Watching people talk about Aspen on social media these days is a bit like watching someone else ski your favorite line, recognizable, but missing the rhythm you remember. It got me thinking that maybe it was time to bottle up the real thing, the Aspen we knew back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, seen through the eyes of kids who had the whole mountain as their playground. Everyone’s heard the polished stories of grown-ups and their high-dollar misadventures, but nobody really captured the scrappy, unsupervised freedom of being young in a town that hadn’t yet figured out it was supposed to be famous. Something closer to Stand by Me, but with more altitude and a lot more dirt under your fingernails. So I rounded up three old school friends, the kind who still remember where all the secret trails led, and we set out to lock it all down, the stories, the laughs, the moments that only make sense if you were there. It wasn’t about nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake; it was about getting it right, telling the local version before it disappears under layers of reinvention. Times have changed, no doubt about it, but that’s what makes it worth looking back, because somewhere in those stories is the Aspen that raised us, raw and real, still carving turns in memory like fresh tracks on a powder day.

Growing Up Aspen - Adventures of the Unsupervised was my first and latest book. Its about what was going on in Aspen during the 70's and 80's only through a pint sized perspective.