The Name: A Highway Engineer Called Charlie Vail
Near Vail, Colorado
The town of Vail is not named for a founder, a pioneer, or a president. It is named for a road builder most skiers have never heard of. Charles Davis Vail, known as Charlie, trained as a civil engineer.
From nineteen thirty to nineteen forty five he served as chief highway engineer for the state of Colorado, and during those years Colorado's paved highway system grew enormously. He was a demanding and often unpopular figure, but he pushed a modern road system across some of the hardest mountain country in America. One of his projects was a paved route through the Gore Range that opened in nineteen forty, following Gore Creek down into the Eagle River valley.
That crossing came to be called Vail Pass in his honor. Charlie Vail was gone years before anyone thought of building a ski resort here. When Pete Seibert and his partners needed a name for their new mountain and village, they borrowed it from the pass that already carried travelers over the range.
So the resort is named for the pass, and the pass is named for the engineer who never skied a day in Vail.
