Correction: Overdose death certificates are sent to the National Vital Statistics database, and preliminary data through October 2025 is available through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Laird thanks C’dale
I want to thank everyone who was able to support me for town trustee. I look forward to continue serving and helping our community be the best it can be. It is a real honor to serve on the town board and I greatly appreciate your support.
Carbondale is a special place, and with amazing people. Thank you all for being part of this community.
As always, if you have an idea, question or concern related to our town, please, email, text or call me.
Colin Laird
Carbondale Trustee
970.309.2053
lairdcolin@gmail.com
Thank you, voters
Thank you so much for the opportunity to serve you for another four years. Thank you for exercising your right to vote and taking an interest in the current and future governance of Carbondale. I believe that strong local democracy is the first building block of sustaining any national democracy.
We are privileged to inherit generally wise prior governance, astonishing natural beauty and a special town character that is characterized by a diversity of people taking part in its ongoing creation. Protecting that character can be both a fraught and empowering process.
It’s best cultivated in an organic and grassroots manner that includes your input. I encourage you to make voting just the beginning of your civic engagement. You are welcome to attend regular trustee meetings on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month or work sessions on the third.
Our volunteer boards and commissions could use your input or membership. Volunteer opportunities abound in more direct ways with local nonprofits and town events such as the upcoming Dandelion Day. Most immediately, you can give to our vital local media, like The Sopris Sun and KDNK which so beautifully express the spirit of Carbondale and the Valley while also holding people like me accountable to you.
Peace on Earth.
Chris Hassig
Carbondale Trustee
Mountain Family gives thanks
Where else can you buy a pair of brand-new fuchsia suede penny loafers with a three-inch heel by Kork-Ease for $8? Or a vintage three-piece Ralph Lauren men’s suit for $65, and catch up with friends at the same time?
My favorite store in Aspen is the Aspen Thrift Shop. Whenever I’m in town, I make it a must-stop destination, even if only to browse the bestseller books, the cool sunglasses (I’m still thinking about the white 1960s cat-eye pair that made me feel like an Italian film star) or the skirts — my newest passion.
While you browse the aisles of the Aspen Thrift Shop and try on hats and shoes, you’re also supporting a remarkable volunteer-run organization, its donors and loyal shoppers that benefit the health and well-being of people throughout the Roaring Fork Valley.
We are deeply grateful to the Aspen Thrift Shop for its generous contribution to Mountain Family Health Centers Health for All Fund, which helps provide medical, dental and behavioral health care to anyone who needs it, regardless of their ability to pay.
As spring arrives, I encourage everyone to shop at the Thrift Shop; and to clean out those closets and cupboards and donate what you no longer use. It’s a wonderful organization that has supported nonprofits throughout the Valley for decades.
On behalf of our entire staff, please accept our sincere thanks.
Jan Carla Halperin
Mountain Family Health Centers
Aspen is on Ozempic
I recently read about the mass exodus of volunteer mountain ambassadors in Aspen. I served for one year, and I loved it. It asked more of me than I expected, but gave more in return. It reminded me through conversations with visitors and locals alike what Aspen can be at its best: open, curious and socially generous. This new “development,” along with some other recent provocative events, inspired me to share my internal conflict regarding the present and the past, and my infatuation with Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley — at odds with practicality.
My first visit was in 1995, for a family wedding at Sardy House. I stayed awake for nearly three days, afraid I might miss something. After the formalities, I drifted into late nights with staff from the Sardy House and Hotel Jerome — people in their 20s from Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Spain, South Africa and across the U.S. It felt unscripted and alive, a place where energy came not from perfection, but from possibility.
That feeling has thinned.
Just before COVID, and especially since, Aspen has begun to feel less like a community and more like a place people pass through, or endure. So many here are no longer thriving; we are working to remain.
“Affordable housing” is an oxymoron. Happy hour may require a drive to Basalt or Carbondale, and, if you drink, that choice carries safety risks and potentially steeper consequences than a $30 glass of pinot grigio. The texture has changed.
Some of my most cherished clients, now in their 70s and 80s, helped shape Aspen into the place people still imagine. They speak with saudade, a longing for what was, softened by the knowledge that change is inevitable. But beneath that acceptance is something else: a quiet grief for what is being lost in real time.
Aspen is on Ozempic.
It has shed more than excess. It has lost muscle. The grit, the eccentricity, the beautifully rough edges have been pared down too. What remains is sleeker, more refined and somehow less alive. Its grit and soul — once a beautifully imperfect, craggy essence born from passion, impulsivity and occasional gluttonous poor decisions — seems to be increasingly replaced and defined by access and optics, where substance risks being edged out by presentation.
And yet, Aspen still flickers.
I felt it recently at Wheeler Opera House, at a retrospective honoring a local sculptor’s family. The artist’s work was rooted in Colorado’s landscape — textured, grounded, real and sustainable.
Candace Clarke
Aspen