In late May and early June in Aspen, Colorado, ski-worthy winter snow gives way to wildflowers and fields of green grass. That’s when area residents start thinking about the season to come: the “Texas Takeover.”

Hikers and golfers show up wearing Houston Astros ball caps or Texans golf shirts. Cars bearing Texas license plates are everywhere. And in shops and restaurants, you’ll overhear the swagger of a Lone Star State accent.

“The Texans are coming. The Texans are coming,” part-time Coloradan Laura Umansky chants, mimicking how Coloradans ready themselves for the summer crowd that descends on the area annually.

Aspen and Snowmass Village are small towns just eight miles apart in Pitkin County, Colorado, with a combined population of around 10,000. But when high season rolls around, tourists leave Texas and elsewhere to beat the heat, easily doubling the head count.

No one knows exactly why or how the area became a magnet for Texans, but it’s clear that the summer phenomenon is real. So many wealthy Texans—Dallas makes a good showing, too—head to Aspen for the summer that many of Houston’s major hospitals take educational and fundraising trips there to stay in touch with existing donors and woo new ones. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Hermann Foundation both visit patrons in Aspen in the summer. Houston Methodist held similar programs there until 2018.

Umansky is a fourth-generation Texan and award-winning interior designer whose Laura U Design Collective firm now has offices in both Houston and Aspen. While she’d been skiing in Colorado for many years, her first trip to the Aspen area was a decade ago for Houston clients who needed help remodeling and decorating their vacation home.

“It was February…and very snowy, and it was so incredible,” Umansky says of that first visit. “I called [my husband] Michael and said ‘we’ve got to rent a place in Aspen for a month in the summer.’ By the time summer was over, we’d bought our first house here. We love it enough that we made it our permanent residence.”

The Umanskys still keep a condo in Houston, where Laura stays on regular business trips. And they are far from the only Houstonians who go back and forth for the weather, eager to shift from 100 degrees to 70 degrees in the summer.

Jacky Fischer and her husband have been vacationing in that area for more than a decade and visit for several weeks a few times a year.

“People come to ski and fall in love with it, and when they go for the summer, they enjoy it even more,” Fischer says. “My favorite time there is the fall, when aspen trees turn yellow and there’s a little snap of cooler weather at night. The change of seasons is breathtaking and beautiful.”

There’s a big food and wine festival in June and a music festival in July. A small rodeo kicks up on Wednesday nights and restaurants tout world-class chefs. The small airport serving the area has at least $1 billion in private jets in its parking lot.

When marching bands and Fourth of July parade floats pass through downtown Aspen, it’s against a backdrop of storefronts including Gucci, Prada, Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Valentino. The Roaring Fork Club, a private golf club in Basalt, is packed with Texans who also belong to Houston's River Oaks Country Club or Dallas Country Club.

Lex Tarumianz, broker associate with Sotheby’s International Realty in Aspen-Snowmass, estimates that 8 to 10 percent of homes in the area are owned by Texans.

“If you come to Aspen with $1 million, you’d be lucky to buy a single-wide trailer,” Tarumianz says of current market prices. “Some $10 million to $15 million will get you an older home or a townhome and this is the bottom end of the market. Our median price for homes is $14 million, and you’re getting a home that’s 3,500 to 4,500 square feet, older in decor and on a 6,000-square-foot lot.”

Some regular vacationers opt for smaller commitments instead. Dena Rafte and her husband, Bob Brown, didn’t want the work of maintaining a second home, so they bought into a time-share condo at the Ritz-Carlton in Aspen and have been going there for summers for 20 years. In July and August, Rafte says she runs into people she doesn’t even see in Houston, because when they’re at home, they don’t have time to go out.

Cherri Carbonara, CEO of the Houston public relations firm Carbonara Group, and her husband, Tom McGhie, use their Snowmass condo off and on throughout the year, skiing and snowboarding during spring break weeks with family, then staying as much as they can during the summer, welcoming Houston friends who drop in and out.

Carbonara had been skiing the area for 20 years when she lucked into the purchase of her condo from a friend who’d bought it in foreclosure. And whether she’s at a Snowmass restaurant or Aspen farmers market, she sees familiar faces everywhere she goes.

“One day I was sitting out on the patio at Hotel Jerome [in Aspen] with two Houston friends and there were more people on that patio from Houston than from anywhere else. We kept seeing all of these people we knew,” Carbonara says. “They were all Houstonians.”

Not only does she enjoy getting out of Houston’s summer heat, but she finds Colorado’s beautiful scenery to be restorative. She loves outdoor activities like hiking and visiting outdoor markets, made possible by the cooler weather. “I have to say, being in nature and being in the mountains is just good for you. It’s good for mental health and good for physical health,” she says.

Carbonara visits with Houston friends John and Kathy Orton, who have been going to Aspen-Snowmass since the early 1980s. John’s parents were regulars, so the Ortons and their children followed. They bought their first place there in 1986.

“Over the summer there’s a tremendous number of Texans in Aspen. Anyone who can afford to get out of Houston in the summer does. Our children are now in their 40s, but when they were little, they liked coming here because a lot of their classmates came here, too,” says Kathy, a retired banker. Semiretired, John is a consulting counsel at the Holland and Knight law firm.

Because they’ve been going there so long, the Ortons also have plenty of Aspen friends who’ve never lived in Texas. But when they attended the annual gala for Theatre Aspen in July, where 200 people raised $750,000, they found themselves sharing a table with eight people. Only two were not from Houston.