Most people driving Highway 82 past the Woody Creek Tavern have no idea there is a racetrack on the mesa above it. It sits up a gravel road past a gravel mine, tucked behind a ridge, out of sight from the highway and mostly out of mind for anyone who hasn't lived next to it. For sixty-plus years that has been the point. Aspen Motorsports Park, known for decades as the Woody Creek Raceway, opened in 1963 as a quiet workaround to a statewide ban on street racing, and it has operated as a low-key private club ever since, unnoticed by most of the valley it sits above.
This summer, that changed. A sale, a 397-page redevelopment application, and one very well-attended public hearing turned a track most residents didn't know existed into the subject of the most contested land-use fight Woody Creek has seen in years. What happened next says less about racing and more about how this small, unincorporated community actually protects its own quiet, and it is worth understanding if you live anywhere near that mesa.
What Actually Sold, and For What
The 45-acre track closed for $17 million on June 24, 2026, a cash sale that came in well under its original $23 million asking price. The buyer was Mount Adams Capital LLC, with Todd Jacobs listed as principal, and the deal was represented through the application process by the Aspen land-use firm BendonAdams, whose partner Chris Bendon has described the purchase as a passion project by car-enthusiast buyers rather than a straightforward profit play.
What they proposed was not a restoration. The application called for realigning parts of the existing track, adding a new members-only clubhouse, expanded car storage and maintenance buildings, a wastewater treatment facility, 14 employee housing units built to hold up to 26 people, and an outdoor shooting range. It also asked the county to lift the 24-race-day-per-year limit set when the club's operating plan was approved in the early 1990s, opening the door to winter track use and effectively year-round, six-day-a-week operation.
The track's history made the ask complicated from the start. Aspen Motorsports Park sits on land zoned residential, which means its racing use exists only because it was grandfathered in decades ago as a nonconforming use. Any expansion of that use requires a special review, and because this application touched so many categories at once, county planner Franco Palumbo said it landed squarely with the Board of County Commissioners rather than a lower-level review body, the kind of application the county doesn't see very often.
The Community's Actual Response
The first organized pushback came from inside the neighborhood itself. On June 25, roughly 20 neighbors and members of the Woody Creek Caucus gathered to go through the application line by line. Caucus moderator Susan Taylor pressed the developers on the employee housing component in particular, questioning why a private racing club would need a staff of 20 full-time employees in the first place.
By the time the Pitkin County Board of County Commissioners opened its July 22 hearing, after a public site visit on July 15, the record had built into hours of testimony. What emerged wasn't a fight between car enthusiasts and everyone else. Several commenters described themselves as fans of the raceway who still didn't think the scale of the proposal fit the neighborhood.
The concerns clustered around noise and risk more than nostalgia. W/J Ranch resident Nancy Pearce compared the sound of the engines to a "dentist drill" that had made her own gardening and daily life difficult. Woody Creek resident Cindy Herndon, who lives directly adjacent to the track, raised wildfire risk from increased vehicle activity on top of the noise. Brush Creek resident John Pappas said he could hear the track from his home across Highway 82, well outside the immediate neighborhood.
"This is about using a grandfathered use to justify a massive expansion."
That was Susan Taylor's assessment at the hearing, and it captured the tone of most of the opposition. Aspen City Council member John Doyle put the imbalance more bluntly, saying the project carried too many private benefits against far too many public impacts. Not every voice was against it. One commenter, Liam Heath, credited early racing experience at the track with sending him toward a mechanical engineering degree at UC Berkeley, and Pitkin County Sheriff Michael Buglione spoke to the value of having a local facility for first-responder driving and firearms training. But by the county's own account, opposition outweighed support by a wide margin.
What Actually Changed Hands
Facing a motion from commissioners to deny the application outright, the developers asked to withdraw it before the board could vote, and the board unanimously agreed to let them. That happened on July 22, 2026, two months before this writing.
Here's the part worth sitting with: withdrawal isn't denial, and it isn't a resolution. Mount Adams Capital still owns the 45 acres. The purchase closed weeks before the hearing even took place, which meant the buyers were financially committed to the property before they knew whether the county would let them use it the way they wanted to. Nothing in the record suggests they can't come back with a smaller, revised application, and nothing about the underlying nonconforming-use status has changed. The track can still operate under its original 1990s terms: capped race days, no shooting range, no expanded housing.
What actually shifted is less about paperwork and more about leverage. A handful of things happened in sequence that matter for anyone paying attention to how this neighborhood functions:
- The Woody Creek Caucus organized early, going through the application before it ever reached a commissioner's desk.
- The county's own Open Space and Trails department flagged concerns about trail impacts and pushed for commitments the developers hadn't originally offered.
- Public turnout at both the July 15 site visit and the July 22 hearing was heavy enough, and specific enough by name and street, that commissioners had a detailed record of exactly who would be affected and how.
- Commissioners moved toward denial before the developers had a chance to negotiate a middle path, which is what forced the withdrawal rather than a modified approval.
That sequence is the actual story here, more than the track itself. Woody Creek doesn't have zoning that automatically shields it from a project like this. What it has is a caucus that shows up, neighbors willing to put their names and addresses into the public record, and a county commission willing to weigh a few hundred noise complaints against a $17 million investment and side with the noise complaints. That is a different kind of protection than a setback requirement or a use restriction, and it is worth knowing about if you are the kind of resident who assumes the zoning code alone keeps things quiet up here.
What Stays the Same For Now
The track's own history is part of what made this fight feel personal rather than procedural. Aspen Motorsports Park has hosted Mario Andretti, Emerson Fittipaldi, Jimmy Vasser, and Katherine Legge over the decades, and it carries the weight of a 2023 accident that killed Jim Crown, former Aspen Skiing Co. managing partner, on the track. Both of those histories, the glamorous and the tragic, showed up in testimony as reasons the facility needed modernizing and as reasons its footprint shouldn't grow. Neither side disputed that the existing facilities are, by the developers' own description, run down and overdue for safety upgrades.
For now, the mesa above the tavern stays roughly what it has been: a private club most people never notice, operating under a 1990s-era cap, with an owner who paid $17 million for land they can't yet use the way they'd hoped. Whether Mount Adams Capital returns with a scaled-back version of the plan, or leaves the original limits in place, will likely depend on whether they think another round with the Woody Creek Caucus is worth the effort. Based on this summer, that caucus isn't going anywhere.
If you're weighing what a story like this means for property near Highway 82, or for any parcel where a legacy use sits on residentially zoned land, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these county hearings as closely as the market itself. Steven Shane works Woody Creek and the rest of the Roaring Fork Valley with exactly that kind of attention. Work With Steven Shane if you want a read on how a piece of land's history, not just its listing price, shapes what you're actually buying.
