The New Rules for Houseguests in Mountain Towns

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They don’t call it lifestyle property for nothing. Anyone who is fortunate enough to live in a beautiful place can expect visitors and a lot of houseguests. I know because I live in a mountain town.

When I was younger and living in a shared house in Aspen, I rashly, widely urged friends to visit, to crash in sleeping bags. But then there were more and more. Someone who supposedly knew my brother from college called and asked if she and her brother could stay a few days. (It’s always “a few.”) One of my housemates had a romance with a visiting British guy, who came back the next winter with two of his friends. By then she’d met someone new, and so she left the three Brits sleeping in our living room for days, until I was elected to tell them to decamp.

In those days of land lines, one time when I came back from work, a visiting friend said, “I called Russia.”

“You … what?”

“I had to call Russia. You can tell me when you get the bill.”

Of course, I’ve stayed in many a friend’s house, and I love having people for dinner and to visit. But early on in Aspen, my housemates and I realized we had to manage the situation. I started warning people ahead to say I would be working and couldn’t ski with them every day, nor go out every night. Guests who are on vacation and locals who are not are fundamentally at cross purposes.

Eventually I got married, moved 30 miles down valley to Carbondale, entered many years of kids and schools, and had visitors, but not the same sort of volume. Lately, though, they are surging anew.

Friends are taking early retirement. Some are self-employed or have reduced their hours, and some are working “very part time.” And there are always teachers with summers off, or just people on breaks: lighthearted, blithe.

Recently a friend said he was coming to town and asked to stay. My husband and I said sure. “I’ll get there Monday or Tuesday,” the next text said. He arrived Sunday morning: “Oh, I thought it was Monday.”

Friends pass through on long road trips, with loaded roof racks and bike racks. People I haven’t seen in years write, “How are you?” and I know what that means. People ask all the time if I can take time off or do things on weekdays. But I work full-time, and in the last month we’ve had six sets of visitors. I wanted to see every one of them (and insisted on hosting some for certain events), but PTO is finite.

The other change is this: now I work at home. The pandemic. A friend who also works at home recently told her nephew sorry, no, he and his wife couldn’t come stay on a Tuesday through Thursday. Her old guest room is now her office, which she must use to work. It’s always easier to have friends on a weekend, but visitors forget, because they’re on vacation.

So, a few suggested tenets for visiting friends in mountain towns and other beautiful places.

1. Ask your hosts well ahead of time if a date works, and offer an easy option to decline. I.e.: “We can also camp, so no worries if you have too much going on.” A dear friend came through last week, knew we had our son and his girlfriend here in addition to two people in a van in the driveway, and mercifully said, “Can you come meet us for dinner one night?”

2. It helps to keep your stay to three nights, per the old saying about fish. (An exception is family, especially our now grown kids … er, and all their friends.)

3. No one was ever anything but pleased with a thoughtful house gift. Anything’ll do. And/or bring food! A cooler is good, too, so you can bring more!

4. Offer to contribute to meals and cover at least one dinner, whether it’s cooked in your host’s house—that’s fine! that’s heaven!—or at a restaurant.

5. Please put your dishes in the dishwasher. They can’t make it there from the counter on their own.

6. On leaving, put sheets and towels in the laundry room, and clean up the bathroom a little.

7. Aim to visit on weekends. At the end of “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen,” Baz Luhrmann says, “Trust me about the sunscreen.” Trust me about the weekends. Midweek is tricky when people work.

8. Help me out. I work a lot. I prefer people not bang on my office door shouting, “Time to stop!” Or chide, “You’re not working again, are you?” or ask, “When are you going to retire?” I like my job, and I’d like to keep it.

Last, I practice what my brother and his husband—who hosted me and everybody else under the sun while they were in the State Department in embassy housing overseas—always called benign neglect. Make your own plans, come and go as you like. I’m glad to see you and will join in if I can, but mostly give you a hug and a house key.

Alison Osius, a senior editor at Outside, lives in Carbondale, in Western Colorado. Having stayed with her brother and his family in Indonesia and Vietnam, she hopes they will take her up on visiting her to ski in Colorado next spring break. She’d hit the slopes with them on the weekend.

For more by this author, see:

Colorado’s Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail Takes You to Sacred Grounds

Don’t Let Altitude Sickness Ruin Your Mountain Vacation. Heed This Doctor’s Tips to Avoid It.

In 2022 A Stranger Saved Us in a Storm at Green River. Trying to Find Him, I Just Got a Surprise.