Aspen Map Art

Aspen is the county seat of Pitkin County, Colorado, a small city of about 7,000 people on the Roaring Fork River at just under 8,000 feet, between the Sawatch Range and the Elk Mountains and 11 miles west of the Continental Divide. It started as a silver mining camp and took its name from the aspen trees all around it. The town boomed in the 1880s until the Panic of 1893 sank the silver market. For half a century, the quiet years, the population fell, to fewer than 1,000 by 1930. Its luck turned in the mid-20th century when Aspen Mountain was opened for skiing and the industrialist Walter Paepcke bought and rebuilt much of the town in the 1950s. Aspen is home to the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Center for Physics, and Hunter S. Thompson once ran for county sheriff from a downtown hotel.