Ghosts of Christmas past: Aspen, 1967

Christmas vacation when you were a cadet at West Point was all about how you got there.  You could fly space available in uniform for half price, but even that was too much if you had to fly halfway across the country, so it was pretty common for cadets to look for "hops," a free ride on an Air Force cargo plane that was going your way. 

A friend of mine and fellow ski patrolman at West Point, we’ll call him Alex, discovered that his father’s former roommate at West Point had retired from the Army as a Colonel and took a job as the manager and groundskeeper at the Aspen School of Music.  The main hall at the school, about 200 feet long and 20 feet wide was used for chamber music concerts in the summer and had two offices at one end of the building with convertible sofas.  The School of Music was closed, and they were ours over Christmas, the Colonel said, if we could get out there.  A lift ticket that year was $6.50.  We could manage that.  We found an Air Force hop and rode in some spare web-seats on a C-141 loaded with cargo headed for McConnell Air Force Base near Wichita.

My parents pick us up, and we stayed a couple of nights with them at Fort Leavenworth and then caught a ride out to Colorado Springs in an Army U6-A Beaver flown by a friend of my father’s at Fort Leavenworth who was picking up his mandatory flight-time for the month.  From there, we caught a Greyhound to Glenwood Springs and hitchhiked to Aspen in a VW bus full of college kids on Christmas break like we were.  Dropped off at Rte. 82 and Castle Creek Road, we walked carrying overnight bags with skis on our shoulders the last mile or so to the turn-off for the School of Music.  We found the Colonel and his wife living in a log cabin style caretaker’s cottage on the grounds, and he took us over to the main building.

It's hard to describe how much snow there was that winter.  The road was covered in snow that had to be plowed multiple times a day, and there were drifts that we had to shovel out of the way to get to the front door of the building.  Inside, the Colonel switched on the lights and turned on the heat.  Overhead western-style wooden chandeliers hung in a row from the vaulted ceiling, and along one wall, there was a fireplace that was about 8 feet wide and six feet high.  The Colonel told us there was some firewood outside if we could find it in the snow.  With an admonition to keep the place strac, an army term that meant neat and orderly and ready for inspection, he left us.

The next day was Christmas eve, so with skis over one shoulder and boots in hand, we hitched into town and asked the driver where a good place for breakfast was.  He dropped us off at a little café on one of Aspen’s side streets that had a row of skis leaning against the wall outside.  Breakfast, and I mean bacon and eggs and home fries and bottomless coffee, was a dollar.  We wolfed everything down and headed for the bottom of Little Nell a block or so away, paid our $6.50, put on our skis and poled over to the lift line.

There was no lift line.  It was 9:30, and people were already on the slopes.  Soon, we were too, howling down Aspen Mountain, skiing over and around moguls the size of VW beetles.  Both of us were wearing herringbone woolen plus-fours, oversize knickers with large folds of fabric that hung below our knees and billowed behind us flapping wildly in the wind.  We bought them on St. Marks Pace in New York City, and our mothers knit colorful socks for us that went over the knees and were held up by the leather straps that fastened just below our knees.  We had cheap sunglasses we bought on Times Square that we thought made us look cool, and I’m telling you, we stood out on the slopes.  

Somebody told us to go for pizza at Pinocchio’s.  It was cheap, and so was the beer, so after skiing all day, we stacked our skis against the wall outside the restaurant and gorged on pizza and quaffed beers and told amazing stories about the brilliant turns we carved through some fresh powder we found along the side of one of the trails near the top of the mountain.

We must have sat around Pinocchio’s for a couple hours.  It was snowing when we came out the door, with at least six new inches on the ground.  Carrying our skis and boots, we started walking towards Castle Creek Road, hoping somebody would pick us up.  Halfway down the block, we came upon two girls in a VW bug with skis loaded in a rack on the back trying to push it out of a snow drift. Volunteering our help, we pushed them free of the deep snow and asked for a lift down to our turn off Route 82.  In the car, one of the girls told us they had heard there was a barracks-style hostel in town and asked us if we knew where it was.  Oh, you’re looking for a place to stay?  My friend asked.  Yes, they were.  We have lots of room where we are.  We’ve got a whole building at the Aspen School of Music.  Turn left here.  We’ll show you.

We helped them carry their suitcases in, found the firewood and started a big fire and showed them where the bathroom was.  It was one of those things.  You’re young, some beer was consumed, the wind howled outside rattling the doors and windows, the convertible sofas were covered in quilts the Colonel had provided…

No more hitchhiking for us.  We had a VW bug and two partners to ski with.  They offered to pay for our lift tickets as compensation for the accommodations at the School of Music, explaining they were schoolteachers in Denver and had plenty of money they had saved for the Christmas holiday.  Really, they said.  It’s no problem.

Really, we thought, as we told them if they wanted to pitch in, they could pay for a couple of hot mulled wines after skiing.  Deal. 

They were excellent skiers, swooping down the slopes in Obermeyer ski pants and matching down jackets.  We usually skied behind them just so we could enjoy colorful evidence of our incredible good luck.  How old do you figure they are? Alex asked me that first day.  I didn’t know.  I didn’t care.  It was Christmas day of the year of the Be-in and the Summer of Love, and demonstrations against the war were beginning to shake the grounds of college campuses around the country.  They didn’t care we were juniors at West Point.  They had jobs, not attitudes.  It was almost too good to be true.

Riding the chairlift up the mountain, Alex started calling down to passing skiers – Hey, if you need a place to stay, bring a case of beer out to the Aspen School of Music on Castle Creek Road.  Look for the sign on the left!  After another night of pizza and beer at Pinocchio’s, we found two cars in the car park at the School of Music.  They had already stacked four cases of beer in the snowbank next to the doors of the main building, and four college kids carried their stuff into the great room.  We showed them where to put their sleeping bags and told them to put their empties in the trash and roll up their sleeping bags in the morning and store all their stuff in their backpacks, because the Colonel came around every morning to inspect. 

I once wrote a Rolling Stone story on the first hot dog skiers, and what I said about them applied that Christmas holiday to all of us, the ski-bums with their sleeping bags out in the great room at the School of Music, and Alex and me with our dream girls…er, I mean women…in the executive offices with the convertible sofas.  As beautiful as they were, skiing made them more beautiful, I wrote in Rolling Stone.  Or at least, that’s how it felt.  I learned to ski in Oberammergau, Germany, in the 1950’s, so I was used to being surrounded by snow-covered mountains and skiing down their slopes. 

But there was something special about Aspen Mountain and Highlands and Snowmass, which had just opened that year.  Aspen wasn’t the magnet for money and excess it is now.  The slopes weren’t groomed every night by Snow-Cats dragging ridged drums to create perfect skiing surfaces, so the snow was what it was – roughly textured and the steeps were wild with bumps and if you knew where to find them, there were groves of pines and aspens you could ski through like obstacle courses. 

We were young, we were away from our homes, and we made our own Christmas.  Somebody cut boughs from a pine tree and arranged them on the mantle of the fireplace.  Somebody else bought some candles downtown, so we turned off the chandeliers and kept the doors of the office suites open for a little extra light, turning the great vaulted room cozy.  We would sit around the fireplace drinking beers, and it won’t surprise you that I told a few stories about what it was like living in Oberammergau, where it snowed from October to May, with accumulation in the hundreds of inches every year.  We put on our skis in the morning and skied downhill to school, stacking our skis outside, removing our boots and wearing slippers inside.  After school, we skied to the local ski slopes, loosening the cables on our beartrap bindings, turning them into makeshift cross-country skis, re-attached our cables and paid a quarter for a lift ticket and skied until dusk and skied home in the dark with loose cables again.  As kids in Oberammergau, we skied every single day for months on end.  On the weekends, at a Gasthaus on the slopes halfway up the mountain, you could get a bowl of split pea soup and a huge boiled wurst and a half loaf of crunchy-crusted bread for 15 cents, and they’d sell you a liter of local beer for a nickel, no questions asked.

It snowed every night in Aspen, so the early morning slopes had fresh powder that could be 9 inches to a foot deep.  At night, Aspen smelled of smoke from fireplaces and the snow fell through a golden glow from the streetlights and storefronts.  It was a perfect moment in time, and in our lives.

All good things come to an end, and so on a sunny morning the day after New Years, Alex and I and our two compatriots loaded up the VW to overflowing and made the drive down the snowy roads and over the snow-packed pass into Denver.  They left us off at the bus station.  We took a Frontier Airlines flight on an old DC-3 to Colorado Springs, changed into our Dress Gray uniforms and caught a hop from Peterson Air Force Base to McConnell AFB in Wichita and climbed into our web seats in another C-141 and flew back to Stewart Field, and made it back to West Point just in time for supper formation.

The schoolteacher from Denver and I wrote letters back and forth for a couple of months, but it was never a relationship.  It was magic.