The Back Bowls and Gore Creek

The single feature that made Vail legendary is hidden from the town below. On the far side of the mountain lie the Back Bowls, seven vast, mostly treeless basins of open snow that stretch for miles. Their names read like a Cold War map, China Bowl, Siberia Bowl, Inner Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, alongside Sun Up, Sun Down, and Tea Cup.

These enormous open faces, unusual for an American resort, are exactly what Pete Seibert and Earl Eaton glimpsed from the summit back in nineteen fifty seven. The China Bowl side of the mountain opened in nineteen eighty eight and greatly expanded Vail's skiable terrain. Down in the valley runs Gore Creek, and its story is a quieter kind of drama.

The lower reaches of Gore Creek are prized enough to be named a Gold Medal trout stream by the state, a top rank for fishing water. But its high tributary, Black Gore Creek, has struggled. Each winter, large amounts of traction sand spread on Interstate Seventy over Vail Pass wash down into that little stream, choking its bed and harming aquatic life.

So Vail holds both things at once, some of the finest ski terrain on Earth, and a creek quietly paying the price for the highway that made the resort reachable.