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US: Kicking Butte in Aspen

PRISTINE: Crested Butte

I was soon crushed when my charming companion flashed nothing more than her "Carte de Femininite", an I.D. confirming her womanhood so she could compete at the Calgary winter olympics decades ago.

A strange question, but somehow in the setting - under a very full and yellow moon in the Ice Bar and Restaurant, a fine log cabin halfway up a roadless Colorado mountain - quirky characters like her seemed perfectly at home.

Welcome to Crested Butte, an old silver mining town-turned-ski resort nestling high in the awesomely-beautiful Rocky Mountains, and a place that very much retains its frontier town freakiness.

First the basics: why would anyone with the Alps a cheap flight away take a 10-hour journey halfway across the world to ski here?

In a lot of cases, it's a cheaper deal in the U.S. and, for now, few people are making the effort, which makes for beautifully manicured and almost empty pistes.

And, where Europeans settle for grotty 1970s chalets and Gallic surliness, Texas Pete demands decent hotels like the Grand Lodge Crested Butte, with swimming pools and hot tubs.

The first day's skiing took us to slopes and board parks as good as any in Europe and, at 1,125 acres, there's no shortage of wide open beginners' slopes and cliffs only a teenager on steroids would dare to tackle.

But, it's off the beaten track - what the hard-bitten locals call back-country skiing - that Crested really proves itself as a playground of knee-deep powder snow, steep and deep mogul fields.

Wide open and uncrowded

But, thankfully, after a thrilling day, it was off to Crested's old strip, which still feels simple like an outlying mining town, for dinner Colorado style - finely-cooked meat and cold beer.

But, just as soon as we had got used to some of the world's best skiing at the world's least-populated resort, it was time to move on to Hollywood-on-Snow, the glam and sham Aspen.

They say that mountain-biking was born in these hills, on the tracks between Crested and Aspen, just a few miles away.

Just how it took us more than 12 hours to get there is a testament to Ted, our New York taxi driver, who had seemingly never seen a mountain before, let alone knew how to drive in them, and brilliantly used a map given to him for free at a local Pizza Hut.

So, it was a slightly frazzled bunch of English journos that checked into the comfortable Aspen Meadows Resort, a Bauhaus designer hotel frequented by the likes of Bill Clinton.

After checking my impossibly cool beech-heavy room for cigars, I ventured out into Aspen itself. The town is a white, glamorpuss' paradise of painfully-expensive shops and the kind of discreetly-exorbitant hotels and restaurants you would expect movie royalty to patronise.

The pistes, on the other hand, were wide and steep, perfect for beginners and intermediates, but fewer runs for the expert to tackle.

But the best way to compare Aspen and Crested wasn't in the gradient and difficulty of their runs, but the feel of the places. The guides the local tourist board chose for us, for example, spoke volumes about the towns they called home. In Crested, we had the laid-back Mark, who ran 24-hour endurance races in his spare time.

In Aspen, we had Bud, an all- American ex-Olympic downhiller who, to save weight back in his competing days, had his sense of humour removed. But he could hare down a mountain faster than anyone else.

Even in Aspen, though, it's still possible to find the pale ghost of the hard little tin town that once was. We ventured past Jack Nicholson's place and Cher's pad to Woody Creek and its eponymous Tavern, where ski bums who actually work the low-paid jobs gather to party with true locals from the massive trailer park all around.

And, if you do find yourself there, raise a glass of Wild Turkey whisky to the dearly departed Hunter S. Thompson, the 20th century's finest journalist, who lived for most of his life just half-a-mile up the road.

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