Vail Mountain stood bare just days before the resort’s 1962 grand opening, but a late December storm dropped several feet of powder on its untracked slopes and gave the new ski area an immediate boost. Built from scratch in an undeveloped valley by 10th Mountain veteran Pete Seibert, rancher Earl Eaton, and others, Vail was conceived as an intimate European-style resort that combined winter recreation with shopping, dining, convenience, and customer service. By the mid-1970s, it had grown from the cozy village Seibert envisioned into one of America’s best-known, largest, and busiest resort communities. The broader Vail Pass country was also shaped by the long evolution of mountain transportation in Colorado. Early motorists crept along rough high-country roads that often followed wagon trails and lacked drainage, grading, and pavement. Although the 1910s brought scattered improvements, modern roads remained limited until Charles Vail served as state highway chief from 1930 to 1945, when Colorado’s paved highway mileage expanded from 500 to 5,000, cutting travel times from days to hours and helping unify the state’s economy. Interstate highways begun in the 1950s and the Eisenhower Tunnel, opened in 1973, further advanced tourism and skiing while reviving local economies, though by the 1990s traffic had become a chronic problem. The surrounding region includes the Colorado River Headwaters Scenic and Historic Byway from Grand Lake through Upper Gore Canyon; the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel through the Continental Divide, with its second bore for eastbound travel opened in 1980 and named for Edwin C. Johnson; Dillon Dam, completed in 1963, which created a five-square-mile reservoir supplying more than 20% of Denver and its suburbs’ water; the Continental Divide itself; Leadville’s Healy House and Dexter Cabin; the Top of the Rockies National Scenic and Historic Byway; Camp Hale, where the 10th Mountain Division trained before many veterans helped build Colorado’s ski industry after World War II; Mount Elbert, Colorado’s highest peak at 14,433 feet; the Mount of the Holy Cross, popularized after William Henry Jackson photographed it in 1873; and David Moffat’s railroad project, begun in 1903 and realized as a transcontinental line in 1934 after the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad linked the DN&P tracks to Dotsero.
