Pete Seibert and Earl Eaton
Near Vail, Colorado
Vail exists because of two very different men who trusted each other. Pete Seibert was a champion ski racer who joined the Tenth Mountain Division as a teenager and was gravely wounded by a mortar shell in Italy. Doctors told him he might never walk normally again, yet he came back to the mountains, raced competitively once more, and carried a single stubborn dream: to build the greatest ski resort in the world.
Earl Eaton was the opposite kind of man, a quiet local prospector and rancher who knew these ridges the way other people know their own backyard. It was Eaton who told Seibert about the huge open bowls hidden on the far side of an unnamed peak. In nineteen fifty seven, the two climbed it together and saw the future.
Seibert became the promoter, the salesman, the public face who raised the money and sold the vision. Eaton was the finder, the man who actually knew the ground. For years afterward, Eaton felt he never got full credit for the discovery, and the tension between the two men is part of Vail's honest history.
Both are now remembered together as the founders, and the resort still marks the anniversary of their climb.
