Vail started with a seven-hour climb and a view of the treeless Back Bowls

In March 1957, Pete Seibert and a local prospector named Earl Eaton put climbing skins on their skis and broke trail up the mountain that would become Vail. The Colorado Snowsports Museum describes it as a seven-hour slog to the top. Seibert had trained for snow country just down the valley at Camp Hale, with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, and was wounded in Italy before coming home to chase a ski-resort idea.

What sold him was the view off the back. Beyond the summit ridge lay a string of wide, south-facing bowls with almost no trees, just open snow and sky. Those Back Bowls, seven of them, are still the heart of why Vail feels so big.

The resort opened on December 15, 1962, with one gondola, two chairlifts, and five-dollar lift tickets. It kept growing. Blue Sky Basin, the terrain past the Back Bowls, opened in January 2000, helping make Vail one of the largest single ski mountains in North America by skiable acres.

The Camp Hale connection isn’t a coincidence. The mountain soldiers who trained in this county came home and helped build the ski industry around it.

For the founding story in the founders’ own words, the Colorado Snowsports Museum’s Vail history page is a good place to start.