopping or sit in restaurants. If you have a wife who doesn’t ski and bitches at you, then she will drive you nuts in Utah.
I was fortunate enough to ski in Park City this year without any non-skiiers in tow. Similar to this “vacationer”, I agree if you are a non-skiier, your would be bored in downtown Park City after 2 hours.
Also, similar to this post, Park City had plenty of snow for me, as compared to the East Coast. This characteristic along with the ease of flying in and out of SLC made for a great week in Park City.