With a burst of a confetti cannon and a round of applause, a crowd of Aspen Skiing Company staff and other community members commemorated a long-planned and finally completed upgrade to Buttermilk Mountain’s main port of entry with a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new guest services building on Friday.
SkiCo Managing Partner Jim Crown said at the event that the fine-tuned facilities at Buttermilk’s base are a big win for the resort that has long featured a hodgepodge of dated structures.
“This is how so many people enter into skiing,” Crown said. “This is how so many people think of skiing or see it either through X Games or if they're seeing their kids. … and we feel just great about Buttermilk once again, bringing people to the sport, bringing people to this mountain and helping us all enjoy and love Aspen.”
The new guest services building replaces a structure commonly called the “green building,” which Crown called “the oldest and the most unattractive building we own.”
It’s part of a modernized Buttermilk that also includes The Hideout children’s ski school structure (opened in 2015) and the Buttermilk Mountain Lodge restaurant (opened in 1993 as Bumps Restaurant, then renovated and reopened in late 2022).
Plans for base-area upgrades at Buttermilk have been in the works for decades, according to SkiCo officials who have been involved in the planning process.
“The fact that we have finally, finally got the entrance right, the facilities right, the food right and for those who are just hanging out with a beer, The Backyard [deck area] right at the top of that restaurant, we can now rest and declare some victory on the way the Buttermilk facilities look,” Crown said.
SkiCo’s Senior Vice President of Sustainability Auden Schendler also joked about Buttermilk’s history of less-than-swanky digs. The latest developments counter that perception, he said.
“This place doesn't have a history of glory and newness, and what you're standing in front of is an amazing building environmentally,” Schendler said.
Because the guest services building is entirely powered by electric energy rather than natural gas, and because electricity provider Holy Cross Energy has committed to 100% renewable energy by 2030, Schendler said the building will be “net zero” by 2030.
Ryland French, the senior director of regional climate strategy for the local Community Office for Resource Efficiency, praised the guest services building’s visual design as well as its environmental considerations. French also gave kudos to energy-efficient upgrades at the renovated Buttermilk Mountain Lodge.
“If you put buildings on electricity, that electricity is highly renewable, that's how you hit the aggressive community greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals that we have to significantly slash our local emissions by 2030,” French said. “And if we do that, then we're a model for the rest of the state, the valley, the country, the world on how to get this work done.”
The new guest services building quietly opened to the public in January, around the time of the X Games in Aspen, and the Buttermilk Mountain Lodge was ready for business on opening day of the ski season back in mid-December.
“It's been, like so many things, pretty much everything in this business, a long time coming,” SkiCo president and CEO Mike Kaplan said at the event.
He also acknowledged that this particular project took slightly longer than expected, as construction delays impacted the opening timeline for the latest updates.
“We're all dealing with the hangover of the supply chain disruptions and those types of things,” Kaplan said. “So this building was not easy to get done, and it literally took a whole community to get it done.”
