THE DEDICATION of the solar array, it must be said, rocked. On a bluebird July day at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, in Carbondale, there was straw underfoot and puffy clouds above, building over Mount Sopris. There was Budweiser and bluegrass, golden retrievers and Garfield County commissioners, the full complement of ranchers and yoginis and climbers and candidates from this mini-Boulder on the Western Slope. And there, behind the stage, was the shiny new 147-kilowatt array—nine banks of 84 solar panels each, tilted toward the southern sun.

"You're obviously way ahead of the game when it comes to the new energy economy," Colorado governor Bill Ritter told the crowd. "As we pulled in, solar panels were being installed at a townhouse across from this. I said, 'Either that's the best job of staging or this town really is committed to installing solar.' "

Actually, the array is the $1.1 million baby of the town, the school, Xcel Energy, the Community Office for Resource Efficiency, and the Aspen Skiing Company, 30 miles up the Roaring Fork Valley. The town and CORE had the idea; the school provided the land; and the SkiCo put up the money to finance the project. The setup will generate an annual 210,000 kilowatt-hours. The school will use a third of that power, and the rest will be sold back to the grid—giving the SkiCo a modest return on its investment.

"We understand that it's our responsibility to find cleaner ways to power our lifts," said Mike Kaplan, Aspen's athletic, 44-year-old CEO, from the podium. Reducing energy consumption is important, he explained, "for our own environmental sustainability, and now, with the price of oil and all the other factors, it's for our own economic viability."

Watching all this from beside the stage was Auden Schendler, the brash force behind the SkiCo's relentless environmental push. Now, as the band packed up and the demo electric car scooted away, he handed his one-year-old son, Elias, off to his wife, Ellen, and headed over for an interview with the cable channel Plum TV. The whole project was so ambitious, the reporter said; what was a ski resort doing installing a $1.1 million solar array?

"Might as well go big or go home," Schend­ler replied.

FOR THE RECORD, Auden Schendler's shorts are not all that short. I'd been warned at the solar dedication that I'd better be prepared when I showed up at the SkiCo's offices in Aspen the next morning. "He'll show you around in his short shorts," brand-development director Steve Metcalf had said, striking a few manly-man poses. "Yeah, they're not all the way short," said a PR consultant, laughing. "But they're definitely mid-short."

The shorts, it turned out, are stiff seventies-style canvas hikers possessed of a certain heroic Dudley Do-Right practicality, much like Schendler himself. As the SkiCo's executive director of environmental affairs since 2001, Schendler has emerged as the industry's most visible environmental gadfly, and the man who's led Aspen's relentless push toward more forward-thinking projects. In 2004, the SkiCo became the first ski resort to gain ISO 14001 certification, meaning its operations meet green guidelines set by the International Organization for Standardization. It started the Save Snow campaign to encourage activism; created an Environment Foundation, through which its employees have donated more than $1 million to local projects; installed real-time energy-monitoring software; and stopped buying Kleenex for its four ski areas—Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk, and Snowmass—because the brand refused to quit using virgin paper from endangered forests. As other resorts rush to follow Aspen's lead, Schendler is, in effect, setting the environmental agenda for the entire industry.