Word: vail
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...area start at $90,000, and Texas Oilman John Murchison's glass-and-aspen vacation house is probably worth $500,000. For years, anyone thought to be a hippie was not overly welcome, and longhairs found it difficult to get work and a pad. Youthful counterculturists discovered that Vail was not the best place to be a ski bum, particularly after local police pulled some tough drug busts. When Minger showed up for the job wearing a mustache four years ago, some locals told him that he was unacceptable. Only lately has Vail Associates, which runs the ski area...
...town's greatest problem has been gaining a sense of identity. Says Minger: "We are a teen-ager as a community. Vail started out as sort of a country club and became a company town. Now we are finally moving toward something that resembles a community. We are no longer just a product, and we are not plastic either. Real people live here, and sometimes there is dog dirt in the streets, and there are kids going to school." What the community needs most, he suggests, is something beyond skiing and summer leisure, perhaps an "industry of the mind...
...Vail rises in a valley below the jagged Gore Range, and 15 years ago the area was nearly as empty as when the Utes roamed it in the days before the white man. It was developed by Peter Seibert, 48, a well-muscled, jovial man, who has dreamed of building a ski town ever since he was a boy in Bartlett...
...World War II, Seibert joined the 10th Mountain Division, which trained at Camp Hale, 20 miles away from what is now Vail. Fighting in the Italian Apennines, Sergeant Seibert was wounded three times in three days. He lost a kneecap, and doctors said that he would never ski again. But in two years, after extensive surgery, he was on the slopes at Aspen as a member of the ski patrol. Later he taught skiing, raced, worked as a logger and studied three years on the G.I. Bill at Lausanne's Ecole Hôtelière. All the time...
...looked for likely peaks on Colorado maps, then inspected them on foot or horseback. In 1957, a former uranium prospector led him to Vail Mountain, and he knew that he had found his spot-the proper moisture and altitude (an 11,250-ft. peak rising from an 8,200-ft. valley), a wide variety of slopes for beginners, intermediates and experts. With three friends, he quickly bought 500 acres at the bottom of the mountain...