Last winter, Snowmass did something it hadn't done in roughly twenty years: it opened two new lifts in the same season. The Elk Camp quad became a six-pack. The old Cirque platter, a single-rider relic serving some of the mountain's best high-alpine terrain, became a double-rider T-bar. People noticed. Lift openings are the kind of change you can see from the base, the kind that shows up in a photo with a ribbon still attached.
This winter, there's no new lift opening on Snowmass. And yet more is actually changing for the people who live here than changed last year. The mountain's multi-year capital plan has moved past the chairs and into the two things that shape a resident's actual week on the hill: where you eat lunch, and how you get from your driveway to the Mall without getting in a car. One of those changes now has a hard date attached to it for the first time.
Last Winter Handled Speed. This One Handles What Happens After You Get Off the Chair.
The lift work wasn't random. It follows a sequence that started with the Coney Express replacement in 2024, continued with the Elk Camp and Cirque upgrades last season, and lands this winter on Ullrhof, the mid-mountain restaurant that's been closed for a complete rebuild since summer 2025. Aspen Skiing Company has framed these as separate seasonal announcements, but read back to back, they're a queue. Lifts first, because getting more people up the mountain faster was the immediate bottleneck. Dining second, because once you've solved how fast people arrive, you've created a new problem: where they all land at noon.
That's the part worth sitting with if you already ski here. The lift upgrades were about throughput. What's opening this winter is about capacity once you're already on the mountain, and that's a different kind of crowding to plan around.
The Actual Headline of This Winter: Ullrhof
Ullrhof sits mid-mountain at the base of the Big Burn lift, and it's reopening for winter 2026-27 as a genuinely different building, not a renovation. The new space seats more than 600 people, up substantially from what the old lodge could hold, and it will be Aspen Snowmass's first fully electric on-mountain restaurant, with a new bar and lounge level and a menu built around upscale American comfort food. It sits inside the same Base Village orbit covered in our area guide to Snowmass Base Village, and its reopening is the biggest single addition to mid-mountain dining capacity Snowmass has made in years.
An exact reopening date hasn't been announced. Aspen Skiing Company has only committed to "in time for winter 2026-27," which for a resident means the practical move is watching for the announcement rather than assuming day-one availability. If Ullrhof opens early in the season, expect it to immediately pull volume away from Elk Camp Restaurant and High Alpine, both of which absorbed the lunch crowd during the year and a half Ullrhof was closed.
Why the Timing Isn't a Coincidence
Ullrhof's expanded capacity lines up with a real shift in who can access Snowmass this season. For the first time, Snowmass is accepting the Ikon Base Pass, a five-day product with blackout dates of Dec. 26-30, Jan. 16-17, and Feb. 13-14, 2027. Add the new Flex Pass, a four-to-seven-day option with no blackout dates starting at $679, and the new Weekday Pass, which offers unlimited Monday-through-Friday access starting at $2,099, and the mountain has built several new on-ramps for visitors who weren't buying a full Premier Pass before.
Ikon and Ikon Base Pass holders will also no longer need to reserve a lift access day at any of the four mountains this season, removing a step that's shaped how crowds spread across the calendar in recent winters. Put those pieces together and a mid-mountain restaurant that can seat 600 instead of a few hundred stops looking like a nice-to-have and starts looking like a mountain planning for exactly the kind of demand the new passes are designed to bring in.
| Project | Before | After | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elk Camp Lift | 4-passenger quad | 6-passenger high-speed | Opened winter 2025-26 |
| Cirque | Single-rider platter | Double-rider T-bar | Opened winter 2025-26 |
| Ullrhof | Original mid-mountain lodge | 600+ seats, fully electric | Reopens winter 2026-27 |
| Sky Cab "Skittles" | 510 riders per hour, pulse gondola | 1,000 riders per hour, detachable | Construction Aug. 2027, reopens Thanksgiving 2027 |
Skittles Gets an Expiration Date
The fourth piece in that table is the one that will actually matter most to people who live in Snowmass Village year-round, because it has nothing to do with skiing. The Sky Cab Gondola, universally called Skittles for its rainbow of cabin colors, is the free connector that's run between Snowmass Base Village and the Mall since 2005. It's how residents move between the two halves of the village without a car, and it's been running long enough that most people who live here have stopped thinking of it as infrastructure at all.
That changed at the Snowmass Village Town Council meeting on August 3, when the town and Aspen Skiing Company finalized a $10 million replacement plan, split evenly between the two. The current pulse gondola carries about 510 riders per hour in clusters of three cabins. Its replacement, a high-speed detachable gondola with the same 12-cabin count, will carry 1,000 riders per hour. Construction is set to begin in August 2027, with the new gondola targeted to reopen by Thanksgiving 2027, which means a stretch of that summer will run without the free base-to-mall connector residents currently take for granted. The town's transportation department has already said it's working on ground transportation alternatives to cover the gap.
Even the cabin colors are getting a small correction. The current lineup swaps in blue because Skittles candy doesn't come in blue, and the replacement will finally fix that by using purple instead, distributed across the same five-color palette. Aspen Skiing Company's vice president of mountain planning, Mak Keeling, told the council the goal is for the change to be invisible to most guests.
"As far as guests are concerned, they will think it is exactly the same."
For residents, the honest version is a little different. The ride itself may feel the same. The two-month construction closure in the summer of 2027 will not. And there's already interest in what happens to the retired cabins: two other ski resorts have inquired about buying them, echoing the way Aspen Mountain has treated its own retired chairs, including the recent Nell and Bell auction and an upcoming auction for chairs from the original Lift 1A, as keepsakes rather than scrap.
What Actually Changes for Someone Who Already Lives Here
None of this requires action this month. It does change what's worth watching over the next several weeks. Ullrhof's opening date hasn't been set, and when it lands will shift where the mid-mountain lunch crowd goes, likely easing pressure at Elk Camp and High Alpine for the first time in two seasons. The three Ikon Base Pass blackout dates, Dec. 26-30, Jan. 16-17, and Feb. 13-14, 2027, are a reasonable proxy for the days the mountain will feel most local, since a chunk of the pass-holding visitor base won't have access on those exact days. And if you're already thinking ahead to hosting family or planning an event near Base Village or the Mall, mark the summer of 2027 as the season to build around a temporary gap in the free connector.
None of this is really about a burger stand or a gondola paint job. It's a mountain that's been running a capital plan long enough that you can see the shape of it now: lifts first, dining and connectivity second, and each phase timed to land right as the pass structure changes who's actually showing up. This winter is the season that plan reaches the parts of the mountain that have nothing to do with how fast you get up the hill and everything to do with how the day actually feels once you're there.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property near Base Village, whether it's worth owning something with a five-minute walk to the new Ullrhof or a season-long view of the Skittles line, that's a conversation Steve Harriage has been having with Snowmass buyers and owners for over two decades. Let's connect.
