04/23/2026
Christopher Caskey/photo credit Aspen Time
There's a type of person who finishes a career in this valley and then immediately starts doing something harder.
Auden Schendler spent years as Aspen Skiing Company's sustainability chief. Matt Jones was the CFO. They weren't sitting on the sidelines watching the climate conversation happen — they were deep in it, building the first coal mine methane-to-electricity project west of the Mississippi out of the Elk Creek Mine in Somerset.
Then they both left their jobs.
And instead of retiring, they bought a coal mine.
Not to mine it. To stop it from leaking. The Bowie No. 1 mine above Paonia was sitting there — sealed off with bulldozed dirt — still venting methane into the atmosphere. Methane that's roughly 84 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year window. So Schendler, Jones, and scientist Chris Caskey drilled a hole in it, pumped in 20,000 pounds of foam to seal the portals, and now they burn the gas off.
Pipe and flame. Satisfyingly analog.
In October alone, the project destroyed more than 51 metric tons of methane — the equivalent of taking over 1,400 metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
I don't write this as a climate post. I write it as a valley post.
This is what second acts look like here. People who spent decades building operating knowledge — financial, technical, relational — and then deployed it toward something that wouldn't have been possible without that foundation. Jones spent a year building the original Elk Creek deal structure. Schendler spent years making the case inside a big institution. Caskey spent more than a decade hunting abandoned mine leaks across the North Fork Valley.
That's not philanthropy. That's expertise compounding in a new direction.
We have a lot of that in this valley — people who ran something real, who know how to get a complex project through permitting and financing and stakeholder politics, and who still want to build. The valley benefits every time one of them decides to stay and go to work on the next problem instead of moving somewhere easier.
Worth noting. Worth honoring.
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