Every write-up on Aspen Highlands' newly submitted master plan starts in the same place: a gondola that would finally deliver on an idea Whip Jones sketched out in 1957, before the mountain even opened. It's a good story. A two-stage lift replacing the four-person Exhibition chair, ending at Cloud Nine Alpine Bistro instead of leaving skiers to change lifts partway up. It photographs well and it fits the version of Aspen Highlands people want to believe in, the maverick mountain finally catching up to its own ambition.
But if you already ski Highlands most weekends, the gondola isn't the part of this document that changes anything for you this decade. The part that does is buried a few pages later, in acreage figures and trail names most outlets skipped past: 124 acres of new snowmaking and 845 acres of forest thinning, both of which come with water rights and funding math already worked out. The gondola doesn't. That gap between what's engineered and what's still aspirational is the actual story in this plan, and it tells you something about which version of Highlands is arriving first.
What the Plan Actually Proposes
The 2025 Aspen Highlands Master Development Plan was submitted to the U.S. Forest Service late last year and runs over 100 pages. It covers four categories: lifts, restaurants, terrain and safety work, and a first real attempt at summer operations for a mountain that currently shuts down completely once the lifts stop turning.
The lift list is the headline. The Maroon Bells Gondola would run in two stages, the first following the current Exhibition lift's path to a mid-station near the Merry-Go-Round restaurant, the second continuing up to Cloud Nine at 10,840 feet. A new detachable quad called Apple Strudel would start where the Apple Strudel and Nugget trails meet, above Golden Barrel, and climb about 976 vertical feet in under five minutes to add redundancy near the top of the current Exhibition line. The existing Thunderbowl triple would become a detachable quad, aimed at easing lines for skiers headed to the race training area at Golden Horn. A beginner rope tow on the Smuggler trail, mostly intended for the Aspen Valley Ski and Snowboard Club, rounds out the lift changes.
| Proposed change | What it does | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| Maroon Bells Gondola | Replaces Exhibition lift, single ride to Cloud Nine | Needs Forest Service acceptance, then project-specific review |
| Apple Strudel quad | Adds redundancy to mid-mountain access | Same review path as gondola |
| Thunderbowl upgrade | Triple to detachable quad, eases race-area lines | Same review path |
| 124 acres of snowmaking | Prospector, Exhibition, Red Onion, Scarlett's, Gunbarrel, Wine Ridge | Water rights and supply already confirmed |
| 845 acres of forest health work | Grey Area, Child's Play, Northwoods, Temerity, Steeplechase, Enigma, Sherwood Forest, Cloud Nine, Moment of Truth | Consistent with prior federal and local approvals |
Restaurant work is smaller in scope but concrete in the numbers. Merry-Go-Round would add roughly 5,000 square feet and about 220 seats, along with larger restrooms, an expanded servery and a bigger bar. Cloud Nine's plan adds a to-go window, a larger deck, better accessibility and a new below-deck dining room with views toward the Bells and Pyramid Peak, with smaller seat gains spread across the additions rather than one large expansion.
The Line You'd Skip Past
Here's the detail that separates this document from a typical resort wish list. According to reporting on the plan from Aspen Public Radio, the text mentions climate change far more often than it uses words like "world-class" or "iconic," the language SkiCo usually reaches for. That's not incidental. Highlands currently only has snowmaking on part of the mountain, and anyone who skied there this past season saw exposed rock and dirt on mid-mountain runs earlier than usual.
The 124 acres of proposed snowmaking expansion targets exactly those gaps: Prospector, Exhibition and Red Onion at mid-mountain, plus the Cloud Nine offshoots Scarlett's, Gunbarrel and Wine Ridge. What makes this piece of the plan different from the gondola is that the company has already confirmed it holds sufficient water supply and the legal right to use it, with agreements in place to limit snowmaking if streamflows drop below a set threshold. The plan doesn't include new water storage tanks, though a proposed midmountain pumphouse for snowmaking could end up sharing space with a separate domestic water tank near the same site.
In plain terms, the snowmaking expansion is close to shovel-ready in a way the gondola is not. One is infrastructure with the water rights already sorted. The other is a lift that still needs to clear multiple layers of federal and county review before a single tower gets placed.
The Fine Print on 845 Acres
The forest health component gets even less attention but affects more terrain than any lift change would. The plan calls for glading and wildfire mitigation work across roughly 845 acres, with named priority zones including Grey Area, Child's Play, Northwoods, Temerity, Steeplechase, Enigma, Sherwood Forest, Cloud Nine and Moment of Truth. The stated goal is reducing wildfire risk, but the practical effect for skiers is better-spaced trees and more skiable glade terrain in areas that currently thicken up in the trees.
This is the kind of change that shows up gradually, a run that skis a little more open each season, rather than something you notice on opening day. It's also the kind of project that doesn't need a gondola-scale approval process to move forward, since it falls under forest management work already aligned with prior federal and local sign-off.
Nothing Here Is a Commitment
It matters to be precise about what accepting this plan actually means. A master development plan is a ten-year vision document, not a permit. Every one of the eleven ski areas operating on White River National Forest land files one, and Forest Service acceptance only confirms that a plan generally lines up with agency policy. It does not approve any individual lift, building or trail.
After that initial review, which the company expected to clear sometime around early summer 2026, each project still needs its own environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, plus land-use review from Pitkin County, since most of the resort sits in unincorporated county land. A small sliver of the base area falls inside Aspen city limits, which may trigger its own separate process or a referral role for the city.
That layered review is why comparisons to past master plans are worth taking seriously. Snowmass has floated a Burnt Mountain chairlift in its own planning documents since the 1990s. It still doesn't exist. Highlands' own planning history includes an idea for a small surface tow near the Golden Horn race venue that appeared in earlier discussions and isn't even part of the current plan anymore. Master plans can shrink as easily as they can grow, and the items that survive tend to be the ones with financing and water rights sorted out well before the gondola-style headline gets written.
If you're tracking what happens next, the sequence looks roughly like this:
- Forest Service review for general policy alignment, expected to wrap by early summer 2026
- Pitkin County land-use review for individual components
- Project-specific NEPA analysis, one lift or building at a time, with no guaranteed order or completion date
The company's own public timeline states that implementation of plan components isn't expected to begin before the summer of 2028, and that's framed as a starting point, not a finish line.
What You'll Actually Notice First
The things most likely to show up on the mountain before any of the big lifts do are the unglamorous safety items. The road up Temerity Ridge, used by the Highland Bowl snowcat, is flagged for widening to improve safety for both snowcat passengers and the hikers who skip the ride and climb on foot. The current uphill route, described in reporting on the plan as a winding, off-kilter skin track, is also flagged for improvement. Broadway, the narrow trail that funnels skiers down from Loge Peak, could get wider, and terrain on skier's left including No Name, Olympic Bowl and Moment of Truth is targeted for regrading to smooth out the return routes that currently bog down after steep descents.
None of that requires a gondola to matter. It requires a snowcat road wide enough for two-way traffic and a skin track that doesn't double back on itself, and both are the kind of quiet infrastructure fix that shows up in a single season without a ribbon-cutting.
The summer side of the plan is more speculative but worth naming. Two pedestrian suspension bridges, one across Loge Bowl and another connecting Picnic Point to Bob's Knob in the Oly Bowl area, would support an expanded hiking network linking Highlands Peak, Loge Peak and Cloud Nine. The gondola, if it's ever built, would run in summer too, opening Cloud Nine to foot traffic for the first time without a snowcat ride. A separate, still-vague mention of an aerial tramway eventually connecting Highlands to Aspen Mountain, Buttermilk or valley floor access points is labeled explicitly as a study-stage concept, something the company has considered for decades without committing to, and the plan itself calls it a tremendous challenge rather than a proposal.
Aspen Highlands has spent more than sixty years being the mountain that skis first and markets second, the one Aspen Journalism's reporting describes as still home to bowl rats logging over a hundred laps a season and an old guard attached to the way things were. The newest lift on the mountain, Deep Temerity, dates to 2005, which means most of the fleet is older than that. Average annual visits have run around 210,000 over the past decade, enough to create real bottlenecks at the base without enough redundancy to absorb a lift going down.
What this plan proposes is less a rebrand than a hedge. The gondola gets the headline because it's the version of the future everyone can picture. The snowmaking map and the glading acreage are the version that's actually funded, and they'll be reshaping the runs you already know before anyone rides a gondola to Cloud Nine.
If you live near the mountain and you're weighing what any of this means for the neighborhood around it, from access during construction seasons to how these changes might shift demand over the next few years, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks both the terrain and the transactions. Lex Tarumianz has spent years reading Aspen's land-use processes as closely as its listings. Reach out to request a confidential consultation when you're ready to talk through what a changing mountain means for property nearby.
