Ullrhof Is Back This Winter. The Gondola Everyone Keeps Asking About Isn't.
Stand in line for the Elk Camp Gondola on any given weekend this fall and you'll hear some version of the same question: did they finally fix Skittles? The answer is no, and the confusion is understandable. Snowmass has had so many capital projects announced in overlapping press releases over the past year that it's easy to lose track of which ones already happened, which one is happening now, and which one is still more than a year out. Sorting that out matters if you live here, because it determines what your actual daily experience on the mountain looks like this winter versus next.
Start with the one everyone asks about. The Sky Cab Gondola, known to nearly everyone as Skittles for its multicolored cabins, connects Base Village to the Snowmass Mall. It's been running since 2005 as a pulse gondola, meaning pairs of cabins move together rather than continuously, which caps its capacity at 510 riders an hour. Snowmass Town Council approved its replacement earlier this year, and the numbers on the new version are real: a detachable gondola with roughly double the capacity, close to 1,000 riders an hour, still with 12 cabins but six inches taller and built with more glass in the doors.
None of that arrives this season. Construction is set to begin in August 2027, with a target reopening by Thanksgiving of that year, according to reporting in the Aspen Times. Mak Keeling, Aspen Skiing Company's vice president of mountain planning, told the town council the alignment and height will stay essentially the same as the current lift, just with fewer support towers in the way. His own summary of the change for the average rider was blunt: guests will think it looks exactly the same. The blue cabins are going purple, mostly because there's no blue candy in a bag of Skittles, but that's a cosmetic footnote to a project that is genuinely thirteen months away from breaking ground.
If you're planning around foot traffic between the Mall and Base Village this winter, plan around the gondola you've always had. It runs on its normal schedule, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, same as always.
The real change this winter sits mid-mountain, not at the base. Ullrhof, the mid-mountain restaurant that's fed skiers on Snowmass for more than five decades, went dark for the entire 2025-26 season while crews tore it down to the studs. That closure wasn't cosmetic. Aspen One put roughly $42 million into the rebuild, out of an approximately $80 million total capital investment across the resort that year, meaning a single restaurant absorbed more than half the mountain's entire improvement budget for the cycle.
The new building reopens for the 2026-27 season as Aspen Snowmass's first fully electric restaurant, with seating for more than 500 people and a new bar and lounge level above the main dining floor. During the year Ullrhof was closed, the resort ran The Hot Dogger, a pop-up serving gourmet hot dogs through a partnership with the Los Angeles-based Sumo Dog, out of the old Spider Sabich picnic area to cover the gap. That stopgap goes away once Ullrhof is back, which is the one dining change on the mountain proper that will actually register for anyone who skis mid-mountain on a regular basis this year.
Here's the part that trips people up almost as often as the gondola timeline. The Elk Camp six-pack chairlift and the Cirque T-bar, both frequently mentioned as this year's big lift upgrades, actually debuted during the 2025-26 season, not this one. Elk Camp went from a four-person chair to a six-pack, and Cirque swapped its old platter lift for a T-bar that doubled capacity by moving from single-rider to double-rider loading at one of the highest-elevation lifts in North America. Snowmass hadn't opened two new lifts in the same season in nearly twenty years, which made last winter the milestone.
This winter is their second season, not their first. If you rode either of them last year, nothing about the hardware itself is different now. What has changed since then is smaller and easy to miss: the Elk Camp Restaurant added a 120-seat deck on its east side with a retractable umbrella and glass wall system, giving mid-mountain diners a covered outdoor option that wasn't there before.
If the mountain's changes this year are limited mostly to Ullrhof, the plaza at Base Village has moved faster. Montevino has taken over the former Slice of Italy space inside The Collective, built around handmade pastas and a sommelier-curated wine list, positioning itself as the plaza's anchor for a sit-down Italian meal. Slope & Hatch, a Roaring Fork Valley original with locations in Glenwood Springs and Eagle, opened at 49 Wood Road inside The Collective with an outdoor patio as its centerpiece and a globally inspired comfort food menu built around what owner Gregg Lemma has described as simple things done exceptionally well.
On the mountain's other dining fronts, the Alpin Room is shifting to French-inspired dishes under chef Emily Oyer, and High Alpine is introducing a rotating global cuisine concept. None of these are speculative. They're operating now, which makes the plaza itself a faster-moving story this year than the lift infrastructure sitting above it.
Aspen Mountain and Snowmass are scheduled to open for the season on November 26, which falls on Thanksgiving this year, with Aspen Highlands and Buttermilk following on December 12. Aspen Snowmass held season pass pricing at current rates through September 18, with prices increasing the following day, so anyone weighing a Premier or Weekday Pass has already missed that window for this cycle. The Flex Pass, new for 2026-27 and built for four to seven days of skiing with no blackout dates, still has a purchase deadline of October 30, which is the one pass decision still open as of this writing.
None of these dates involve the gondola. That project doesn't touch anyone's season pass, opening day, or daily commute between the Mall and Base Village until at least the summer of 2027, and even then the closure is expected to run about two months rather than a full season.
The version of this winter worth planning around is the one that's actually arriving: Ullrhof back online after a year dark, the Elk Camp and Cirque lifts settling into their second season, and a plaza that's already rewritten itself around Montevino and Slope & Hatch. The gondola conversation can wait. It has another year to go before it's anyone's actual problem.
If you're weighing how any of this on-mountain investment, from Base Village's shifting restaurant lineup to the capital work still ahead at Skittles, might shape property values in Snowmass Village over the next few seasons, Jennifer Banner follows these developments closely and is glad to talk through what they mean for your specific address.
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