Hiking Recs near Aspen

You can walk up smugglers mountain right in town. It's a fire road that goes switch backs until you get to the top but then you have a nice view over the town. Keep going and it becomes single track. Since it's in town, there are a lot of people on the trail including mountain bikes. There is a nice paved path along the frying pan river in town and trust me, with the altitude, you will want a flat trail.

I am guessing that you mean Notch Mtn. Why would he drive from Aspen to Minturn to hike? Or drive over to the Collegiate's when he has the Elk's right there?

I agree with Smugglers although it is a dirt road hike, the viewing area is cool. I have hiked Ute Trail and it is also right there in town but on the opposite side of Smugglers. I've run into Lance Armstrong both times I have hiked Ute.

Cathedral Lake is a good one also.

There is a ton there just depends on how much you wanna climb and how far you want to go.

I am in interesting shape.

Not good but not awful. Hopefully better by the time I go.

With the Ute trail though, I saw that it’s rated as very difficult and I don’t know why.

I don’t want to be doing trails where I can easily fall off a mountain because I probably would. Or trails where you’re having to jump over things, etc.

But it looks like a lot of time times These trails are just rated hard because they’re tiring. I can deal with that.

Ute is rated as difficult because of elevation gain, it's a stair stepper. You can go about a mile up to a lookout point and turn around there if you don't want to do the whole thing. You can hike the whole way up to the sundeck and take the gondola down or I guess you could ride up and walk down.

Stay off Government trail, its full of mountain bikers.