🇺🇸 United States · Rocky Mountains
Vail is one of the biggest and most famous ski resorts in North America: a resort built from nothing in the 1960s about 160 km west of Denver, right off the I-70 highway, which in a few decades became a byword for large-scale skiing. Its mountain, Vail Mountain, is famous above all for the Back Bowls, immense open snow bowls on its south side that offer almost unlimited terrain, plus a huge front side and the modern Blue Sky Basin area.
At the foot of the mountain spreads Vail Village, a pedestrian town in European alpine style —inspired by the villages of Tyrol— with cobbled streets, hotels, restaurants and an atmosphere designed down to the last detail for the visitor. Next to it, Lionshead is the other main base, more modern, with the Eagle Bahn gondola. The whole valley is linked by an excellent free bus system.
This guide covers the essentials of Vail with a practical eye: the immense mountain and its Back Bowls, the lift ticket system (Epic Pass), the two pedestrian villages, what to do in summer (hiking, biking, golf, the dance festival), how to get there from Denver and where to stay and eat. Vail is skiing on a grand scale, accessible luxury and spectacular mountains all year round.
Unlike Aspen, Vail did not grow out of an old mining town: it was conceived from scratch as a ski resort. It was driven by 10th Mountain Division veteran Pete Seibert and local rancher Earl Eaton, who during the Second World War had discovered the potential of these slopes while training at nearby Camp Hale. Vail opened in 1962 and grew at dizzying speed to become one of the largest resorts on the continent. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Rocky Mountain state: land of the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapaho, of the ancestral ruins of Mesa Verde, forged by the gold and silver rushes, today a skiing mecca with Aspen and Vail and home to a fast-growing Denver.
Read the history of Colorado →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In 1957, two men climbed on foot, with skins under their skis, a nameless mountain in central Colorado. When they reached the top and looked south, they were left speechless: below them opened kilometer after kilometer of virgin snow bowls, immense and without a single tree. One of them, a war veteran named Pete Seibert, had spent his whole life looking for exactly that. Those bowls would become the legendary Back Bowls, and that anonymous mountain would become, five years later, Vail: the only major ski resort in North America built entirely from nothing, with no mining town to start from. But to reach that summit, the story had begun a century earlier.
The valley where Vail stands today takes its name from Gore Creek and the Gore Range, in memory of Sir St. George Gore, an Irish aristocrat who organized an extravagant hunting expedition through the region in the 1850s. Before that, these mountains were the territory of the Ute people, who traveled them on their seasonal moves. During Colorado's mining boom, the nearby town of Minturn emerged as a railroad junction, but the Gore valley itself remained largely unpopulated, given over to grazing and hunting.
The episode that would change its fate happened during the Second World War. A few kilometers away, at Camp Hale, the United States Army trained the 10th Mountain Division, a unit of skiing, climbing soldiers prepared for combat in alpine terrain. Many of them fell in love with the mountains of Colorado.
One of those soldiers, Pete Seibert, held on for years to the dream of creating a great ski resort. After the war he worked at resorts in Europe and the United States learning the trade, never losing sight of the idea of finding 'his' mountain in the Rockies.
The dream took shape thanks to Pete Seibert's meeting with Earl Eaton, a local rancher and prospector who knew these mountains inch by inch. In 1957, Eaton took Seibert up a nameless mountain in the Gore valley. From the summit, seeing the immense open bowls of the south face —the future Back Bowls—, Seibert understood that he had finally found the place he had been looking for.
The following years were ones of discretion and difficulty: to keep the price of the land from soaring, Seibert kept the project almost secret and set up a company to buy the land and obtain the national forest permits. Raising the capital was an odyssey, but in the end the resort was built in a great hurry.
Vail opened its doors in December 1962, with barely one gondola, two chairlifts and a handful of buildings. The name, 'Vail', comes from Vail Pass, the local mountain pass in turn named after Charles Vail, the engineer who had laid out the road in the 1930s. It was a resort born from scratch, with no mining past, conceived entirely for skiing.
Success was almost immediate. Vail grew at an astonishing pace through the 1960s and 70s, adding lifts, runs and services, and gradually opening the legendary Back Bowls, which soon made it a world reference for big-mountain, wide-open skiing. The opening of the Eisenhower Tunnel and the improvement of Interstate I-70 connected it quickly to Denver, which multiplied its accessibility.
For the base, a deliberately European style was chosen: Vail Village was designed in imitation of the alpine towns of Tyrol, with cobbled pedestrian streets, gabled buildings, frescoes and a clock tower. It was not a real historic center but a carefully staged setting that gave the resort a welcoming, distinctive character. Lionshead was later added as a second base.
In 1976, coinciding with Colorado's centennial, Vail received a boost in prestige when President Gerald R. Ford chose the village as his vacation residence; his bond with the place was immortalized in the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater and the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, dedicated to his wife.
Over the decades, Vail not only established itself as one of the largest resorts in North America by skiable terrain, but also gave rise to one of the great companies in the industry. The operating company, Vail Resorts, kept growing through acquisitions until it controlled dozens of resorts in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, and popularized the multi-resort season pass model with the Epic Pass.
The mountain itself kept expanding. In 2000 Blue Sky Basin opened, a new wooded area beyond the Back Bowls that added adventure terrain. Vail also hosted major sporting events, such as the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in 1989, 1999 and 2015, which reinforced its international standing.
Not everything was harmonious: in 1998, a fire set by radical activists of the Earth Liberation Front destroyed several summit facilities in protest at the expansion toward Blue Sky Basin, one of the most notorious acts of 'ecoterrorism' in recent United States history. The resort was rebuilt and kept growing.
Today, Vail is one of the most popular and prestigious ski destinations in the world, with an immense ski area, top-level lift and service infrastructure and a village that combines accessible luxury with alpine atmosphere. The Epic Pass has changed the economics of skiing, letting enthusiasts travel many resorts on a single pass, though it has also fed debates about crowds and overcrowding.
Like other mountain resorts, Vail faces the challenges of affordable housing for its workers —who largely live in the valley towns such as Avon, Edwards or Minturn— and of climate change, which threatens the reliability of the snow seasons and has pushed the resort to invest in sustainability and in its summer offering.
Because Vail is increasingly a year-round destination: summer draws hikers, cyclists, golfers and culture lovers, with dance and classical music festivals at the Ford Amphitheater. Out of that nearly empty valley that two visionaries spotted from a nameless summit, one of the great icons of the American mountains has emerged in barely six decades.