Aspen's Buttermilk Mountain assumed two distinct personalities over a weekend in January 2008. It was almost like different ski mountains coexisting -- somewhat incredulously and barely aware of one another -- on the same hill at the same time.

On the front side, filling the base area and the slopes closest to the valley, ESPN's Winter X Games XII spun along for three days and nights like a hip-hop, youth-culture, on-snow circus.

Snow-covered alleyways between sponsors' tents teemed with opportunities for free swag. TV cameras watched from above, swiveling on massive cranes.

Music throbbed to just about drown out the two-cycle scream of the snowmobiles. And astonishing pro athletes popped like popcorn above the lip of the halfpipe, battled their way down skiercross courses, and flew over big-air gaps wide enough to hide a small fleet of semitrucks.

At the same time on the mountain's backside, my friend and I found a Buttermilk as serene as any in-bounds, lift- served skiing we could remember. (And we have collectively skied more than 90 seasons.) In what is known as the Tiehack area on the mountain's eastern flank, we found six inches of quiet, cushiony powder and almost no one with whom to share it.

This was timeless old-school Aspen on one side, extreme-bling, new-century Aspen on the other.

And this is the combo with which Aspen has tried to reinvent itself in recent years. Colorado's first great ski town had grown stodgy in its dependence on upscale baby boomers and its refusal to allow snowboards on Aspen Mountain. That changed in April 2001, when the first ''trial period'' for boarders resulted in a wholesale opening of the floodgates.

The X Games blew into town in 2002 and are set to return through 2010. (This winter's dates are Jan. 22-25, 2009.) The ski company and the town have made a concerted effort to grow younger -- a biological impossibility, perhaps, but a marketing success, it seems.

Over on Tiehack, my friend and I drifted through sunny aspen glades. Turning among aspen trees is unlike anything else in skiing. The slim, straight, white-bark trunks wink at you with Cleopatra eyes -- actually the eye-shaped scars of sloughed-off lower branches. Sunlight streams through. There is no shade, only barred shadows that flicker as you pass like frames in an old movie.

BUTTERMILK

But where were all the powder-crazed Aspenites? Not at Buttermilk.

Buttermilk is beneath them. They were riding high at Aspen's three other bigger, more-famous mountains: Snowmass, Aspen Highlands and Aspen Mountain, known locally as Ajax. That left us to spoon lines in all that delicious powder by ourselves, powder the cat drivers had thoughtfully left ungroomed.

For an hour and a half we rarely crossed another skier's track. Then we thought, let's see what the circus is up to, shall we? From the backside around to the front, the way down offered more surprises.

Buttermilk was created in the late 1950s to be Aspen's learning mountain. (Ajax was and still is too steep for most novices.) Across Maroon Creek from the old silver mining town, Friedl Pfeifer, Aspen's ski school director then, spotted a gentle bread loaf of a mountain with sustained easy pitches from top to bottom. He bought a ranch at the base and opened Buttermilk with one T-bar in 1958.

The name came from one of two stories, depending on which old-timer you talked to. Loggers used to work that mountain, cutting ties for the railroad. One ''tiehack'' on the crew brought a pail of buttermilk every day to wash down his lunch, and eventually the hill became known as Buttermilk Mountain.

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