Until the 1960’s & 70’s

As an adult I love to tell my “city slicker” friends how I grew up on a dirt street.  They struggle with that concept knowing that I grew up in Aspen.  Almost everyone who has ever heard of Aspen think its streets are paved with gold or at least a thick layer of asphalt.  They cannot fathom that Aspen ever had dirt streets.
Not only did it have dirt streets but the fact of the matter is that was not that long ago.

For my first eleven years we lived at the intersection of Garmisch and Hopkins.  Back then many of the “side streets” were dirt and they were quite a bit wider than they are now.  Every year the city would pick a few of the streets to either pave or just spray oil and spread small gravel which gave it a semi-paved look and feel.  Still you could drive down any of those streets and put up a pretty big dust cloud behind you.  When it rained it was hard telling where the streets ended and the yards started.  There was no storm drains either.  One summer Aspen experienced a 10 day rain and water collected everywhere.  One of the lowest spots in
my neighborhood was at Garmisch and just south of Main Street.  During and after that particular storm there was a puddle that was over 3 feet deep in the middle of the street and half of the park was flooded as well.  All of the kids had blast playing in the water until it finally drained away.

In the 1960’s the Castle Creek Road pavement ended just past the Country Day school campus which at that time had a very nice restaurant, tennis and swimming club.    Just past the Highlands the pavement on Maroon Creek Road ended which was later extended just past the T Lazy 7 Ranch.  The fact of the matter was, the Red Mountain Road was paved to the top long before most of the other area roads.

For kids, our primary form of transportation was bicycles and we went everywhere.  On any given weekend kids would ride to the Maroon Bells, up Red Mountain or out to the Difficult Campground choking on the dust clouds every step of the way.  As for Garmisch and Main, that intersection as well as many others like it throughout town have been upgraded with storm drains, re-contoured to eliminate low spots and paved from curb to curb.  Gone are the days of dirt roads and mud puddles.