Aspen Lawn Guy Lorenzo Semple Adapts to Drought as Income Plummets

The air in Aspen tastes different this summer. It’s thinner, drier, carrying the sharp, metallic tang of dust that settles on your tongue before you even realize you’ve been breathing it. For Lorenzo Semple, the self-described “lawn guy,” the heat isn’t just a weather event; it’s a ledger entry, and the numbers are bleeding red. His income, he writes in the Aspen Times, has plummeted to a third of what it was last summer. It’s not just the drought; it’s the realization that Nature is trying to fire him, and he’s too stubborn to quit.

Semple is caught in that peculiar limbo of middle age where reinvention feels like a foreign language and unemployment is a permanent address. He jokes about throwing in the trowel, about succumbing to a “help wanted” sign and pissing into a cup at the HR office, hoping Gary doesn’t read his column. But then he looks around. He sees Billy Cirelli, the legendary local OG, still mowing well into his later years. He sees Deb Curtis, head-phoned and sleeveless, pushing her Toro recycler through the West End. If they can endure the heat and the dust, he thinks, he has miles to go before he sleeps.

So, he adapts. He’s been quietly training his clients for this hydro-hobbled reality for a dozen years, just waiting for them to catch up. He’s been cutting their grass higher, leaving the clippings to mulch or side-discharge in that old-school, messy vitality, rather than bagging every scrap and dragging it to the dump. The dust from “Killer 82” made bagging a tedious, unappealing endeavor, so he stopped. He’s mowing every other week now, a regimen his clients seem to accept, even if they don’t entirely love it. Some had been asking for this shift for years; he just pushed back then. Now, gripping the reigns looser, he’s letting the grass breathe.

And ironically, the lawns are holding up. The ones adhering strictly to local water restrictions look better than the ones that are “above” the rules, hiding their excess behind a veneer of green. You can see the difference in the morning dew. Semple is trying to wean himself off the “sauce” of constant hydration, too. He’s counting every drop, whether he’s brushing his teeth, doing dishes, or letting the sprinkler dust off his mountain bike overnight instead of spraying it down. He’s flushing less, showering irregularly. “Smell me if you don’t believe me,” he writes. “Sound gross? It is. I am.”

It’s a sensory confession from a man who knows the weight of a mower and the smell of dry earth. He’s not just talking about water policy or municipal restrictions; he’s talking about the physical reality of living in a valley that’s drying out. The river is the ultimate judge, and one look at it is enough to make anyone conserve. Semple is doing his part, one high-cut lawn at a time, accepting that the grind might be slower, the income lower, but the work is still there. He’s still mowing. He’s still here. And if you walk past a yard in the West End at dusk, you might just hear the hum of a Toro, cutting through the heat, leaving behind a trail of clippings that will dry out before the sun sets.