Aspen Times Columnist's Real Name Surprises No One

Aspen —The byline was wrong.

For 22 years, the weekly column High Points appeared in the Aspen Times under the pen name Paul E. Anna. Readers knew the voice — warm, observant, relentlessly positive in a valley prone to grumbling about traffic and construction. But they didn’t know the face. Last week, the mask slipped. The real name of the author was printed in the byline instead of the pseudonym.

And nobody noticed.

That is the part everyone skips past. It’s not that the name was revealed; it’s that the revelation landed with the thud of a stone dropped into a dry well. No phone calls. No emails. No posts on social media questioning who Paul E. Anna actually is. As far as the anonymous columnist knows, he was the only one who saw the discrepancy.

The column began in 2004, a time when the Aspen Times editor, Andy Stone, felt the paper needed a counterweight to the national anxiety of the Iraq War and the local irritations of Aspen’s growth spurt. The pitch was simple: write 400 words a week on only good stuff. Seek out the positive and eschew the negative. To keep the ego out of it, the writer stayed anonymous. Stone committed $50 per column, assuming the novelty would wear off before the paper’s deep pockets were tested. He underestimated the stamina of the project. High Points has remained a weekly endeavor ever since.

The author estimates the column has consumed roughly 2,400 hours of his life. For two-plus hours each week, he has sat down to focus on the people and things that make the valley special. Topics have ranged from skiing and local festivals to the work of other columnists, local dogs, and the incomparable beauty of the mountains. In a cynical world, the effort has forced a kind of disciplined optimism.

Initially, the lack of reaction to the identity reveal was discouraging. It felt like indifference to the column itself. But standing there long enough, the perspective shifted. The anonymity wasn’t a secret to be guarded; it was a shield against self-importance. If readers didn’t care who was writing, it meant they cared about what was being said. The column succeeded because it was about Aspen, not about the writer.

The story ends not with a dramatic unmasking, but with a quiet correction. The next week’s column will likely revert to Paul E. Anna. The real name will fade back into the margin, invisible again. The valley will continue to read about its own goodness, unaware that the voice guiding them has a face, a history, and a life outside the page. The mystery remains, not because it is hidden, but because it doesn’t matter.