A Bomb in Aspen

A vivid and harrowing story in the new issue of Outside magazine. Jim Blanning, 72, sent Aspen, Colorado, into a frenzy this New Year’s Eve when he walked into two banks and robbed them by threatening to set off bombs. In Mike Kessler’s piece, we learn that Blanning was a town playboy, an occasionally flush prospector and—in darker moments—a man “with some wild thing in his head,” according to his brother. Still reeling from a real estate gambit didn’t go his way, he walked into a Well Fargo branch and handed a note to the banker: “You had better be one very cool individual … or many in Aspen will pay a horrible price in blood.”