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“We're at the top of Highlands Bowl!,” shouted Judd Rogers, dressed in lederhosen at 12,392 feet above sea level.
“It’s pretty windy,” said Cora Chimeriakas, standing next to her friend Finn Rogers.
The 9-year-old girls were wearing pink — one in a bunny costume and the other in a feather-boa dress.
They weren’t strangers to the expert-level runs in Highland Bowl.
Author: “Is this your first time on the bowl?”
In unison: “No!”
Author: “How many times?”
Finn: “A lot?”
Cora: “Yeah, a lot.”
Aside from the gale-force winds at the higher elevations, Sunday was a gorgeous, bluebird day, with an inch or two of fresh powder over a hard ice sheet.
For some folks, Sunday at Aspen Highlands was also the biggest party in Aspen since before Finn and Cora were born.
At the top of the Cloud 9 lift, snowboarder Caleb Gragg was dressed as the comic-book superhero He-Man.
“I think this will be the No. 1 party Aspen’s had in 10 years,” he said. “Period. Hands down.”
Author: “Why?”
Gragg: “We've been waiting for this as locals. This is our time to come together and get weird. We've been waiting two long (expletive) years to do this together, and I think everyone's coming out in full force, and it's gonna be a weird, fun day.”
Since the start of the pandemic, Valley residents had gone two years without a proper closing-day party at Aspen Highlands. As Gragg predicted, the party returned Sunday.
At the Merry-Go-Round bar and restaurant, Dustin Lutomski held a flag emblazoned “Freak.”
“I’m literally flying my freak flag,” he said.
He stood at the edge of a crowd of more than 200 people, almost all dancing and drinking.
Author: “Describe what we’re looking at right now.”
Lutomski: “It's like Halloween on skis. Everybody's in costume. Everyone's going off. It's great.”
Author: “And what brought you to Highlands' closing day?”
Lutomski: “This is the best party in the world. This is like this is the High Holy holiday. … It sucks we couldn't do it the last few years, and now everyone's got all this pent-up energy, and we're getting it. It's go time.”
Author: “Are you a local?”
Lutomski: “I was not born here, so I'm not a local. I've only lived here 16 years.”
Lutomski wasn’t the only non-local on the mountain Sunday.
Lakewood-based snowboarder Jon Demi didn’t even know about the party. But he fit right in — because he just happened to be wearing his dinosaur onesie.
“I had no clue that Highlands' closing day was like this much of a party,” he said. “It's actually funny because I actually like to wear the dinosaur onesie a lot to snowboard. Like, it's just fun to wear. Next season, I'm for sure going to be doing some more days here.”
Canadian Ashley Last caught one of the final lifts of the day to Loge Peak. She was more interested in skiing than partying.
“I've got such a variable chain, from the top, like crusts and dusts, and then into slash, and then it was really hardpack in the trees,” she said. “So I'm getting a lot of different variation, which I'm enjoying.”
She hadn’t been ignoring Aspen’s culture entirely, though. It’s different, she said, from her usual skiing territory in Whistler, British Columbia.
“I'm definitely struck by how affluent everything is here,” she said. “It definitely seems a bit posh. … I definitely noticed the lack of homeless people and of cheap and cheerful places to eat and stuff like that. It doesn't really foster a ski-bum culture.
“Where I'm from, they have van-life culture, where it's a bunch of people who just love to do their outdoor sports — whether it's rock climbing or mountain biking — and they live in their vans,” she said. “And they're able to go and shower at the public pools and things are made very available for them to kind of just live out their dream. It seems like … gotta pay to play up here.”
At the base of Highlands, the party continued outside the Highlands Alehouse after the lifts closed.
Hundreds of people cheered, danced and sprayed Champagne on one another as the Highlands Ski Patrol made their final run down the mountain.
Ski season isn’t officially over — the Snowmass Ski Area closes this Sunday, and Aspen Mountain is open through Apr. 24 — but the biggest, loudest party of the year, if not the decade, wrapped up last Sunday at Aspen Highlands.
