TL;DR
Aspen Highlands has submitted its 2025 Master Development Plan to the Forest Service, outlining a decade of proposed upgrades including a two-stage gondola, a new mid-mountain chairlift, and dining expansions. Nothing is approved yet, but the vision is worth knowing about.
Aspen Highlands Has a 10-Year Vision - And It Starts With Fixing the Base Area Bottleneck
Aspen Highlands has submitted its 2025 Master Development Plan to the US Forest Service, laying out a series of proposed upgrades spanning the next decade. The headline item is a two-stage gondola from the base area to the summit, but there's more to it than that - including a new mid-mountain chairlift, lift upgrades, and expanded dining at two on-mountain restaurants.
None of this is approved yet. A master plan submission is the start of a conversation with the Forest Service, not a green light. Still, it's a clear picture of where Aspen One wants to take Highlands over the next ten years.
The Gondola: Fixing a 31-Year-Old Bottleneck
The centrepiece of the plan is a two-stage gondola running from the base area up to the Merry-Go-Round restaurant, then continuing to Cloud Nine Alpine Bistro - a climb of 2,700 vertical feet in total.
The plan is direct about why this is needed: the Exhibition Lift, which is currently 31 years old, is the only way out of the base area and is the primary cause of congestion there. When it has mechanical issues - which, at 31 years old, is increasingly a when rather than an if - it causes significant disruption across the whole mountain.
The numbers make a reasonable case for the upgrade. The Exhibition Lift handles 1,800 people per hour. The proposed gondola would manage 2,400, a lift of more than 30% in uphill capacity out of the base. It would also open up access to the upper mountain during periods when the lower mountain has melted out - a genuine operational benefit as seasons become less predictable.
