I’ve been home for a couple weeks, reveling in a place I wake up blissed out every day. The picture above is 15 minutes down a winding country road from my home and where I go often to hike and ski. I have had a love affair with the American West since I was 12, and recently realized Aspen gives me the same exhilaration I had when on a bicycle tour near Banff in the Canadian Rockies between high school and college. The thin, dry air, the majestic mountain scenery underneath cerulean blue skies, mist hanging between the peaks and in the valleys and the sunlight, whose only competitor I know of is Santa Fe’s famous luminosity.