Short play to premiere Friday at Willoughby Park
Staff report
Travis Lane McDiffett, Nina Gabianelli and Mike Monroney performing A Briefly Complete History of Aspen.“ An updated version will debut Friday in Willoughby Park (Courtesy Aspen Historical Society)
The Aspen Historical Society has updated its popular “A Briefly Complete History of Aspen” and will premiere the new play Friday.
The new version of this factual but funny and madcap run through local history now stretches from the days of the Utes up through the town’s mining and skiing eras to recent events like the 2018 Lake Christine Fire and the ongoing pandemic and real estate boom. It still runs under an hour.
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Skyler Lomahaftewa is a Basalt resident and a member of the Uncompahgre band of the Ute tribe. In the winters, he gives snowboard lessons at Aspen Snowmass and in the summers, he does audio-visual work for events like Food & Wine and the Aspen Ideas Fest.
Every year around this time, Lomahaftewa goes back to the Northern Ute Reservation in Utah, where he grew up, to prepare for the annual Bear Dance. Now he’s trying to bring the spring tradition back to the Roaring Fork Valley.
“I often think about my connection here to this Valley as historical Uncompahgre Ute homelands, and being a Bear Dance chief,” he said. “This is where the Bear Dance was born, in these Rocky Mountains.”
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“I often think about my connection here to this Valley as historical Uncompahgre Ute homelands, and being a bear dance chief,” he said. “This is where the bear dance was born, in these Rocky Mountains.”
Like the bear dance, Lomahaftewa’s family has roots in the Rocky Mountains, but under Governor Pitkin’s orders, the Uncompahgre Ute people were forcibly removed from areas like the Roaring Fork Valley and forced onto reservations around 1880. As far as Lomahaftewa knows, he’s the only Northern Ute tribe member who lives in the Valley, and he’s noticed that a lot of people don’t know much about Ute history or what life is like on the reservations today.