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127 CHaPter 3 Our Big Backyard as the story goes, earl eaton, an eagle county native and sometime ski-area, mine, and construction worker, accidentally “discovered” the legendary mountain while prospecting for uranium. It was the mid1950s , and Eaton had heard the buzz that Eagle County might be the next uranium hot spot. It wasn’t, according to his Geiger counter. But while traipsing around the White River National Forest on the west side of Vail Pass, Eaton found something else: a sprawling, loaf-shaped mountain, its north face wooded in lodgepole pine, aspen, and spruce, and its south face sculpted into a series of spacious, sun-soaked basins, nearly bare of trees. It suddenly struck Eaton that he had just stumbled across some of the world’s most spectacular ski terrain. So he shared his discovery with Pete Seibert, his boss at a nearby ski area—and the vision for Vail was born. The story is not entirely true. Eaton was not looking for uranium, he later admitted, and the mountain was no sudden discovery; as a local, he had known of it for years.1 In fact Seibert was not even the first person he told about it. By the time the two men met, Eaton had already tried to interest several others in developing the mountain, including a Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad executive. It is true that Eaton showed the place to Seibert in 1957 and that Seibert, a ski-area manager, former racing champion, and veteran of the Tenth Mountain Division, agreed it was prime ski terrain. But even Seibert was not instantly sold on developing it. He and Eaton scouted several other sites before deciding the first one was best. After some difficulty, they got approval from the U.S. Forest Service, 128 chaPter 3 which granted Seibert a use permit in 1959 and that same year put Eaton and Seibert’s mountain toward the top of a thirty-year master plan for developing skiing in Colorado’s national forests.2 By that time Seibert was already on to the next step: raising capital and buying real estate. He recruited a small group of partners and began purchasing ranchland at the base of the mountain, along the banks of Gore Creek. Then he barnstormed around the country to drum up the money he would need to make Earl Eaton’s mountain a resort.3 Here was a case study of what could happen when commercial leisure gave new value to nature and new identity to place. No one had ever paid much attention to this mountain before. No one had even bothered to give it a name. There was no gold or silver (or uranium) and not much marketable timber, especially on those treeless south-facing bowls. There was a lot of snow, but that only served to hinder human activity for most of every winter and spring. The mountain, in short, was close to worthless from a traditional resource point of view. But the postwar leisure boom made landscapes look different. Now snow was a valuable commodity, treeless bowls a potentially priceless asset. And with this newfound worth, an anonymous lump of topography finally merited a name. In 1959 Seibert and his partners decided to call the mountain after nearby Vail Pass, thinking the name short and catchy, the kind that would easily lodge in consumers’ minds. In other words, Vail, more than just a name, was a brand name from the beginning , leisure marketing intertwined with the very labeling of the land.4 Vail’s corporate vision, and its pitch to investors, emphasized “natural competitive advantages”—the foremost, of course, being ski terrain. Vail Mountain was a stupendous playground of powdery snow, with a north-side vertical drop of more than three thousand feet. Seibert envisioned a dazzling variety of ski trails on that side, snaking for miles through the trees, from “delightful bunny runs” to “heart-stopping vertical drops,” in one reporter’s words. On the south side, the “huge expanse of natural bowls” would give skiers “the primeval thrill” of plunging into “a vast alpine paradise ” of untracked snow.5 But topography and snow were not Vail’s only “natural competitive advantages.” Equally important, Seibert realized, was the resort’s geographic location—namely, the fact that it sat right on U.S. Highway 6. The highway put the mountain just two and a half hours from Denver—and thanks to the Pavlo report, U.S. 6 was about to become Interstate...

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