Hardcover

The Hardcover Edition — Built to Be Kept

This is the highest-quality version of The Furry Mountain Monkeys of Aspen, Colorado. It has weight in your hands, texture on the cover, and pages that invite you to slow down and stay a while. The illustrations carry more depth. The spreads open wide. The story feels at home here.

It’s the version that sits on a shelf within reach. The one that gets picked up again. The one that gets read aloud, then read again quietly, then handed to someone else with a certain level of confidence.

If you find yourself relating to a moment when you were the one in need and someone offered help with no strings attached, this is a version worth keeping. Stories like this carry that forward—the choice to help, the chance to be accepted, and the ways we adapt for one another.

Now to the Book

This is a children’s book that behaves like it has lived a few lives. It presents itself as a gentle rhyming story about a boy and some unusually thoughtful monkeys, then quietly unfolds into Aspen history and a study in how living things decide whether to help a stranger or protect themselves.

At first glance, it is simple. A boy skis. A boy crashes. A boy is found by a troop of small, light-brown monkeys with glowing green eyes. But how those monkeys came to live inside Aspen Mountain is a story of its own—and it begins long before the boy ever puts on his skis.

Perhaps these kind little monkeys once lived in the jungle where their glowing green eyes would have made them less than ideal neighbors. Imagine trying to sleep beside them. Or hide from a predator. One can only imagine the jungle meetings. Sleep disrupted. Hiding places illuminated. A general sense that these monkeys, while lovely in spirit, had begun to function more as lighting fixtures than friendly neighbors. Perhaps the larger primates finally drove them out, leaving them to find somewhere else to belong. Our own species knows something about leaving home and learning to survive in unfamiliar surroundings.

Whatever brought them to Aspen, the monkeys found refuge in its abandoned silver mines—remnants of a time when men followed silver into the mountain and returned each night to drafty cabins that offered considerably less comfort than advertised.

Deep inside the mountain, the monkeys built something remarkable: a hidden ecosystem sustained by a hot sulfur spring and their own inconveniently useful eyes. The very trait that might have made them unwelcome elsewhere became the foundation of their survival. Their glow helped the plants grow. The plants fed the monkeys. And the monkeys, now properly zoned, settled into a quiet life beneath the mountain.

By the time our boy comes skiing down the slopes, this hidden world has survived undetected for generations—warm, thriving, and carefully concealed.

Then he crashes. And the monkeys have a decision to make.

He is injured, half-conscious, and exactly the kind of problem a secret-dependent species learns to avoid. Helping him introduces risk. Leaving him introduces a different kind of cost. The decision sits there, heavy and immediate. And this is where the story shifts from charming to revealing.

They help him.

With full awareness of what it could mean. They bring him into the cave, into the warmth, into the system they have protected for generations. They choose connection over self-preservation—a decision that carries weight every time it is made.

The boy heals in their world. He joins them in song, which feels like something that would be difficult to explain later, and is. He stays long enough to understand that what they have built is sustained, protected, and quietly generous.

The day comes when he must leave, because leaving is part of the arrangement. He returns to town with a story that asks for belief and receives something closer to polite dismissal. The Ski Patrol listens with the practiced patience of EMTs who have heard many things on a mountain after a skier meets a poorly aligned lift pad—and learned to sort them efficiently.

But the story holds. And for anyone who has lived a moment that others could not quite understand, this book will feel familiar.

What remains is less about whether the monkeys exist and more about what they chose to do when it mattered. A hidden system. A calculated risk. A connection. An acceptance. A decision to help someone who could undo everything simply by surviving and speaking.

Aspen itself has evolved in a similar way—through adaptation, reinvention, and a willingness to carry forward what came before. The end of the silver boom gave way to a long, uncertain stretch. Ranchers and Italian potato farmers found fertile ground and made use of what remained—the rail lines that once carried silver now moving crops to market. Then came another shift, when Elizabeth Paepcke arrived during World War II, saw something others had overlooked, and recognized her husband Walter’s vision of a place where mind, body, and spirit could exist in harmony. Her belief, and his trust in it, helped shape Aspen into the world-class destination it is today.

The monkeys follow a similar arc. They take what remains, adapt, and build something that works. The story rests there: resilience in uncertainty, perseverance through change, acceptance, and the kind of risk that carries the possibility of something better.

A Book Born From a Three-Line Ad

This book exists because of a classified ad. Three lines in the Aspen Daily News, read while I was searching for a job that felt slightly more promising than moving furniture:

“Write children’s book. Incorporate Aspen history. Submit for contest.”

That was it. No further instructions. No guarantees. Just an open invitation. So I tried.

What emerged is a story layered with real Aspen history—woven into the mountain, the landscape, and the culture of a town that has always drawn people willing to follow something uncertain.

This hardcover is where that story settles in. It holds up. It stays with you. And it’s ready to be handed to the next person who might need it.