Vail: A Resort Dreamed Up From Nothing
Near Vail, Colorado
Almost every mountain town in Colorado grew up around something real. A gold strike, a silver vein, a railroad junction, a ranch. Vail is different.
Vail was invented. The place you are driving through was, within living memory, an empty sheep pasture in a valley called Gore Creek, with no town, no lifts, and no name on the mountain above it. The story begins in the winter of nineteen forty two, when the United States Army built a high altitude training camp just over the ridge to the south and taught thousands of soldiers to ski, climb, and survive in the mountains.
Two men who came to know this country in those years were Pete Seibert, a veteran of that mountain division who had been badly wounded in Italy, and Earl Eaton, a local prospector and rancher who had grown up in these valleys. On the nineteenth of March, nineteen fifty seven, the two of them left an army surplus jeep on the shoulder of the highway below and spent hours climbing a peak that had no official name. From the summit they saw enormous open snowfields rolling away on the far side.
They called it, for a while, No Name Mountain. What they were really looking at was one of the largest ski mountains in North America. To keep other speculators from guessing their plan, they bought up the ranch land quietly under the cover of a fake outfit they called the Transmontane Rod and Gun Club, as if they only meant to hunt and fish.
Construction began in the spring of nineteen sixty two, and on the fifteenth of December that same year, Vail Mountain opened for skiing. There was one gondola, two chairlifts, and a lift ticket that cost five dollars. The town below was incorporated four years later, in nineteen sixty six.
From that single deliberate act, a village of a few dozen people grew into one of the most famous ski resorts on Earth. As you move through Vail, remember that almost none of it is accidental. The pedestrian village, the covered bridges, the mountain itself as a ski destination, all of it was imagined first, then built.
Vail is what happens when a soldier keeps a promise he made to a mountain.
