Longtime local newspaper reporter Scott Condon covered county issues, public lands, Aspen Skiing Co. and much more over his 39-year career in the Roaring Fork Valley. He retired from the daily news grind on June 20.
After 39 years reporting on the Roaring Fork Valley, Scott Condon said one of the best parts of the job has been forcibly learning humility.
“The thing I’ve really liked and learned about journalism is that every time you get on a roll — you have three great days, you have scoops and stories that you know everyone’s reading, and you’re feeling really cocky and you’re feeling good — that fourth day, you make a major mistake on a story or you get scooped on a story that’s important to you. And you feel like dogs–t,” he said.
“I’d be willing to bet there is no profession that can bring you down as quickly as journalism. If you don’t know humility, then you learn humility really, really fast.”
It’s a hard lesson to learn in Aspen, where cults of personality exalt the bizarre and longevity earns an air of superiority. But after decades of the daily news grind, Condon has filed his last story, heading out of the valley in favor of the desert trails of Grand Junction.
After avalanches on Independence Pass in April 2019, reporter Scott Condon biked up for a look and a ski.
‘Blown away’
Condon, 62, took his first Roaring Fork Valley journalism gig with The Snowmass Sun in 1985 after answering an employment ad in a newspaper. A recent college graduate from Iowa, Condon had moved to Colorado, living with his brother and a hometown friend while he looked for a reporting job that would keep him in the mountains.
After his interview with the Sun, Condon walked through Aspen to check out the town and he knew he needed to live there.
“I can remember laying down in Paepcke Park and just being completely blown away, like nothing else in the world,” he recalled.
Tucked into a “glorified trailer” shared among five or six newspaper employees and a branch of Alpine Bank, he wrote stories about town of Snowmass Village business, Snowmass news out of Pitkin County, and other general assignments on a typewriter.
“When I look back on it now, I’m amazed I kept a job because I was so inept when I first started,” Condon said.
He had a couple of editors with whom he worked well, but in spring 1987, Condon made the move to the paper with which he’d spend the bulk of his career: The Aspen Times.
It was still a weekly publication when Condon joined, running every Thursday.
“When it was a weekly, it was so much fun. The whole town was more laid-back. The journalism scene was more laid back. I think it was more about having fun than eyeballs,” he said. “It was about serious journalism, but there was a big emphasis on having fun.”
Weekly to daily
Reporters worked on Microtek word processors, lovingly referred to as “Microwrecks” because of their tendency of losing stories about once a month.
Legendary Times owner Bil Dunaway shepherded in the daily print schedule in November 1988 for the paper to keep up with the Aspen Daily News, a relatively-fledgling publication compared to the Times’ 107-year-old history. Moving into a daily structure brought about the perennial problem for local news outlets: being understaffed.
Amid that staff shortage in the shift from weekly byline deadlines to daily deadlines, Condon eventually found himself promoted to an editor position at the ripe age of 27, for which he recalls being woefully unprepared.
“My one-year stint as the editor taught me that I really did not enjoy it,” he said. “It was so much telling people what to do or trying to tell people what to do, rather than just doing it yourself.”
Scott Condon and his daughter, Hannah, are pictured on the Colorado Plateau. Condon said he looks forward to many more hikes in the immediate future.
In the early 1990s, Andy Stone took the helm as editor of the Times and stayed on through 2004 before moving higher up within the company. Stone had worked on and off for the paper since 1974.
He said Condon is the “best reporter I have ever worked with.” Working with him could be “prickly” at times, Stone said, but only because Condon had such a strong editorial sense that it sometimes clashed with other editorial decisions.
“I remember one moment very clearly — but I don’t remember what it was about,” Stone said. “I just remember Scott marching into my office and saying, ‘Andy, I’m calling bullshit on this!’ with a strong edge to his voice.”
Condon’s beats remained largely unchanged over his decades reporting on the valley, including Pitkin County, Aspen Skiing Co., environment and land use.
“When I first started at The Aspen Times, people were in an uproar over the [SkiCo] single day ticket price of $35 a day. It was like, ‘You’re gonna ruin Aspen! The middle class isn’t gonna come here anymore,’” he said. “The people that were objecting to the prices did not win that fight.”
Before the Great Recession in 2008, Condon recalls Swift Communications, the parent company to the Times and other Western papers at the time, as flush with resources for reporters, with continuing education classes and money for reporting trips.
Reporting highlights from that era include a series on the oil-and-gas boom in Western Garfield County and traveling to Pearlington, Mississippi, to cover a fundraising effort organized by then-Carbondale and Rural Fire Protection District Chief Ron Leach just 10 days after Hurricane Katrina.
“I think we spent five, six, seven days down there,” Condon said. “I really enjoyed that because there were tangible results and how you could see what you were doing could potentially help people.”
Condon likened the newsroom under Dunway’s ownership to Shangri-La — fun times, resources, and a tight-knit team. Under Swift, Condon said Stone did a great job acting as a firewall between corporate ownership and Aspen attitude in the newsroom. But eventually, Stone moved on.
Ownership changed, and post-recession hemorrhaging of local news and the larger economy affected newsroom morale, Condon said, with a closer eye from Swift than ever before. But the arrival of former publisher Sam Johnston and former editor David Krause brought about “a new golden era” for the paper, he said.
Through the changes, Condon said he never seriously considered leaving the valley for a journalism job elsewhere. He already knew he didn’t care for editing, even though the reporter-to-editor career path is well-trodden by journalists advancing through their careers.
A big part of that longevity is housing. With ample employee housing options in Aspen, Condon saved for a downpayment during the early years of his career. He and his wife, Ann, bought a midvalley house in the ’90s where they raised their daughter, Hannah.
He interviewed for a ski industry reporting position based in Denver sometime before becoming a homeowner, but he couldn’t stomach leaving the Roaring Fork Valley for the city.
So, he built a decades-long career with The Times, cultivating sources and following community issues that spanned years.
Scott Condon said the opportunities afforded to him working for a paper in Aspen kept him in the area long-term, like getting to cover Margaret Thatcher at Aspen Ideas Festival.
Friends and colleagues
One of his longest source-journalist relationships is with Roaring Fork Fire Rescue Chief Scott Thompson. Over decades of working together, the two forged mutual respect based on the desire to get accurate information out to the public.
But when they first met, only one of them was on the job.
Decades ago, Thompson worked as a Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy. One graveyard shift along Highway 82, Thompson clocked a car flying down the road in the wee hours of the morning. He pulled the guy over, who said he was late to meet friends for a skin up Tiehack.
That guy was Scott Condon. He didn’t have some type of important documentation with him, registration or insurance card, Thompson said, but let him off with a warning and a promise to track him down to write a real ticket if Condon didn’t bring that missing documentation to the sheriff’s office later that day.
He did drop off that documentation, and something else.
“He wrote me a glowing letter, wrote it to the sheriff,” Thompson said. “Down the road, the joke was that when I got promoted, the sheriff said ‘Here’s one of the reasons you got promoted.’”
Moving through his own career, Thompson interacted with Condon a lot, challenging the often-skeptical attitude law enforcement and journalists sometimes feel for each other.
“He seems to somehow get the story. He tells it like I told him and doesn’t make mistakes,” Thompson said. “He’s very thoughtful that way.”
On the foundation of that trust, Thompson, who has been fire chief for 23 years, changed the authority’s approach to the press. Instead of always using a public information officer, Thompson makes a point to have chiefs who were on the scene of an incident available to journalists.
“I so much appreciated not getting filtered through a PIO. I think he appreciated [the] times I felt like Colombo going back like ‘Is this correct? Did I hear you right?’ just going back to get it correct that friendship followed,” Condon said. “It wasn’t ‘we’re friends, therefore we could work together well’ it was ‘we have worked together so well and became friends.’”
No reason for guilt
West Virginia-based Ogden Newspapers bought Swift in late 2021, marking the third owner of the paper in Condon’s career. Watching ownership of the beloved, historic paper change that many times “killed him,” Condon said.
Coverage of the Lift 1A real estate transaction between OKO Group and Norway Island LLC sparked major community outrage, particularly toward OKO Group principal owner, Soviet-born Vladislav Doronin.
In April 2022, Doronin filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper. It was settled out of court in May 2022. During settlement negotiations, Doronin-related coverage was restricted and many members of the Times editorial staff left the paper.
Condon left in June 2022, after the firing of Andrew Travers, the arts and entertainment reporter who was promoted to editor after Krause left. He had been with The Aspen Times for 35 years.
“It was very painful when I did it — not painful for leaving Ogden, I didn’t have a problem leaving them. I still was holding on to The Aspen Times and I really felt bad ditching my colleagues,” Condon said. “I talked to Stone, who had been an editor and a mentor for a long time. He said, ‘Well, what you’re holding on to doesn’t exist. You’re thinking of a period that is long gone. You didn’t ruin it. They did. So you shouldn’t feel guilty about leaving.’ And that cleared my conscience quickly.”
He went to Aspen Daily News, where he continued covering stories like SkiCo cracking down on “underground” ski instructors and perceived NIMBYism in land use questions.
Then in March 2024, he gave the Daily perhaps the most generous notice from an employee to an employer — 100 days. His last day was Thursday, June 20.
‘Unfinished business’
Looking back, Condon credits the successes of his career to sharply-honed organizational skills, not any natural talent for writing.
“I’ve worked with a lot of people that are a lot better writers. I’ve worked with people that had much better command of the language,” he said. “I think the thing that I had a good grip on was that I’ve tried to have a story every day that we could put on the front, and they would be worthy stories.”
At the beginning of the two daily papers-era, Condon said Aspenites felt there wasn’t enough room for all those inches. Now, that’s clearly not the case, with two papers, a public radio station, and a nonprofit online outlet.
“I think [local journalism] will persevere. I think in Aspen it will persevere as long as there’s some old-timers left in Aspen that still read the paper,” he said. “I just wonder how much people who come to the Roaring Fork Valley for a job as opposed to a lifestyle really care about the paper.”
Now, he’s ready for a “rewire.” As corny as it sounds, Condon said a “rewiring” is a better word to capture his plans for life in Grand Junction, where he and Ann recently closed on their dream build — hikes with Max the dog, bike rides, and scouring the Colorado Plateau for rock art.
“There’s some unfinished business out there, but I don’t know what it is yet,” he said. “I’m going ride my bike and hike for a year to figure out what that unfinished business is, which is a good thing.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correctly identify Pearlington, Mississippi.
