The Aspen Music Festival and School are together a prestigious summer music program that trace their roots to the music offerings at Aspen’s Goethe Bicentennial celebration in 1949. The festival puts on a variety of concerts throughout the summer, and…

Elizabeth Paepcke (1902–94) is best known for working with her husband, Walter, to transform the former mining town of Aspen into a cultural hub after World War II. Trained in art and design, she was perhaps most influential in getting Walter interested…

The Given Institute was an International Style conference and laboratory building designed by Harry Weese and built in 1972 at 100 East Francis Street in Aspen. Built on land that formerly belonged to Elizabeth Paepcke near Hallam Lake, the building was…

The Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival was a three-week celebration of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 200th birthday in 1949. Held in Aspen under a huge canvas tent designed by Eero Saarinen, the event was organized…

Herbert Bayer (1900–85) was an artist, architect, and designer best known in Colorado for his work in Aspen during the decades after World War II. Born in Austria and trained at the Bauhaus, Bayer brought to the United States a modernist belief in simple…

Built in 1889 by Jerome B. Wheeler (1841–1918), the Hotel Jerome was Aspen’s original luxury hotel. After the 1893 silver crash destroyed the town’s economy, the hotel survived as a boardinghouse and slipped into comfortable shabbiness. When Aspen…

Located just west of Independence Pass at an elevation of about 10,900 feet, the town of Independence was established in 1879 and boomed briefly in the early 1880s, reaching an estimated population of 1,500. In the mid-1880s, the town’s harsh climate and…

The Panic of 1893 touched off a nationwide economic depression that lasted for at least three years, threw millions out of work, and caused banks and businesses to fail across the country. In Colorado and other silver-mining states, the panic was tied to…

Pitkin County, named after former Colorado governor Frederick Pitkin, is located in west-central Colorado, spanning 973 square miles of mountains and the Roaring Fork River valley. It is bordered by Garfield and Eagle Counties to the north, Lake and…

From the 1850s to the 1920s, gold and silver mining drove Colorado’s economy, making it into an urbanized, industrial state. The rapid development of Colorado’s mineral resources had political, social, and environmental consequences. The mining of gold…

Established on January 26, 1915, Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) has for more than a century been one of the country’s most visited national parks. Mountain vistas and wilderness solitude draw millions of people every year. The park lies between…

Colorado’s ski industry anchors the state’s thriving tourist economy. Built primarily on national forest lands, the state’s numerous ski resorts attract upwards of 12 million visitors annually, generating billions in revenue. Introduced to the state in…

“A Fantasy land,” “a mystique,” “a state of mind”—these are only some of the expressions used to describe the Western Slope of Colorado, commonly defined as the roughly one-third of the state that lies west of the Continental Divide. The serpentine…

The merchant and investor Jerome B. Wheeler (1841–1918) built the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen in 1889, making it the third-largest opera house in Colorado at the time. As Aspen declined after the Panic of 1893 and the demonetization of silver, the…

The Wheeler/Stallard House is a three-story Queen Anne style residence built in 1888–89 by Jerome B. Wheeler on the west side of Aspen. Edgar and Mary Ella Stallard occupied the house from 1905 to 1945, when Walter Paepcke acquired it for use as overflow…