Sun, Feb 23, 2003 page12

• Vail started as a vision in Europe

  With a free-lift-ticket offer to lure early investors and a perception that their slopes were mild enough for less-experienced skiers, Vail resort's founders found themselves shoveling in the money

  • By Bill Pennington / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  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.

  

  Pete Seibert's vision was to build a signature ski area in the US modeled after the ones he had visited in Europe.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  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.

  "One way or another, skiing was going to be my life," Seibert wrote in his book, Vail: Triumph of a Dream (Mountain Sports Press, 2000).

  With pluck, a homemade knee brace and the help of dozens of other members of the 10th Mountain Division who had also returned to Colorado, Seibert not only skied again, but he also excelled as a racer.

  He joined Aspen's ski patrol and later qualified for the 1950 US ski team. At Aspen and other mountains where he worked, Seibert continued to learn his trade of choice, running a ski area. And he never stopped talking about, and looking for, the mountain he would make into the nation's grandest ski area.

  To a secret ...

  Then Eaton, who had worked on Aspen's ski patrol and maintenance crews with Seibert, suggested the trip up the nondescript mountain near Vail Pass.

  "You couldn't see the bowls or anything other than a bunch of trees from the road," Eaton said. "You had to climb it to see it. But even after we did, we knew we had to keep it a secret. Everyone back then was looking for that special mountain, especially one closer to Denver, like Vail was. But they didn't know where it was. We just had to keep it that way."

  Seibert and Eaton told everyone their interest in the no-name mountain was for a rod-and-gun club. They raised some money and bought the sheep ranch at the foot of the mountain for about US$110 per half hectare. They kept buying land, but even after announcing plans to build the largest US ski area, they were US$1 million short of what it took to break ground. Seibert went on a cross-country tour by car with this pitch: For US$10,000, investors would get four lifetime ski passes. He even offered Vail homesites for a larger investment.

  Those lots now frequently sell for in excess of US$6 million.

  To construction ...

  Construction of the village began on the former sheep ranch in the spring of 1962.

  "It was like being back in the pioneer days," said Pete Seibert Jr., who was 8 when his family moved to the base of newly named Vail Mountain. "No television, no doctors, no grocery store. We had school in the basement of our house with one teacher. A host of other families, pioneers, came to build the dream, too."

  Vail opened on Dec. 15, 1962.

  Steep success ...

  Vail had also come along at exactly the right time. Skiing was spreading in the US in the 1960s like long hair on teenagers. The number of skiers in the country was doubling every five years, and Vail aggressively marketed to the family audience, promising good but not scary skiing, as well as reliable snow and a sense of old West adventure. It also had a cozy village modeled after noted European Alps towns like Switzerland's Zermatt, where Seibert had measured the width of the narrow streets so he could replicate them in his pedestrian-only village.

  But 1976 was also one of Vail's worst years. That spring, a frayed cable caused two gondolas to fall 38m, killing four skiers and severely injuring eight others. The US$50 million in lawsuits that followed sent Seibert and Vail's panicked board of directors looking for a buyer. In that transaction, Seibert was forced out of any role in the running of Vail.

  Seibert stayed in the ski industry, helping establish two other Western areas. In the next several years, Vail went through numerous owners, reorganizations and threatened bankruptcies, even as its real estate market blossomed and the village spread exponentially.

  ... and a wipe-out

  Seibert was brought back into the fold in 1990 as a consultant about the same time Vail was pursuing controversial expansions to new mountains.

  One of those, the Blue Sky Basin area that Seibert and Eaton had seen miles in the distance during their first visit to the mountaintop, was opposed by environmental groups.

  In the fall of 1998, ecoterrorists set fire to three buildings in the area and four chairlifts. Vail's mix of ski-loving locals and the affluent was shaken at the notion that there could be trouble in paradise.

  But Vail Resorts, the public company that took control in 1996, rebuilt the damaged lifts and buildings for US$12 million.

  By 2000, on the weekend when Blue Sky Basin officially opened, more than 6,000 skiers and snowboarders waited in line, each wanting to be the first to see the last secret of the back bowls.
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