The Anatomy of a Ski Town

THE Ted Kennedys, the John Lindsays and the Charles Percys ski there. After a hard day on the slopes, the night life warms up in the 30 restaurants and bars, and skiers cluster over Swiss wine and superb antelope schnitzel at Gashof Gramshammer, which is owned by a former Austrian ski champ. The younger set is likely to converge at Donovan's Copper Bar or the Nu Gnu or the Ore House, where the talk--and interest--seems to focus on skiing above all else, even sex. The newest favorite place is the Ichiban, a Japanese restaurant run by a sociologist, a dental hygienist and an architect--all of them people under 30 who left their careers and homes in Boston and Seattle in order to live close to the mountain. This is the scene at Vail, Colo., an instant alpine community that is the most successful winter resort built in the U.S. in the past decade.

As in any ski town, there are problems of extreme expansion and contraction. The population swells from 700 in summer to as many as 10,000 in winter. On weekends, Vail's eight policemen, normally preoccupied with nothing more serious than ski-equipment thefts (the biggest crime category), struggle with monumental parking jams. There is also a shortage of moderate-income housing for Vail's 2,000 ski instructors, waiters and salespeople, many of whom live in a trailer camp a dozen miles away. The town manager, Terrell Minger, 30, cannot afford to buy a place in Vail on his $21,000 salary.

The permanent, year-round residents, who hired Minger and run the town, are mostly conservative, family-oriented folk. They can afford to pay $35,000 or more for condominiums. Houses in the golf-course 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, dropped its rule that bearded residents could not get special-rate local lift tickets.

The 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" or a center for the performing arts. As a start, the University of Colorado has begun to hold workshops on urban design and new towns at Vail.

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, N.H.

In 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 Hoteliere. All the time he yearned to find the "perfect" mountain for his resort.

He 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 for $55,000.

To raise more capital, the partners approached 20 wealthy people, asking for investments of $5,000 each. John Murchison signed up, and others quickly followed. With their money as a base, Seibert then sold limited partnerships for $10,000 each to another 100 people. Each of the initial investors got limited partnership shares in the enterprise that became Vail Associates, as well as four lifetime lift passes and a half-acre lot. The lot had to be built on immediately. "That was an ingenious idea," recalls Texas Financier Dick Bass, one of the early investors. "The obligation of shareholders to build on their property gave Vail a lot more houses much sooner than other ski developments." By late 1961, Seibert and friends had $1,500,000, including $500,000 in loans from the First National Bank of Denver and the Small Business Administration. They were ready to build.

Seibert marked off the trails himself. One of the first and most exacting he called Riva Ridge, after a battle that the 10th Mountain had fought in Italy. Three days before the scheduled opening of Vail in December 1962, two lodges, a restaurant and a couple of stores waited for customers, but there was no snow. Seibert hired an Indian snow dancer and lo, it snowed. In later years, whenever there was little snow, he fired old railway flares packed with silver iodide into the clouds to seed them. "My three kids thought I was crazy," says Seibert, "but when it's not snowing you do almost anything."

There was a brisk demand for land, condominiums and store space. Vail Associates limited businesses to a few of each kind and imposed architectural controls on builders. Sensitive to the ecology, the company helped form a sanitation district and took other environmental-protection steps that have since won praise from federal officials. Residents raised money for a twelve-bed clinic, where four doctors treat 15 to 20 skiers on a busy day. Some commercial property, bought for just over $100 an acre in 1957, rose to nearly $300,000 this year. An original investor who put up $5,000 now has land and stock worth about $82,000.

When Vail Associates grew so big that it could no longer be run by Seibert alone, he moved up from president to chairman. As the new president, the company recruited Richard L. Peterson, a Harvard M.B.A., now 37. The two men also brought in several other business-school grads, giving Vail professional management. Last year the company grossed $6,700,000 from lifts, ski school, restaurants and land sales, and earned $812,100 after taxes. Expanding, it recently spent $4,600,000 for 2,200 acres at Beaver Creek, seven miles from the main development; the area is scheduled to open in 1975.

Seibert himself owns Vail stock worth more than $600,000. But, he insists: "Money is really not my thing. More important, I'm right where I have wanted to be since I was a kid. Driving at night sometimes, I come round that turn at the end of the valley--and suddenly I see all the lights. Then it comes back to me that there was nothing here not all that long ago."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.