One of my biggest pet peeves is to read about an incredible event that occurred in town that I somehow missed, which partially explains why I took the path to becoming a family travel writer. I figured that if I could get myself known as the key person to contact when something interesting was going on for families, I would never have to be in the dark ever again.

In addition, I have teamed up with Aspen Shines, a locally owned and operated website that offers a downloadable Aspen iPhone Application. Now we all can be keyed into their social calendar that gives the most current and up to date information on “Aspen Hot Spots,” Restaurants and Bars.

May Selby, the Author of the Aspen Times Column “Mountain Mayhem,” also writes the “Aspen Today” column for Aspen Shines and she, unlike me, is very good at keeping her finger on the pulse.

The thing is that the fun never stops in Aspen and we don’t always need to wait for events to come our way to provide entertainment. Aspen Shines will be the first to let you know that while it is true that Aspen has some of the most remarkable skiing in the world there is so much more of an adventure to be had in the Roaring Fork Valley for families that is not just slope specific.

Who needs Disney World when fun activities and adventures abound directly outside your front door?

This past March Aspen Shines kids enjoyed themselves in and around Aspen. Below are the photos to remind us that it takes so little to bring on the fun.

So be sure to follow suit and don’t forget to lather on the sunscreen, bring a coat for the mountain weather that can change in a heartbeat and bring your BPA free water bottle.

• Ride the RFTA bus around town or take advantage of Aspen’s free shuttle buses. Either one will fulfill your child’s love for rides.

• Be guaranteed a fun ride on a fire truck if you visit the fire station.

• Go to The Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park and ride the Canyon Flyer, the first alpine coaster in the United States. Your kids will love being in control of their speed as you careen around the tight turns.

• Snowmobile above Lenado with Western Adventures.   

• When it’s open again, ride the Gondola to the top of Aspen Mountain and race down the Nastar course. Your kids will love it when they win an award for fastest speed in their age group.

• Take a walk around town. You never know what celebrity you may run into.

• Of course, there is always the adventure of going out to eat. There are so many kid friendly restaurants around that it is tough to choose from. For the best wraps in town go to The Big Wrap. For pizza go to Domino’s, New York Pizza, Highlands Pizza Company, Mezzaluna or Brunelleschi’s to make your own. For smoothies and cookies go to Peach’s, Victoria’s or Poppycock’s. For buffet style delicious food on the go, go to Jour de Fete. For deli meat and sandwiches go to The Butcher’s Block or Johnny McGuire’s. For sit down go to LuLu Wilson’s, Krabloonik’s, Main Street Bakery or The Woody Creek Tavern. For dessert, go to the Dark Horse Alley, Boogie’s Diner or Paradise Bakery.

• For parks visit the Yellow Brick Schoolhouse park or the John Denver Rock Park.

• Make mini me snowmen.

• Visit the ARC and meander down the lazy river pool or test their skills on the climbing wall, ice skating rink and the Whoa Nelly sledding hill.

When the day is coming to a close you can now enjoy some quiet time while your children collapse in complete happy exhaustion!

Last Tuesday night a girlfriend gave me a precious gift by inviting me to join her to watch an evening of movies at the aspenShortsfest that claims to be, “one of the world’s premier international short film and video showcases for the trend-setting art form: the short. Aspen Shortsfest’s centerpiece, the six-day Oscar®-qualifying International Competition, offers a lively, thought-provoking, and humorous selection of drama, comedy, animation and documentary – all 30 minutes or less”.

Not only was it a treat because I am passionate about films but I was once the Hospitality Coordinator for the festival, a job that was right up my alley, and I miss being a part of it all.

I helped to organize the travel for the filmmakers and coordinate their activities once they arrived. One of the highlights of my job was to map out the rooming situation by getting to know them through email and figuring out who should be roommates in the donated condos, hotel rooms and generous film lover’s homes. I did my best to put the shy near the boisterous and the foreign with the domestic. It was very rewarding to see the beautiful and lasting relationships that transpired.

The filmmakers were an eclectic mix of people, as were their films, and their bonding created incredible energy during the festival.

At the end of the festival they were always very sad to leave and often commented on their admiration for the Executive Director of the festival, Laura Thielen, and her husband George Eldred who is the Program Director for the festival. They also mentioned how brilliantly the program was put together and how Laura and George successfully created a far more personable and less commercial atmosphere than the other festivals that they had attended.

As stated on their website, “For almost two decades Aspen Shortsfest has connected film lovers with the unique qualities of short films, which encourage unparalleled innovation and creativity, by presenting works from established filmmakers and emerging artists alike. For example, Academy Award®-nominated producer and director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) first garnered notice at Aspen Shortsfest 2000, winning the festival’s best comedy and audience awards. Four of the films shown at Shortsfest 2009 were recently nominated for Academy Awards®: Nick Park’s A Matter of Loaf and Death and Fabrice O. Joubert’s French Roast, for Best Short Film-Animated, and Instead of Abracadabra, directed by Patrik Eklund and Mathias Fjellstroem, and Miracle Fish, from Luke Doolan and Drew Bailey, for Best Short Film-Live Action”.

This week is your chance to see some more incredible films and even though the festival began April 6th you need not to worry. You still have the weekend to see more films and chances are that if you missed any shows upvalley you may still have the chance to watch them downvalley at The Crystal Theatre.

For those of you who would like to bring your children, there is a family program on Sunday, April 11th beginning at 2:00pm, at The Wheeler Opera House. Tickets are $6 and filmmakers are expected to come and speak afterwards.  The program runs 60 min. The presentation is appropriate for ages 11+

Another program of interest that is also showing on Sunday, April 11th at The Wheeler Opera House, beginning at 6:00pm, is Australia’s Tropfest’s Best showing movies that are 7 minutes or less. Tickets are $12.

The program runs 80 minutes and is appropriate for ages 13+

All films are shown either at The Wheeler Opera House, The Isis or downvalley in Carbondale at The Crystal Theatre.

Visit this link for the complete online guide.

I hope to see you all there.

On Tuesday night I went to see Jared Diamond speak at the historic Wheeler Opera House, a beautiful theater built in 1889, with seats in rich Moroccan leather and an azure ceiling with silver stars that appear as though they are popping out of an early evening sky.

Diamond, a professor of Geography and Physiology at the University of California, was being presented by  the Aspen’s Writers Foundation Winter Word Series as one of America’s most celebrated scholars.

The lights went down and the spotlight landed on Diamond, who would be speaking for the next hour about his latest book titled, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

I was immediately taken in by Diamond, an avuncular man dressed in hiking boots and high wasted brown pants with a tucked in pink Oxford shirt and I sat mesmerized as he spoke about how and why whole societies have lost their way in the past and descended into chaos.

He spoke of the demise of highly advanced civilizations like the Maya who developed astronomy, calendrical systems and hieroglyphic writing as far back as 200-400 AD and who were noted for elaborate and highly decorated ceremonial architecture all built without metal tools. They were also skilled farmers, clearing large sections of tropical rain forest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizeable underground reservoirs for the storage of rainwater. The Maya were equally skilled as weavers and potters, and cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster extensive trade networks with distant peoples. Source.

Diamond also referred to the prehistoric Native American Anasazi Indians that lived from 200 to 1300 AD, in the Four Corners of the southwest United States. The Anasazi Indians were adept hunters and food gatherers discovering how to cultivate maize, squash and beans. They were also astute pottery makers.

He continued to talk about the people of Easter Island, “who in just a few centuries, wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?”

“Their vanishing touches us as the disappearance of other animals, even the dinosaurs, never can. No matter how exotic those lost civilizations seem, their framers were humans like us. Who is to say we won’t succumb to the same fate? Perhaps someday New York’s skyscrapers will stand derelict and overgrown with vegetation, like the temples at Angkor Wat and Tikal.”

Diamond was by no means taking an apocalyptic stance about the state of the world, giving us glimpses of hope by speaking of the people in Papua New Guinnea who have been around for 46,000 years because they have learned how to sustain themselves by reserving and transplanting their resources.

On my drive home in a blinding snowstorm with black iced roads, I thought about the message that this extremely fluent and amicable author was giving to us, a message that I have heard repeatedly that has always left me in a stone cold sweat.

If we don’t make the choice now to study the past and fix the problems that exist today, than in a mere fifty years time it is quite possible that we will be following in the footsteps of those intelligent civilizations who either were destroyed by civil wars or who committed “serial ecoside, straightforward abuse of their physical environment that precipitated their demise” and we will not be the ones to suffer but instead it will be our children and grandchildren.

At the end of his lecture Diamond directed his last sentence to the younger people in the audience and said, “It’s your choice on whether you want to make a world that is worth living in,” but it is our responsibility as well and we must take the environmental problems of today seriously and make the right choices together, now.