For more than 145 years, The Aspen Times has chronicled Aspen through silver boom, near-ghost-town bust, ski-town rebirth and the luxury era. Here's how the valley's oldest newspaper got here.
Born in a silver camp (1881)
The first issue of the Aspen Weekly Times came off the press on April 23, 1881. Aspen was barely two years old then, a rough mining camp on the Roaring Fork River that prospectors had reached over treacherous mountain passes in search of silver.
Its mission was practical. In a camp hemmed in by peaks, where the first wagon route over Taylor Pass only opened that same year, miners depended on the paper to learn what was happening beyond the valley.
The original owner was D.H. Waite & Co., led by Davis Hanson Waite. Waite sold the paper in 1885 and went on to a much bigger stage: he was later elected Governor of Colorado.
Waite's successor was B. Clark Wheeler, one of early Aspen's great boosters. Wheeler was no stranger to putting his stamp on the place: a year before the paper launched, he had led the switch from the name Ute City to Aspen. Under his ownership the Times soon began publishing every day, keeping pace with a camp that seemed to grow by the week.
Surviving the silver bust
Then came 1893. The collapse of silver prices gutted Aspen almost overnight, and the town came close to vanishing altogether. With fewer readers every year, the Times scaled back and became a weekly paper once more.
For the next half century, Aspen was a quiet ranching and mining remnant, and the Times was a small-town weekly to match. What matters most about these years is simply that the paper kept going. Plenty of mining-camp papers folded when their towns emptied out; the Times outlasted the bust and was still there when Aspen came back to life.
The Dunaway years (1956 to the early 1990s)
After World War II, Aspen reinvented itself as a ski resort and cultural retreat. The man who would define its newspaper for nearly four decades arrived almost by accident.
Dunaway's résumé read like an adventure novel. He was born in 1923 in what was then Persia, where his father, a Missouri economist, was advising the government. A family move to Switzerland put him on skis as a teenager. During World War II he joined the 10th Mountain Division and won a Bronze Star in Italy, where he led a scouting patrol atop Riva Ridge. Afterward came European ski racing, a Harvard master's degree and a historic first: skiing down Mont Blanc with French alpinist Lionel Terray.
His arrival in Aspen was a happy accident. Freshly out of a job editing Skiing Magazine, he entered a veterans' race in town, took a hard fall and wound up in a cast that ran all the way to his hip. With time on his hands, he dropped by the Times office. Buying a newspaper wasn't part of the plan, but the town had won him over and he could picture what the paper might become. In 1956, it was his.
Taking on City Hall
The Aspen of the 1950s was run by a handful of long-serving officials who preferred to settle things privately. Dunaway's opening battle was to drag those decisions into public view, and he made a habit of covering City Council in person, meeting after meeting.
Over the years his editorials took up a long list of causes. Photos he published of the decaying municipal water works pushed the city into repairs. When newly arrived hippies were harassed by local law enforcement in the 1960s, the Times pushed back, and the American Civil Liberties Union recognized the paper for it. He spoke out against the Vietnam War, sided with striking ski patrollers, clashed repeatedly with the Aspen Skiing Company, and argued for worker housing while already providing it for his own staff.
Dunaway believed a small-town paper should be about the small town. Rather than filling pages with cheaper syndicated material, he had his own reporters cover the news. The approach paid off in trophies: the Times collected editorial honours almost annually under his ownership, and the Colorado Press Association named him Editor of the Year in 1978.
There was room for mischief, too. The Flyer, a lighthearted companion publication, mixed pet stories and recipes with tongue-in-cheek send-ups of local issues, and the paper was an early pioneer of the April Fool's edition. Staff teased their thrifty, purple-loving boss as "The Purple Prince," and it was common to see him fixing the office himself or clearing cigarette butts off the sidewalk out front.
Dunaway built a small local media empire along the way, including KSNO, Aspen's first radio station, the town's cable TV company and, for 14 years, Climbing magazine. He was inducted into the Aspen Hall of Fame in 1999.
Going daily again
In 1978, Dave Danforth launched a rival, the Aspen Daily News, which started as a single sheet. To compete, Dunaway agreed to turn The Flyer into a daily edition. He hired reporter Dave Price to create it, and the Aspen Times Daily launched on November 9, 1988, the morning after a local election. Its first headline announced a Democratic sweep of the county.
The daily quickly made national headlines of its own. In 1990, Price covered the arrest of Woody Creek's most famous resident, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, on assault charges. His reporting helped show the case was built on a fabricated claim, and the charges were dropped. Thompson later reprinted some of Price's stories in one of his books.
New owners, chain ownership and a changing town (1990s to today)
Dunaway handed over the paper in the early 1990s to an ownership group headed by Loren Jenkins, who had won a Pulitzer as a Washington Post foreign correspondent. Jenkins gave the Times a fresh look, widened its scope with world news and arts reviews licensed from major national dailies, and used the opinion page to push back hard on overdevelopment. In 1996 he moved on to become NPR's foreign editor.
A few years later the paper changed hands once more, this time to a circle of local backers that included George Stranahan, Michael McVoy and Andy Stone, a novelist who had written for the Times for years. Somewhere in that decade, the daily edition also dropped "Daily" from its name.
Corporate ownership arrived on December 1, 1999, when Nevada-based Swift Communications added The Aspen Times to its growing stable of Colorado mountain-town papers, alongside the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, Vail Daily and Summit Daily News. Printing shifted to a plant in Gypsum. In 2004 the paper reorganized its schedule: the daily began appearing seven days a week, and the old weekly was reborn as the Sunday paper.
The Ogden era
On December 31, 2021, West Virginia-based Ogden Newspapers bought Swift's media businesses, including the Times. Ogden kept running the papers under the Swift name.
The pairing had a nice symmetry. The oldest newspaper in Pitkin County joined a company that has been in the newspaper business since 1890 and is still run by the same family, now in its fifth generation.
In July 2023, the City of Aspen named the locally owned Aspen Daily News its newspaper of record, a role the Times had long held. Even council members who supported the change admitted it felt like the end of an era.
Still publishing, 145 years on
The paper has changed hands many times, but the presses never stopped. Today The Aspen Times is a free daily with a print run of around 9,000, delivered up and down the valley from Aspen to Carbondale. Few businesses anywhere in Pitkin County can claim a longer unbroken run.
For anyone curious about the valley's past, its back issues are a remarkable record. From silver strikes and the 1893 crash to the arrival of the ski industry, Hunter S. Thompson's run-ins with the law and today's debates over development, The Aspen Times has been there to write it all down.