Fri, Jan 29
🌎 Nation's Best
X Games Aspen 2027
For three days at the end of January a mountain in Colorado becomes the only place in the world where the hardest tricks in snowboarding and skiing are attempted in public, at night, in front of a crowd standing in single-digit cold. X Games Aspen has run at Buttermilk Mountain for twenty-six consecutive years, and it is the event that decides what the next several winters of the sport will look like.
What it is actually like is colder and louder than television suggests. The superpipe is twenty-two feet tall, and the scale of it only registers standing at the bottom - riders come out of the wall a full building's height above the deck, and the sound the crowd makes is not cheering so much as a collective involuntary noise. Big Air runs at night under floodlights with the mountain black behind it, which is the single best thing to watch in winter sport. Between drops there is music, and between events there are several thousand people in the strangest assortment of technical outerwear and thrift-store fur you will encounter anywhere.
Is it worth it? If you follow the sport at all, this is the one. Nowhere else will you see every ranked rider in the same place trying things they would not risk at a World Cup, because the format rewards the attempt rather than the consistent run - which is exactly why the tricks that define a generation tend to land here first. If you do not follow the sport, go anyway for Big Air at night; it converts people. Where it is less for you: this is not a ski holiday. Competition days are long, standing, and cold, and the terrain you came to ride is busy.
What to know before you go. Spectator access to the main venue has historically been free, which surprises people and is the single best-kept fact about it - the cost is getting to Aspen in late January, not getting in. Book lodging absurdly early or stay down-valley in Basalt or Carbondale and ride the free bus up; Aspen's rates in X Games week are what they sound like. Dress for standing still in the cold rather than for skiing, because you will not be moving. Evening sessions are the marquee ones. Buttermilk is the smallest of the four local mountains and the shuttle situation is the thing first-timers underestimate.
It belongs on this list because it is one of the few American sporting events that is genuinely a culture rather than a fixture - a discipline inventing itself in public, on a deadline, with the whole sport watching. Buttermilk Mountain, Aspen, Colorado, the last weekend of January.
For three days at the end of January a mountain in Colorado becomes the only place in the world where the hardest tricks in snowboarding and skiing are attempted in public, at night, in front of a crowd standing in single-digit cold. X Games Aspen has run at Buttermilk Mountain for twenty-six consecutive years, and it is the event that decides what the next several winters of the sport will look like.
What it is actually like is colder and louder than television suggests. The superpipe is twenty-two feet tall, and the scale of it only registers standing at the bottom - riders come out of the wall a full building's height above the deck, and the sound the crowd makes is not cheering so much as a collective involuntary noise. Big Air runs at night under floodlights with the mountain black behind it, which is the single best thing to watch in winter sport. Between drops there is music, and between events there are several thousand people in the strangest assortment of technical outerwear and thrift-store fur you will encounter anywhere.
Is it worth it? If you follow the sport at all, this is the one. Nowhere else will you see every ranked rider in the same place trying things they would not risk at a World Cup, because the format rewards the attempt rather than the consistent run - which is exactly why the tricks that define a generation tend to land here first. If you do not follow the sport, go anyway for Big Air at night; it converts people. Where it is less for you: this is not a ski holiday. Competition days are long, standing, and cold, and the terrain you came to ride is busy.
What to know before you go. Spectator access to the main venue has historically been free, which surprises people and is the single best-kept fact about it - the cost is getting to Aspen in late January, not getting in. Book lodging absurdly early or stay down-valley in Basalt or Carbondale and ride the free bus up; Aspen's rates in X Games week are what they sound like. Dress for standing still in the cold rather than for skiing, because you will not be moving. Evening sessions are the marquee ones. Buttermilk is the smallest of the four local mountains and the shuttle situation is the thing first-timers underestimate.
It belongs on this list because it is one of the few American sporting events that is genuinely a culture rather than a fixture - a discipline inventing itself in public, on a deadline, with the whole sport watching. Buttermilk Mountain, Aspen, Colorado, the last weekend of January.
What it is actually like is colder and louder than television suggests. The superpipe is twenty-two feet tall, and the scale of it only registers standing at the bottom - riders come out of the wall a full building's height above the deck, and the sound the crowd makes is not cheering so much as a collective involuntary noise. Big Air runs at night under floodlights with the mountain black behind it, which is the single best thing to watch in winter sport. Between drops there is music, and between events there are several thousand people in the strangest assortment of technical outerwear and thrift-store fur you will encounter anywhere.
Is it worth it? If you follow the sport at all, this is the one. Nowhere else will you see every ranked rider in the same place trying things they would not risk at a World Cup, because the format rewards the attempt rather than the consistent run - which is exactly why the tricks that define a generation tend to land here first. If you do not follow the sport, go anyway for Big Air at night; it converts people. Where it is less for you: this is not a ski holiday. Competition days are long, standing, and cold, and the terrain you came to ride is busy.
What to know before you go. Spectator access to the main venue has historically been free, which surprises people and is the single best-kept fact about it - the cost is getting to Aspen in late January, not getting in. Book lodging absurdly early or stay down-valley in Basalt or Carbondale and ride the free bus up; Aspen's rates in X Games week are what they sound like. Dress for standing still in the cold rather than for skiing, because you will not be moving. Evening sessions are the marquee ones. Buttermilk is the smallest of the four local mountains and the shuttle situation is the thing first-timers underestimate.
It belongs on this list because it is one of the few American sporting events that is genuinely a culture rather than a fixture - a discipline inventing itself in public, on a deadline, with the whole sport watching. Buttermilk Mountain, Aspen, Colorado, the last weekend of January.
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X Games Aspen 2027
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Friday, January 29, 2027
10:00 AM MST – 1:00 PM MST
Spectator access historically free
· until Jan 31, 2027
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For three days at the end of January a mountain in Colorado becomes the only place in the world where the hardest tricks in snowboarding and skiing are attempted in public, at night, in front of a crowd standing in single-digit cold. X Games Aspen has run at Buttermilk Mountain for twenty-six consecutive years, and it is the event that decides what the next several winters of the sport will look like.
What it is actually like is colder and louder than television suggests. The superpipe is twenty-two feet tall, and the scale of it only registers standing at the bottom - riders come out of the wall a full building's height above the deck, and the sound the crowd makes is not cheering so much as a collective involuntary noise. Big Air runs at night under floodlights with the mountain black behind it, which is the single best thing to watch in winter sport. Between drops there is music, and between events there are several thousand people in the strangest assortment of technical outerwear and thrift-store fur you will encounter anywhere.
Is it worth it? If you follow the sport at all, this is the one. Nowhere else will you see every ranked rider in the same place trying things they would not risk at a World Cup, because the format rewards the attempt rather than the consistent run - which is exactly why the tricks that define a generation tend to land here first. If you do not follow the sport, go anyway for Big Air at night; it converts people. Where it is less for you: this is not a ski holiday. Competition days are long, standing, and cold, and the terrain you came to ride is busy.
What to know before you go. Spectator access to the main venue has historically been free, which surprises people and is the single best-kept fact about it - the cost is getting to Aspen in late January, not getting in. Book lodging absurdly early or stay down-valley in Basalt or Carbondale and ride the free bus up; Aspen's rates in X Games week are what they sound like. Dress for standing still in the cold rather than for skiing, because you will not be moving. Evening sessions are the marquee ones. Buttermilk is the smallest of the four local mountains and the shuttle situation is the thing first-timers underestimate.
It belongs on this list because it is one of the few American sporting events that is genuinely a culture rather than a fixture - a discipline inventing itself in public, on a deadline, with the whole sport watching. Buttermilk Mountain, Aspen, Colorado, the last weekend of January.
What it is actually like is colder and louder than television suggests. The superpipe is twenty-two feet tall, and the scale of it only registers standing at the bottom - riders come out of the wall a full building's height above the deck, and the sound the crowd makes is not cheering so much as a collective involuntary noise. Big Air runs at night under floodlights with the mountain black behind it, which is the single best thing to watch in winter sport. Between drops there is music, and between events there are several thousand people in the strangest assortment of technical outerwear and thrift-store fur you will encounter anywhere.
Is it worth it? If you follow the sport at all, this is the one. Nowhere else will you see every ranked rider in the same place trying things they would not risk at a World Cup, because the format rewards the attempt rather than the consistent run - which is exactly why the tricks that define a generation tend to land here first. If you do not follow the sport, go anyway for Big Air at night; it converts people. Where it is less for you: this is not a ski holiday. Competition days are long, standing, and cold, and the terrain you came to ride is busy.
What to know before you go. Spectator access to the main venue has historically been free, which surprises people and is the single best-kept fact about it - the cost is getting to Aspen in late January, not getting in. Book lodging absurdly early or stay down-valley in Basalt or Carbondale and ride the free bus up; Aspen's rates in X Games week are what they sound like. Dress for standing still in the cold rather than for skiing, because you will not be moving. Evening sessions are the marquee ones. Buttermilk is the smallest of the four local mountains and the shuttle situation is the thing first-timers underestimate.
It belongs on this list because it is one of the few American sporting events that is genuinely a culture rather than a fixture - a discipline inventing itself in public, on a deadline, with the whole sport watching. Buttermilk Mountain, Aspen, Colorado, the last weekend of January.
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