Patrol Headquarters
An architectural rendering of the Aspen Highlands' ski patrol headquarters.
Most on-mountain ski patrol huts in America are called huts for good reason: They’re generally low-slung, cramped and
fragrant with wet wool, polypro and hot wax—like slightly enlarged childhood clubhouses cobbled together from spare lumber and no budget. To the extent that they’re ever purpose-built, it’s usually just barely sufficient to the needs. After all, the buildings are only for rough, marginally civilized patrol people, right?
Well, Aspen Highlands has always done things a little differently. When longtime Highlands patrol director Mac Smith finally got the OK for a badly needed new patrol headquarters in 2003, he’d already thought about it a lot. “Mac and I had been talking about it for years,” relates Kim Raymond, who retired from full-time patrolling at Highlands in 1992 to become an architect with her own firm in Aspen. “When he called and said, ‘We finally get to do it,’ he had five locations in mind. I said, ‘Mac, this is the only one,’” she says of the prime site they chose.
If you’ve been to the building, you know why Raymond felt that way. Chiseled into the south side of Loge Peak at the top of Highlands’ highest lift, the HQ, says Raymond, is “easy to get in and out of, has great views of Highland Bowl and a giant deck for the public,” plus dramatic full-frontals of Pyramid Peak and the Maroon Bells that even Red Mountain homeowners would envy.
Having any public component in a patrol hut is unusual. While all ski patrol rooms and buildings in Aspen/Snowmass are traditionally open to all, it’s mostly if you have an emergency, want to warm up after a long cold lift ride or need to work on your equipment. The Aspen Skiing Company has added elements such as a wildlife gallery to the patrol facilities on top of Elk Camp at Snowmass for civilians to visit, but that’s a rarity.
The Highlands HQ not only welcomes visitors with its expansive deck, but even sells T-shirts, mostly about their pet project of Highland Bowl: “Smoke the whole bowl,” urges one. The main walk-in level of 1,000 square feet is a high, open area with a loft and five small rooms off of it for dispatchers, the kitchen, storage and a bathroom. Though there is no permanent caretaker, patrollers do sometimes spend a night in the loft. The rough-sawed plywood paneling gives the interior a “nice but industrial feeling,” says Raymond, made homier by strings of Tibetan prayer flags, patroller-of-the-year plaques, photos, T-shirts, packs hanging from hooks and a big communal table made by patroller Chuck Smith.
On the lowest level is storage for medical supplies, dog kennels, lockers, a work bench, chainsaws, evacuation ropes, cable riders and the other assorted gear of a big-time, big-mountain ski patrol, plus a place to recycle the aluminum from avalanche-control explosives.
“It’s a fairly complicated structure because of the snow load and the big deck,” says Raymond. So Bob Oddo, of Oddo Engineering in Glenwood, handled the design work’s heavy lifting. And the construction process at 11,500 feet presented challenges from the beginning. Mac Smith started the difficult, rocky excavating then turned it over to Village Excavators. “We had cement trucks coming up here to pour the walls and footers,” says Smith of a job that some might have done, much more expensively, by helicopter. “It was a long drive but they never had any problems.” And for underground culverts the builders saved money using old lift towers.
One of the few patrol facilities in the country to be architecturally designed, it still came in “very close to budget,” says Raymond. “The Ski Company was excited to make it green, but we were working with very limited funding. So for example we plumbed for the hot water part of the solar when it was built, then added it a year or two later.”
They were able to go green throughout with recycled blue jeans for insulation, recycled steel from the landfill, passive solar from big south-facing windows, a kitchen that came out of another of Raymond’s client’s remodels, and composting toilets. The exterior siding is wood fiber and cement material from Hardi-Panels; the roof is made of R-Control Panels in a plywood-foam-plywood sandwich; the floors are recycled tire rubber, without the smell; and the main power is a beefy 2.3 kilowatt photovoltaic solar system installed by patroller Mike Tierney’s Aspen Solar, Inc.
The end result is a space with a great vibe that comes from its amazing location, the people who use it, and an intelligent, dynamic, environmentally sensitive design that makes everything feel that much better.
