X Games Aspen returns to Buttermilk on 29, 30 and 31 January 2027. It is the twenty-sixth consecutive year the event has been staged on the same mountain, and X Games and Aspen Snowmass have signed a host agreement that keeps it here through the winter of 2028/29 — which is unusual in action sports, and the reason the whole operation runs as smoothly as it does.
The short version for anyone planning a trip: three days of snowboard and ski competition on the Buttermilk superpipe and slopestyle course, free to watch during the day, ticketed in the evening, with two concerts attached. Buttermilk itself opens for the season on 12 December 2026, so there is a month and a half of normal skiing before the grandstands go up.
- Fri 29 JanuaryDay one, and Zhu at night.Competition through the afternoon, then the first of the two ticketed evening concerts.
- Sat 30 JanuaryThe big day — Marshmello at night.Saturday is the heaviest crowd of the three and the hardest day to get a dinner table anywhere in Aspen.
- Sun 31 JanuaryFinals, and out.The quietest of the three for spectators, and the easiest to do as a day trip from down valley.
What it costs, and what is actually free
Daytime access is free. That is the single most useful fact on this page, and it is the one most visitors do not believe. Aspen Snowmass states that X Games is free before 5pm each day while Buttermilk is open for skiing; the X Games event page puts the cutoff at 4pm. Treat the late afternoon as the line, and check the published schedule the week of — the two sources have not agreed in past years either.
What you pay for is the evening: the night competitions and the concerts. Tickets are sold through Fever in a general admission tier that covers three days of competition, X Fest and the nightly concerts, and in a Gold Lounge tier that adds a heated lounge, an open bar for over-21s, food and reserved viewing. There is also a two-day lift ticket add-on covering all four mountains across the event weekend, which has been offered at $208.
The first 500 Roaring Fork Valley high-school students get tickets free each day, first come first served. If you have a teenager in the valley, that is worth knowing in January rather than reading about in February.
There is no parking at Buttermilk
Write that down. Every year a share of visitors drives to the venue, finds nowhere to leave the car, and spends the first hour of the day solving a problem that did not need to exist.
The two ways in are both free. From Aspen, take the RFTA bus — it runs from downtown to Buttermilk and costs nothing on that stretch. From Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, Basalt or Snowmass, drive to the Brush Creek Park and Ride off Highway 82, leave the car there for free, and take the bus connection in. Snowmass has its own connection. In a town where the whole valley is trying to reach one small mountain on the same morning, the bus is not the budget option — it is the fast one.
Dress for standing still in January at 7,900 feet, which is a different proposition from skiing: an insulated jacket, a hat, gloves, and boots with grip. Sunscreen, because the UV at that elevation is punishing even when it is cold. An empty water bottle is allowed in; a sealed one usually is too. And if you have flown in within the last day, read the altitude guide before you spend eight hours outside at elevation.
Where to eat, which is the real problem
X Games weekend is, after Christmas and New Year, the hardest weekend of the Aspen year to get a table. Fifteen thousand-odd extra people arrive in a town with a finite number of dining rooms, and most of them have not booked anything. Three tiers of answer, in the order they are useful.
At the mountain
Home Team BBQ sits at the base of Buttermilk, which makes it the most convenient hot meal of the weekend and also the busiest. Eat early or eat late; the middle of the day is a queue. Inside the venue, X Fest runs food vendors, and prices are what event prices are.
In town, without a reservation
These are the rooms that absorb an X Games crowd without a booking, because they are built to turn people over quickly.
- Big WrapWraps, fast, cheap by Aspen standards. The default lunch for people who work in this town.
- New York PizzaA slice and a drink for under ten dollars, open until the small hours. The after-concert meal.
- Grateful DeliSandwiches, counter service, no ceremony.
- CP BurgerBurgers and the outdoor ice rink next to it. Works with children in tow.
- Paradise BakeryCoffee and pastry on the corner of Galena and Cooper, and the one queue in town that moves.
Our full list of fifty rooms — and the verdict on each — is on the restaurants page, and the cheap end of Aspen is collected in the $50-a-day guide.
For a real dinner
Book it now. Not in January — now. The dining rooms that matter take X Games weekend reservations months out, and the gap between booking in October and booking in the second week of January is the gap between eating where you wanted to and eating where there was room. If you are three or more people, that is doubly true.
Eat down valley and drive up for the day. Basalt, Carbondale and Glenwood Springs are twenty to forty minutes from Buttermilk and barely notice X Games weekend — same kitchens, same wine lists, a third of the pressure, and you will get a table on a Saturday. Basalt in particular is a short drive from the Brush Creek Park and Ride you are already using.
Who is competing
The 2027 edition runs as part of the X Games League winter draft. Among the names announced across snowboard and ski: Scotty James, Zeb Powell, Alex Hall, Eileen Gu, Mark McMorris and Luca Harrington. Start lists shift until close to the event — an injury in December rewrites a field — so treat any roster published this far out as an indication rather than a promise.
Is it worth building a trip around
Yes, with one caveat. The event itself is genuinely free to watch for most of the day, the standard of riding is the best in the world, and the atmosphere in town over those three days does not resemble any other week of the Aspen winter. The caveat is lodging: X Games weekend is priced like a holiday weekend, and it sits in a month that is already expensive.
If the skiing matters more than the event, the week after X Games is one of the quietest and best-value stretches of the whole season — the crowds leave, the snowpack is usually at its deepest, and the prices drop. That calculation, month by month, is laid out in when to visit Aspen.
Dates and the free-entry cutoff come from the X Games event page and Aspen Snowmass. Both are updated as the schedule firms up, and the two have differed on details in past years — confirm the daily schedule the week of rather than trusting a page written in October, this one included.