Out of breath, sweating and knee-deep in snow, Pete Seibert would not have been easily convinced that a day of mountain climbing was to put him on the precipice of US history. It was March 19, 1957, and Seibert, then 33, was following his friend Earl Eaton, a uranium prospector, up a deserted, nameless Colorado mountain, and all Seibert knew for sure was that it was hard work.
Seibert was a skier and a dreamer, a common combination in Colorado in those days. Seibert's vision was to build a signature US ski area modeled after the ones he had visited in Europe. Eaton, who had roamed these hills with a Geiger counter searching for a different bounty, had promised Seibert a sight he had never before seen.
Halfway up, after four hours of climbing, Seibert was beginning to see what Eaton had meant, and said so.
"I turned and said, `It gets better, Pete,'" Eaton, now 80, recalled recently.
Three hours later, the two men crested the hill and before them, on the other side, was a vast landscape of largely treeless bowls, several miles filled with powdery snow, a panorama stretching across the horizon of seemingly boundless, perfect skiing terrain.
"We've climbed all the way to heaven," Seibert said.
In less than five years, Seibert and Eaton had taken the no-name mountain, and a sheep pasture beneath it, and spawned a revolution in the ski industry with Vail Mountain and its hallmark village. This winter is the 40th anniversary of that opening, and if Seibert, who died of cancer last July, overstated his first assessment, he did not fall short of creating his dream.
Vail is not only the biggest and most popular snow sports destination in the US, with 1.5 million people schussing its 2,140 hectares of trails annually, it is also a US institution, a beacon at the cultural nexus of sport, winter family travel and high society.
In an evolving ski and snowboard industry, for most of the last four decades, Vail is the four-letter word that has set the standard.
Its remarkable rise to that position is made only more remarkable by its up-from-nowhere beginnings. And like many things in history, the first steps in that path were woven by the Fates.
Begin with Seibert's recruitment into the US Army's famed 10th Mountain Division, a unit created to combat German forces who had been winning European mountain battles on skis.
The Army sent Seibert, a New Englander who had skied since he was 7 years old, and 16,000 other skiing soldiers to train in the high altitude and the deep snow of the Colorado mountains.
Their camp, hundreds of hastily constructed barracks, was not far from Vail Pass, named for Charles Vail, the chief engineer of the Colorado highway department during the 1930s, and their training grounds were part of what would become Vail Mountain.
Seibert saw the potential in these immense, untouched Colorado mountains. But in early 1945 he was transferred to the front lines in the Italian Alps, and within weeks of his arrival, Seibert, a platoon sergeant, was gravely wounded by a mortar shell.
From a war wound ...
The blast tore off his right kneecap, nearly severed his left arm, opened two chest wounds and sent shrapnel splintering into his face. Seibert spent the next 17 months in hospitals. Released from the Army at age 22, he could walk with a limp, but his doctors had told him he would never again ski. Still, Seibert headed back to the Colorado Mountains, to Aspen, the first skiing mecca in Colorado.
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