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My name is Mark Seal. I'm a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and I call Aspen home.
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Aspen is a place of intense natural beauty first and foremost, but other than that, it's also a real mountain
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town with a great history and a long time lore and legend and story. Love you, Mariah. I love you so much.
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There's so much more to it than people who read about the celebrity aspect and the glitzy aspect of it realize.
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How was it, Paris? Awesome. There's just so much here. Aspen was born in the silver boom when
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silver was the king when it was the monetary standard. And it became one of the most successful silver boom towns in
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America. And then with the silver crash, it became a ghost town again until they
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found new riches in snow. And that's what began the second boom of Aspen when people came here to ski.
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From the silver miners to the Hunter Thompson era and beyond, Aspen has always been a town of renegades and and
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people who came who left everything they had known behind to start a new. It was this wild and free-spirited Aspen
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that Nancy Fister belonged. I mean, she was a true daughter of Aspen. She was wild and as beautiful as
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the place she was born and raised in. Everyone knew her. She was born to great parents. She was
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born to these Aspen originals. Artf Fister was a World War II fighter pilot from Minnesota who, like so many other
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people, came to Aspen to ski and he stayed. Art Fister paid $30,000 for the 700 acre lazy chair ranch on
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what is now Buttermilk Mountain. Betty Fister was as epic as Artf Fister. She was a legendary World War II woman
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pilot. She flew gliders, hot air balloons. She had a a brightly colored helicopter that she called Tinkerbell.
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She bungee jumped off a bridge in Australia when she was in her 70s. I mean, these are people who were
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adventurous to the end. Although Nancy apparently traveled the world, she always came home here. And
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so, in a sense, she never really left. She lived on the land that her father had bought way back in 1954.
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Aspen endures as it always does, but Nancy Fister will not soon be forgotten. [Music]