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.

Yet his mouth has gotten him into trouble, specifically when he has very publicly criticized his own company's environmental progress, suggesting that all its efforts have basically been for naught. Schendler can be shockingly honest about the challenges green companies face, to a point that can confuse his co-workers and annoy his competitors. More than once, his bosses, who support his particularly rabid brand of corporate accountability, have fended off other resort managers asking someone to put a muzzle on the guy.

I get a sense of Schendler's boundless enthusiasm as I follow him on his rounds. Tall, blond, and fit at 38, Schendler is both hyper-smart and hyperactive, showing off his projects like a ten-year-old with a science kit. I chase after him as he lopes from office to ski run to sports club in pursuit of eco-infractions and more caffeine.

"Oops! Look at this—60 watts," Schendler says of a light fixture at the Snowmass Club. "Someone replaced the fluorescents. How do you keep that from happening?" On the new tennis-court lighting: "This is actually a failure that remains a failure." On the ladies' room at the bottom of Snowmass's Elk Camp gondola: "See, she's going to leave the light on, and it will be on all summer." And on the micro-hydroelectric system he built on Snowmass's Fanny Hill in 2004: "This is probably the coolest thing I've ever been involved with."

The system funnels spring runoff down a snowmaking pipe, through a turbine, and back into the creek. It cost $150,000 and produces 150,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, with $10,000 worth sold back to the grid—and its profitability paved the way for another, bigger hydro plant on Aspen Mountain and three possible wind turbines on Snowmass. It took years of technical disasters, budget overruns, and, as Schendler calls them, "Soviet-style" bureaucratic hoops to make it happen. In that sense, the project is a perfect example of a Schendler success: great once it's done but such a massive headache in the making that few companies would've green-lighted it.

Part of Aspen's willingness to take risks is cultural; in a building full of young sports nuts and creative types, employees like to say that "the inmates are running the asylum." Schendler, a New Jersey native who graduated from Bowdoin College in 1992 with a degree in biology and environmental studies, is a kayaker who's also summited Mount McKinley. He worked for Outward Bound, and as a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Institute, under green-business guru Amory Lovins, before starting at the SkiCo. CEO Kaplan was a ski instructor in Taos, New Mexico, until he got his M.B.A. from the University of Denver. Matt Jones, 39, the CFO whose acrobatic number crunching made the array possible, is a former backup singer who drinks bourbon with Schendler every Friday.It also helps to have billionaire backers who believe green innovation is good business. Aspen is owned by the Chicago-based investment firm Henry Crown and Company, whose president, Jim Crown, has long overseen the resort's drive for sustainability. In 1994, Crown hired Kaplan's predecessor, Pat O'Donnell, who'd worked at Patagonia. "I give Pat a lot of credit," he says, "for saying 'This has to be part of how we live our lives. Also, we need snow, and global warming is the enemy of, among other things, robust winters.' "

To combat that enemy, they've unleashed Schendler, an energy vortex in his own right. "I tried decaf," he tells me at one point. He was miserable. "So I asked myself, 'Do I want to live a decaf life?' "

The answer, clearly, was no.