Aspen Without the Snow: A Case for the Other Nine Months

Ask most people what Aspen is for, and they'll describe a ski town: gondolas, aprés, a bar tab that reads like a hotel invoice. They're not wrong, exactly. They're just working with a quarter of the picture.

The town runs on four mountains and one unspoken rule — Aspen Mountain (everyone calls it Ajax), Highlands, Buttermilk, and Snowmass each have a personality, and a good advisor books the mountain to the client, not the other way around. Ajax is advanced terrain and hidden shrines off Ruthie's; on a powder day, the Sundeck gives out free pancakes before 11. Highlands is expert-only and mostly reached on foot — a forty-five minute uphill hike rewarded with some of the best runs in North America, and a lunch seating at Cloud Nine that starts civilized and ends, reliably, in a snowcat ride down because nobody's fit to ski. Buttermilk is the family mountain and the X Games terrain park, and its backside, Tiehack, is the kind of locals' secret that isn't really a secret anymore but still feels like one. Snowmass is the biggest by far — twenty minutes out, built for every skill level, with a base village that added a climbing wall and a skating rink for the days nobody wants to be cold on purpose.

That's winter. What most people miss is that Aspen in July is arguably the better trip — wildflowers instead of moguls, the same restaurants without the wait, and a version of the town that locals actually prefer. The Little Nell is still the address that matters, ski-in/ski-out and steps from the Silver Queen Gondola, which runs summer and winter both and is worth riding just for the view. Hotel Jerome, the Auberge-run original on Main Street, kept its cowboy-chic bones through a full remodel — the fireplace in the Living Room and a burger at J-Bar, the old-school saloon, are close to mandatory. For something less scene-driven, the Viceroy in Snowmass has a 7,000-square-foot spa and a year-round pool that quietly does more work than the ski runs.

Dinner in Aspen has always skewed more sophisticated than the fleece-and-goggles image suggests. Cache Cache pairs a classically trained French chef with a sultry, low-lit dining room and one of the better wine lists in town. Betula, Bonito's Aspen outpost, brought a modern French-Pan-American menu and a soundtrack good enough that regulars ask about it. For something rowdier, Ajax Tavern at the base of the mountain does truffle fries and flowing rosé to a crowd that has clearly already had a good day, and Cloud Nine's two aprés seatings remain the closest thing the Rockies have to a controlled variable in chaos — noon is civilized, two o'clock is not, and the difference is entirely the amount of Champagne sprayed.

Shopping here rewards a slow walk down Galena and Cooper. Kemo Sabe does genuine cowboy hats and turquoise, with horses occasionally tied up outside; Miron Crosby makes custom boots worth the wait; The Little Bird is a consignment shop that takes only pristine Chanel and Gucci, which tells you everything about who's shopping there. And when the day's activity quota is met, Belly Up — a 450-person club that has hosted everyone from Snoop Dogg to B.B. King — usually has something worth checking the calendar for.

The advisors who send clients to Aspen in August instead of February aren't doing it as a workaround. They're doing it because the town, unhooked from the ski-season math, gets to be what it actually is: a genuinely beautiful mountain place that happens to have some of the best restaurants and hotels in the country, four seasons a year.