Thursday, 01 October 2009 00:41

How McLain Flats got its name

During the “Quiet Years” of Aspen, before our ski industry developed, before private jets and mega homes, ranchers were growing potatoes on the perfectly flat mesa we now know as McLain Flats. Mac McLain bought an automatic potato picker, claimed to be the first on the Western slope of Colorado. On one fine autumn day, Mac was operating his new potato picker in a field on McLain Flats. Apparently it started to rain and sleet, and kept on raining and sleeting for several days. Mac’s machine got stuck, smack in the middle of the mesa. When things finally dried out enough, ranchers brought in two-four in hand work horse teams to extricate the mud mired equipment. It was said that it took a very long time to move the potato picker from the bog.  As the story goes, it became a joke with the local ranchers, as each day they came across the mesa, the potato picker sat out in the middle of the flats hopelessly stuck.
The potato picker was finally rescued by the teams of horses, but the image of that piece of equipment sitting out there, on the flats for so many days, never left the minds of the locals. And that is the story as it was told to me by Doug McLain, Mac McLain’s son. 

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