The Secret Side Of Ajax

Aspen’s past and present are intertwined at historic lift 1A. What does the future hold for “The World’s Longest Ski Lift?”

The cultural gap between the two sides of Aspen Mountain runs wider than just the distance between the lifts. Waiting for their seats in the bucket at the gondola is the see-and-be-seen crowd, chatting on cell phones, making plans to meet for après at The Tavern. On the quiet side, skiers who have chosen the cheek-chilling, open-air alternative are more likely to be grilling patrollers for details on last night's grooming, or fantasizing about rope drops as they swing their skis gently on the ride up the classic double chair.

If you broke up Aspen Mountain into ski neighborhoods, Lift 1A would be like the old, established section of town-the place where the locals live, where the trees are mature, where you can stroll alone, safe at your own pace and in your own place.

For such a small area, Lift 1A has a big heart. Start with the terrain, steep and bumpy, but complemented by a world-class cruiser in Spring Pitch. Then there is the history: For more than half a century the very best skiers in the world have laid tracks down these very runs. And, finally, there is the vibe: solitary, quiet, mellow.

The Beginning
The Lift 1A story begins in the spring of 1946. Aspen, like the rest of the planet, was just waking from the nightmare of World War II, which had ended six months earlier. There was a sense of optimism and a belief that with peace, prosperity was there for the taking.

Walter Paepcke, a visionary industrialist from Chicago, was investing heavily in Aspen with the dream of creating a utopian community to nurture mind, body and spirit. He bought tracts of land around the base of the mountain, signed long-term leases on the Hotel Jerome and the Wheeler Opera House, and set about renovating both.

Realizing that he needed to give people a reason to come to this new utopia (stay in his hotel), Paepcke partnered with Friedl Pfeifer, an Austrian veteran 10th Mountain Division who had recovered from wounds received in the war and had come back to Aspen to start a ski school. The two found investors and formed what is today the Aspen Skiing Company.

Skiing had been part of the Aspen lifestyle for a dozen years or so with an old boat tow providing access to Roch's Run, which had been cut in the 1930s as a WPA project. But Pfeifer, who had grown up in the ski town of St. Anton, Austria, also had a dream, a dream that Aspen could also be a world-class ski town on par with Europe's. To put Aspen in the spotlight, Pfeifer knew something dramatic was needed. In March of 1946, he audaciously announced that the Aspen Skiing Company would build the world's longest ski lift. It was projected to cost what was at the time the staggering sum of nearly $100,000.

A locals' opening took place in December of '46, but it was the unveiling of the lift to the world, on January 11, 1947, that changed Aspen forever. With slight hyperbole, the papers labeled the lift "The Longest, Fastest, Highest, Chair Lift in the World in the BEST PLACE ON EARTH."

That sun-filled day saw Colorado governor-elect Lee Knaus, U.S. senators, NBC national radio commentator Tor Torland, and Aspen native Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker, attending opening ceremonies along with a crowd of 2,000 or so locals and visiting dignitaries. Leonard Wood wrote in The Aspen Times that the lift was "perhaps the first large and really tangible sign that Aspen has found a new, good and profitable way of life. We have our chance," he exhorted. "Let's make use of it."

The Heyday
While the lift was a revelation, skiing in the late 1940s was not for the faint of heart. "The lift was so high that I would close my eyes and sing ‘Nearer My God to Thee' on the way up," recalls local photojournalist Mary Eshbaugh Hayes, who first rode the lift in the winter of 1952. She got many verses in, no doubt, as the ride lasted up to 45 minutes.

And those were a cold and solitary forty-five minutes, in leather boots, woolen ski pants ("black or blue," says Hayes- "they were the only colors they made.") and a sweater or two with a windbreaker on top. On wooden skis, (army-surplus Groswalds were the skis of choice) locked into bear-trap bindings, and with wool "fast hats" covering their heads and ears, skiers would shuffle in line waiting to get into the chairs, where they would close the bar, rest their skis on the footrest and enjoy the view.

To help ward off the cold, skiers would bundle up in lift coats and blankets provided at the bottom of the hill for the ride up, and when they exited the chairs on top they would put the coats back on the downhill lift. At the bottom, the lift operators would place the coats on a line to dry and skiers would pick them up after their runs.

Now that Aspen had a world-class lift and a quality hotel (the remodeled Jerome had opened the previous summer), it was time for the next step. Dick Durrance, an American Ski racing legend had been hired to oversee the mountain and he had an idea as audacious as Pfeifer's. "What if we could bring the FIS World Skiing Championships to Aspen?" he wondered.

The World Cup
Armed with only a film of Aspen and a brash cockiness, Durrance flew to Europe in 1949 and convinced the FIS Congress to award the 11th World Alpine Skiing Championships to Aspen. Fourteen teams of skiers, mostly from Europe, followed by hundreds of journalists, descended on Aspen in February of 1950 for the town's coming-out party.

The Men's downhill ran from the top of Lift 1, down the FIS Trail into Spar Gulch, and then took a left turn through the Schuss Gully to the finish. The dashing Zeno Colo of Italy was fastest down the course and celebrated his victory with a cigarette at the bottom. Two years later, Colo would capture the gold medal in the 1952 Winter Olympic Games in Oslo.

While not the first ski race in Aspen, the success of the World Championships was a landmark event, one that led to a tradition of racing that would see Aspen, and Ruthie's Run in particular, host the greatest ski racers ever to don 220s.

In 1968 the first World Cup race was held in Aspen. Billy Kidd captured the slalom event that year beating Jean Claude Killy who, just weeks earlier, had won an unprecedented three gold medals in the Winter Olympic Games in Grenoble, France.  In later years skiers like Canada's Nancy Greene, Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden Austria's Franz Klammer and American favorites Phil and Steve Mahre and Bill Johnson would all have memorable days on the Lift 1 side of Aspen Mountain.

Much has changed in the ensuing years, In 1971 the loneliness of the long-distance ride up Lift 1 ended when the double chair that operates to this day as Lift 1A, went into service. "We were all thrilled," remembers Mary Hayes. "We finally had someone to talk to on the way up." In 1986 the gondola went into operation and the energy on Aspen Mountain moved to the Gondola Plaza and The Little Nell area.

But today, even though a dwindling cadre of skiers remember when Lift 1 was new and Aspen was on the cusp of a new age, the old chair still holds wonder for a passionate group. The steep and mysterious Trainor's Dumps, high on the ridge of Shadow Mountain and long a private preserve of patrollers, draw an especially hard-core bunch to this side of paradise-on the few happy days when they are open. Eleven-year-old Max Marolt, a fifth-generation Aspen skier hailing from a family that has been skiing the Lift 1 area since the runs were first cut, says, "I always thought of Aspen Mountain as the ‘big' mountain. Now it's my favorite. Every day," he exclaims with the conviction of youth, "I end my day skiing Aztec to Corkscrew to Norway. Every day."