Archives of the Twelfth Headwaters Conference, November 2-4, 2001
The I-70 Corridor:
A Short History of a Highway and a Brief Look at its Culture
by Allen Best
Interstate 70 west of Denver has become among the best-known regions of Colorado. A mere highway, it transcends the political and geographic features across which it serves. In fact, this "I-70 corridor" has become nearly synonomous with two headwaters counties, Eagle and Summit.
Summit is the older and perhaps better known. One of Colorado's original 17 counties, it was created soon after miners found gold in the gravels of the Blue River at Breckenridge. The county's name recognition, however, probably owes to its more recent use in a marketing campaign, Ski the Summit.
Eagle County was created in 1883. Like Summit County, it has roots in mining and a modern existence of recreation in general and skiing in particular. Instead of a Ski the Eagle marketing campaign, however, advertisers instead adopted the name Vail Valley. It's a Humpty-Dumpty name, meaning that it's wherever you want it to be. The Vail Valley now overshadows both Eagle County and the Eagle Valley from which it sprang.
Travelers on I-70 will be in one of these two counties as they drive from the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel to Garfield County. It's a region of lofty elevations. The tunnel and Vail Pass are the highest points on Interestate highways in the nation. It is also a place of head-turning scenery. In few places are plate-glass windows purchased with such good cause. Finally, it's a place of skiing, the greatest concentration of ski areas in the United States. Summit County's four ski areas together hosts more skiers annually than all of Utah, while Vail is singularly the nation's busiest and also largest ski area.
These superlatives of physical geography are matched by those of economic and cultural geography. The 2000 Census revealed that Eagle and Summit were, respectively, the 8th and 10th fastest growing counties in the nation during the 1990s. What makes this growth even more startling was the exclusivity of real estate. Even if not every home was a mansion, not every sales price numbing, the preponderance of high-end housing skewed this corridor into being one of the priciest in the nation. In Summit County in October, the average asking price for a single-family home was $311,000. In Vail, the municipality, the average single-family home price exceeds $1 million, and the average condo price is more than $500,000. What's even more startling is that Vail's luster is currently tarnished. The hot spots are now in the resort suburbs. (1)
Census Bureau analysis from 1990 further define this extraordinary region which a highway runs through. Summit County that year had the nation's highest female civilian labor participation rate, 84.1 percent, and Eagle County was No. 3 among the nation's counties. Summit County also stood out for its high education. It topped the nation's counties for percentage of adults who had graduated from high school, and it was No. 22 in the nation for percentage of adults with a bachelor's degree. (2)
Studying who chooses to advertise in the yellow pages further defines the senses of this place. Eagle and Summit counties and their common bedroom of Lake County have a permanent population of 71,000. The Qwest telephone directory for this region gives 130 telephone numbers for architects, 73 numbers for plumbing contractors, and 57 numbers for firms selling log cabins, homes and buildings. And, not least, there are more than 220 telephone numbers of realty agents offering to expedite your purchase or sale of land, home, or both.
If real estate seems to be the strongest driver, recreation and leisure remain strong components of both the identity and the economy of this I-70 corridor. The Qwest directory yellow pages give 23 telephone numbers for purveyors of hot tubs, 44 numbers for snowboard dealers, and 60 numbers that will get you a firm and caring therapeutic massage. (3)
And finally, this I-70 corridor is characterized by demographic anomalies. As an athletic endeavor, skiing is identified with youth. Yet the trend has been one of aging. By the mid-1990s, Eagle County had a higher median age than Colorado. Colorado, in turn, had a higher median age than the nation.
One cause of this rising median age is the waxing popularity of these resorts for people in their early and middle retirement years, broadly from ages 50 to 70. The largest social group in Eagle County has become Vail Club 50, which now has 850 gray-haired members who climb mountains, ski, and afterward habitually patronize high-end restaurants. (4)
At the other end of economic and age scales are the immigrant groups, primarily Mexicans from Chihuahua, but in lesser numbers from scores of countries and from every continent save for Antarctica. The scale of this importation of labor is suggested by the fact that Vail Resorts Inc., operator of four ski resorts in the two counties, has requested temporary visas for the upcoming winter for 1,500 people. This total also suggests the extremes of affluence found along the I-70 corridor.
This I-70 corridor is the culmination of American capitalism at its best -- or worst. This is globalization come home. This is, finally, the consequence of transportation decisions made a half-century and more ago. Without I-70, there would still be ski areas and second homes and people with money, education, and activity. There would, however, not be quite as much.
However, nothing about this transportation route, the I-70 corridor, is natural. The Oregon Trail across Wyoming is entirely a consequence of geography, South Pass. I-70 defies geography. This geography is such that even the vast riches of Leadville, one of the greatest mining camps of all time, failed to dismantle them. These walls of mountains further discouraged the first wave of commercial air service. Until cabins were pressurized, airlines going west from Denver flew over either Wyoming or New Mexico.
II. Nobody much goes this way
When trying to understand the artificiality of I-70, it's useful to imagine yourself standing at the summit of Vail Pass in the fall of 1936. To the east is Copper Mountain, and at its base the decaying cabins of the old mining camp of Wheeler Junction. This rough road goes across Shrine Pass and to Red Cliff. As for Vail Pass itself, the path that proceeds west will admit nothing more substantial than a horse. Ask a rancher or a logger, and they might tell you that, "Nobody much goes this way."
The first historical record of Vail Pass is found in the diary of a zoologist, T.D.A. Cockerell, who later went on to found the University of Colorado Museum. Camped there in the early September of 1887, Cockerell noted projectile points and shards of pottery. Indians, archaeologists later determined, had used this crossing of the Gore Range sporadically for 7,000 years. Cockerell proposed to call it Pottery Pass. (5)
Pottery Pass failed to catch on. This remote mountain pass, the dividing line between Summit and Eagle counties, had been of no use to the mining economy. As such, it went little used.
Discovery of silver at Leadville in the 1870s determined the infrastructure of the mining era. As the historian Marshall Sprague noted, once the wondrous wealth of Leadville became known, all the world hurried to get there. Normally, the quickest way is the most direct way. From Denver, that most direct way would have been across Loveland Pass and then across Summit County. Railroad promoter William Loveland tried to effect this route, but the first great wall of mountains that we call the Front Range thwarted him. The best he could do was a stagecoach road that was impassable through winter.(6)
Instead, the railroads -- for that was the height of transportation technology then -- detoured south around this wall, marching up through first the Arkansas River and then the South Platte. In this way three railroads arrived at Leadville and two invaded Summit County.
The one railroad that arrived west of Vail Pass did so by a different route, and for reasons that were entirely incidental to the resources that are now at the heart of the skiing economy. The Rio Grande Railway crossed Tennessee Pass in 1880 to reach the mines in and around Red Cliff. In 1886, the railroads were marched down the Eagle River at a furious pace and driven through Glenwood Cañon, arriving at Aspen in time to usurp ambitions by another railroad to relieve Aspen of its silver ores.
This transportation infrastructure of the 1880s, the railroad, remained dominant in the Eagle Valley for more than a half-century. Aside from the mining around Red Cliff, it was an economy primarily of agriculture: cows and then sheep with a few head of lettuce thrown in along the way. Hunters and fishermen were occasionally entertained, and, of course, trees needed felling.
An editorial from 1920 illustrates how the railroad had defined the geography of this headwaters area. A former miner, rancher, and merchant named Orion Wainright Daggett had purchased a newspaper in Red Cliff that he renamed the Holy Cross Trail. It was a platform for his many opinions. He promoted pilgrimages to Mount of the Holy Cross, inveighed against miscegenation of the races, and campaigned untiringly for better roads. This was the era of the Better Roads Movement, when trains were being abandoned for the flexibility of the car.
In one such editorial, he urged his readers to abandon the railroad tracks and explore the lateral, tributary valleys -- Squaw Creek, Bachelor Gulch, and the valley of Gore Creek. In all of these out-of-the-way places, he said, writing from his office in Red Cliff, were hard-at-work homesteaders, grubbing a living from the land.
"While we in Eagle valley proper think we are the whole thing, there is another class of worthy citizens that need consideration," Daggett wrote. (7)
Today, Red Cliff is the out-of-the-way place, the place of gawks and stares. Squaw Creek and Bachelor Gulch, sitting directly above I-70, have become homes to CEOs, a prominent national celebrity, and several $8 million houses. And the Gore Valley that editorialist Daggett had once described as the place for yeoman frontiersmen? Most people call it Vail. An interstate runs through it.
When Daggett wrote that editorial in 1920, the only way around the mountains during winter was by railroad. Passes across the Continental Divide remained closed until Berthoud Pass and Tennessee Pass were kept open during the winter of 1929-30. To get from Denver to Glenwood Springs, now a distance of 150 Interstate miles, motorists had two choices: north across Berthoud Pass and through Kremmling or south through Buena Vista and then to Red Cliff.
Nor was it any shorter in summer.
Daggett promoted a new highway directly west from Denver, which he called the Holy Cross Trail. It was to go across Loveland Pass and then across those pottery sherds that the zoologist T.D.A. Cockerell had seen long before. But instead of going down from Vail Pass, he recommended climbing another 500 feet to another little-used pass and conveniently down past Daggett's office in Red Cliff. Along the way, the religious were expected to pause at this obscure pass that Daggett called Shrine, because of its views of the cross of snow in the 14,005-foot mountain in front of them, and genuflect.
Colorado's highway officials mouthed approval, even allowing use of convict labor to help create an improved road across Shrine Pass. However, no meaningful work was done until the late 1930s, and then in a different location. Several people were undoubtedly behind choosing this alternative location, but we can look fairly toward one individual as being the primary architect of this new transportation infrastructure across the state. His name was Charles D. Vail.
A one-time locomotive engineer, Vail had moved to Denver while still relatively young and then began assuming positions of successively greater responsibility. To do so in Denver then, as now, meant being a Democrat, a footnote of irony given the predispositon toward Republican politics of modern-day Vail. From Denver, Charlie Vail oversaw the city's vast and growing parks system, and then became state highway engineer in 1930.
As state highway engineer, chewing on his habitual 15 cigars per day, Vail oversaw expansion of the state's roads during the Great Depression. Forging a better road at Monarch Pass, his crews celebrated completion with posting of a sign that designated it as Vail Pass. Locals would have nothing of it.
West of Denver, Vail had better luck. In 1939 his department completed a wide new gravel road across Loveland Pass. Then, bypassing Red Cliff and O.W. Daggett's dreams, Vail's contractors pushed new roads across the pass down into the Gore Valley, now better know n as Vail. Accounts say that grateful county commissioners called for the pass to be named in Vail's honor. It was, and without incident. Not incidentally, the work was done partly with federal aid in a spin-off New Deal program. (8)
Thus, by the time of Pearl Harbor, we had the basic footpath for today's I-70. We also had a tunnel being bored under Loveland Pass, completed in 1943, that explored the geology for a possible highway tunnel. We also had, in the 1930s, the beginning of the ski industry, at Berthoud Pass, Winter Park, and Aspen.
On the other hand, mineral deposits in Summit County were withering, and the infrastructure built to serve it was decaying. The two railroads in the county were gone, and Breckenridge's last gold dredge ceased operations in 1942. (9)
III. The Impetus for Change
We know these mountain valleys didn't remain that way, and it's important to our story to understand how and why. Once I picked up a hitchhiker from Grand Junction who presumed to know. As our conversation turned to I-70, he assured me that I-70 had been built where it was built because Vail and Aspen had said to build it there.
He was, as best I can tell, absolutely wrong. When the interstate decisions were being made in the late 1950s, Aspen was no more than a rough draft and Vail but a chapter outline. I-70 West is explained by broader, regional considerations.
In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the law that authorized the first 40,000 miles of interstate highways, with the federal government obligated to pay 90 percent. That first law envisioned Interstate 70 beginning at Baltimore and ending at Denver. There was to be no extension west of Denver.
Highway planners had feared that these two walls of mountains directly west of Denver, first the Front Range and then the Gore Range, would run up costs. And second, there was no national need for a highway into or through these mountains. Summit County was losing population, losing valuation. There was no Vail in Eagle County. Only Aspen was bouncing back from its quiet years, stirring ambitions to repeat its success.
Among those who had begun looking for new ski area sites was Pete Seibert, a veteran of the 10th Mountain Division who had trained at Camp Hale. As a boy growing up in New Hampshire, he had seen Life magazine pictures of resorts in the Alps, and vowed to one day have his own. After the Allied campaign in Italy, where he lost a kneecap and suffered other injuries to a mortar shell, he defied the doctors who doubted his ability to ever ski again. He not only skied, but in Aspen he skied well enough to win races.
In time, he returned to his boyhood dream. One summer he spent his nights as an auditor at the Grand Imperial Hotel in Silverton and his days traipsing around the San Juans in search of the perfect ski resort location. He found what is now called Velocity Mountain, above the Sunnyside Mine, but did not pursue it.
Ironically, he found his perfect ski mountain only two valleys removed from Camp Hale. He was led there by Earl Eaton, another Aspen ski bum who had grown up in the Eagle County. Together they hiked up the mountain in March 1957 and from its summits they studied the treeless Back Bowls. This was the place. The mountain had moderate slopes, it was located along a federal two-lane highway, and a metropolitan area with a major airport was within an afternoon's drive. An Interstate? There was no certainty of one, nor did Seibert believe one was particularly needed. Aspen and Sun Valley had done just find without four-lane highways, and Seibert figured Vail would also. (10)
That Vail and a string of other ski resorts did end up on an interstate highway is explained by other factors. The congressional delegations for Colorado and Utah lobbied hard to get federal money to extend I-70 from Denver for 456 miles to Summit Cove, Utah. The extension was approved in 1957, several months after Seibert hiked up the mountain of his ambitions. Then, the loudest voices in Colorado came from Grand Junction and Glenwood Springs. There was never real doubt about the interstate bypassing them.
An extension, however, required national justification. Although the phrase was probably yet to be coined, the Colorado mountains in the 1950s were still flyover country. The recreational economy was still marginal. To justify this extension, national transportation planners had to have national reasons. The strongest rationale was that I-70 would shave 200 miles off the drive between Chicago and Los Angeles. Also possibly useful in justifying the extension were the energy and uranium reserves of Southwest Colorado and Eastern Utah.
IV. Chicken or egg, skiing or highway?
In considering what the I-70 corridor has become, it's useful to play the game of "What if." Here, the obvious what-if is, had there been no I-70, no federal largesse. The answer is that a four-lane highway would eventually have been built with state money. Ski areas would have eventually been created. This corridor of superlatives might well exist. It just wouldn't have happened as quickly.
Colorado was already building a four-lane highway west from Denver in the 1950s. Ski areas were opening, first with Arapahoe Basin and Aspen in 1947. Tunnel locations were being plotted. Federal money just hastened the process.
In the early 1960s, more ski areas opened: Breckenridge in 1961, Vail in 1962, and elsewhere in Colorado, Crested Butte, Steamboat and Snowmass. Then, in 1970 there was Keystone and in 1973 Copper Mountain, followed finally by Beaver Creek in 1981. And nearly all, even at the outset, presumed some level of real estate sales.
The story of Vail is instructive. After hiking up the mountain of his dreams in 1957, Pete Seibert set out to round up investors. He needed money to install lifts, clear trails, and buy land at the base of the mountain. There was already a town, Minturn, at the foot of the mountain, but it was on the west side. That side lacked the gentle terrain and it also faced west. It holds snow poorly in most winters. Virtually all ski mountains face north. Moreover, Minturn was built to service trains and belatedly became a mining town. To this day, I cannot think of one resort of any sort built in an industrial setting. Minturn did not break the mold.
So, buying the ranches at the northern foot of Vail Mountain, Seibert and his associates set out to piece together his dream. He almost didn't pull it off. He had very little money himself, and even the well-heeled people he contacted across the country resisted the gamble. Finally, he threw in residential building lots. That did the trick. The investors figured that even if skiing never happened, they would get summer cabins. From the outset, Vail was a real estate development. Skiing was the possible amenity. (11)
Real estate and skiing have been intertwined at other resorts along the I-70 corridor, often on the crumbling foundations of the former mining economy. Consider Keystone. Railroad tracks had been extended there to service nearby silver mines. Those tracks had been pulled up decades before Keystone opened in 1970. It was a real estate venture. The only real deference to the mining precedence is found in the names of condominium complexes: the Flying Dutchman, Saints John, and Wild Irishman.
Copper Mountain, which opened in 1973, was similarly a combination of skiing and real estate. The condominiums were built on the former site of Wheeler, a mining camp, and were reasonably close to two long-abandoned railroad tracks. To have a resort, you need a good ski mountain and private land at the base to sell.
Although devoid of the mining precedence, the same formula applies to two additional ski resorts opened in the 1980s, at Beaver Creek and Arrowhead, which now have combined operations.
The story of these resorts suggests two principles. The first is real estate, real estate, real estate.
Real estate diversifies the skiing ventures, providing stability. Without that diversification, resorts become increasingly vulnerable to weather and to transportation pinchpoints elsewhere. The second rule is to put the resort where there is snow and highway proximity. Finally, if only two out of three are possible, forget the snow.
Blessed by natural snow, these ski resorts by the early 1970s were posting double-digit gains in skier days, even if Denver was still at the end of a two-lane highway across the Continental Divide. In 1973, that changed, with completion of the first bore of the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel and with the four-lane segment across Vail Pass in 1976. By then, the resorts were going concerns. This clearly indicates that the ski resorts were not purely creatures of I-70. The extent of their development since then, however, seems to suggest the influence of I-70.
The What-if game is an endlessly fascinating one. I once asked Rod Slifer, the town's first real-estate agent and still a town official, how Vail would have ended up differently had there been no I-70 going through it. Vail, he said, would have happened, but with a development pace more along the lines of Steamboat Springs.
In fact, until the 1970s, the level of affluence along the Highway 40 corridor -- as revealed in county valuations for Grand and Routt counties -- was greater than that along the I-70 corridor of Summit and Eagle counties. By 1990, the tables had clearly turned, suggesting the influence of a Interstate. (12)
V. How the new modifies the old
But this headwaters region bisected by I-70 was not virgin territory. There was an existing social order, existing cultures. There were senses of place that the highway modified. The question is how?
Answering that question fully would be something I would happily undertake in another paper, hopefully with a fellowship allowing my undivided attention. However, a few anecdotes suggest that the new social order pays lip service to the former order, as in the name of condominiums at Keystone. The new order sets the standards, and those who can modify themselves to these standards will become part of the new order.
At Vail, for example, the new townsmen hadn't yet got around to creating a municipality before they set out to create their own school. There was already a school district in the valley to serve the daughters and sons of miners, ranchers, and railroaders. However, instead of trying to integrate themselves into this existing social and educational order, the new residents set out to create their own school.
To label this snobby is simplistic. They happily opened themselves to the natives who saw opportunities to growth in wealth and experience together. Some did. Among the richer people in the Eagle Valley are the Gallegos brothers, sons of miners who went into the masonry business, becoming extraordinarily wealthy.
Yet when does one economic and social order blend with the pre-existing one, and when does it simply shove it aside? I am reminded of the story from early Denver. When gold was discovered in Auraria, opportunists from the eastern states flooded in, and so did others who had already been in this region from New Mexico to Wyoming. The new townsmen in turn glorified their predecessors, used them, and discarded them. The new pioneers found only a few of the original "pioneers" to have lingering value.
By the time I arrived along the I-70 corridor in 1985, a mountain culture had assembled that I knew and felt comfortable in. This mountain culture exulted in physical activity and in the outdoors. This culture relished occasional privations, the sand in the cook pan of camping trips, but also the comforts of modern living. Vail in 1985 was a place of Saabs with bras and Toyotas with camper toppers. It was far different from the ranching and mining cultures, but there were places -- mostly in the outdoors -- where the cultures happily overlapped. Somewhere in here was also a strong drug culture.
Soon after I arrived, however, a new culture began to assemble. The I-70 corridor was becoming culturally richer and more diverse. Eagle County has a stronger Hispanic flavor than ever before, and we have a stronger presence of fine arts -- Bob Dylan in the flesh, jazz on the green, string quartets in the chapel by the creek. Summit County, which even until 1990 was as white and homogenous as the driven snow, now has a rich polyglot of accents.
But the economics behind this diversity are ironically less democratic and less accepting. There is a new fixation on outward signs of exclusivity. Gates are both literal and symbolic. The threshold for these new gated communities seems to be $1 million, maybe $1.5 million per house. This profusion of gated communities has been paralleled in the late 1990s by new private schools, all seemingly driven by a concern that public schools just aren't up to the task -- and perhaps worried in particular that no school with immigrants in it ever will be. If there is racism, it is not overt. The divisions are economic.
Finally, there is an altogether different connection with nature. I remember once thinking that a sure sign of either arrogance or newness were cowboy boots or high-heels during winter. Snow and ice made either one impractical. Now, with a myriad of devices and enough hired labor, it's easy to be well-heeled through winter along the I-70 corridor. At the same time, nature is no longer the draw it once was. More and more people arrive purely for the jobs, in part because nature has been yoked under control. I think it is telling that the "mud season" seems to be in the process of being redefined. Once used exclusively to define the time of spring snowmelt, a writer in Breckenridge recently used the phrase to describe the October shoulder season of few tourists. Mud season to him was purely an economic description. In truth, there's too much asphalt, too many bricks in these I-70 corridor towns for mud to be a major consideration.
The great outdoors remains a vital component of the I-70 culture, but it is a more high-tech and not incidentally high-cost experience. The technological innovations of skiing have been immense, with extensive grooming and shaped skis allowing greater proficiency with fewer skills. The same principle applies across the board of outdoor recreation, from kayaking and rafting to mountain biking and even hiking. Along the I-70 corridor, people are out farther onto the edge, but more in control.
Nearly all these changes, from private schools to extreme sports, can be found across Colorado and the nation. What is noteworthy about the I-70 corridor is the extent of change. Always, it ranks among the superlatives. Other Colorado resorts may cater to the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's citizens. These I-70 resorts cater to the wealthiest 5 percent and build second homes for the wealthiest 1 or 2 percent.
VI. Seeing the future through a rear-view mirror
What will happen in the future? The near is more easily seen than the far. Skiing will be a lesser proportion of the total pie during the next decade, just one of many amenities for an I-70 economic and cultural order. This trend was already clearly underway before the attacks of September 11. It's possible that those events will reinforce perception of the interior Rockies as a "safe" yet comfortable location for living and doing business. It's also likely that the emphasis upon a sweat culture of the I-70 corridor will be replaced in small part by a new emphasis upon education and the arts. This is partly a consequence of a general aging of the I-70 population. However, these communities are trying hard to re-invent themselves, to keep themselves relevant to the changing world.
As for I-70 itself, the highway increasingly is the magical portal to paradise. It clogs with city-like densities on weekends, which should be no surprise, since the towns along its way collectively now attain city-like populations. Perception of this highway will always be in the rear-view mirror. Those who remember quieter, less uncluttered times will think it horrible, and those who come from other places where traffic has long been worse will find this a step up from "home." In time, perhaps as little as 20 years, this I-70 corridor could lose its luster and its amalgamation of cultural and economic superlatives. The instructive case is Leadville, where even 30 years ago few people could conceive of the end of mining. The last mine has now been closed for two years.
End Notes
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Summit County prices from Summit Asociation of Realtors, and Eagle Valley prices from Vail Board of Realtors. Also see Northwestern Colorado Council of Governments, 2001 Cost of Living Study, for relative pricing of I-70 corridor vs. cost in "standard" U.S. city. To understand the nature of real estate in these counties, however, you must visit slope-side enclaves. Instructive is the Bachelor Gulch development at Beaver Creek, where the National Park-inspired architecture called "parkitecture" has been employed. However, this expression of "rustic traditional" architecture is not inexpensive. Prices have surpassed $1,000 a square foot in the condominiums at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a level rare for Colorado, and even the nation. As a rule of thumb, the higher the elevation, the higher the price.
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U.S. Census Bureau, 1990 census, as collected by the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments.
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Qwest/Dex telephone director for Vail, Summit County, Leadville and Surrounding area, November 2000-2001.
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Eagle County's 60-plus population cohort grew by 70 percent in the 1980s, and was projected to double to more than 160 by the turn of the century. Those data are not yet available.
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Gooding, John D. 1981 The Archaeology of Vail Pass Camp, a Multi-component Base Camp below Treelimit in the Southern rockies. Highway Salvage Report No. 35, Colorado Department of Highways, Denver.
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Sprague, Marshall, The Great Gates, 1964, Little, Brown and Company. See pages 239-240, and 276.
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Holy Cross Trail, 1920. Biographical information about Daggett found in Brown's Holy Cross, the Mountain and the City.
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Best, Allen. "Charles D. Vail. Page 8, The Vail Trail, January 4, 1991.
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For sake of brevity, I've necessarily detoured around Denver's longing for a more direct route west. That willful enterprise had begun in 1860 and by the ealry 1920s, when O.W. Daggett was lobbying whatever elected leaders and bureaucrats he could buttonhole with his own brand of religion and roads, Denver was looking hard at an automobile road. The insight of Denver's municipal leaders was articulated with precision in Denver Municiipal Facts, a every-other-month publication issued by the city government. Particularly prescient was an article in the Sept-October 1921 issue, written by Arthur H. Carthuart, entitled "Denver's Greatest Manufacturing Plant." By that he meant recreation. Denver Municipal Facts can be found at the Denver Public Library.
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See Seibert's "Triumph of a Dream." In personal interviews, Seibert has maintained that he always believed that Vail would succeed as a resort, even wtihout an interstate highway, and that he in fact preferred no interestate. In interviews, Robert W. Parker, Seibert's vice president for marketing, corroborated Seibert's account.
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See Seibert and Hauserman, Inventorrs of Vail.. Seibert's story is a particularly fascinating one. His own father had worked I the mines of Leadville early in the century before returning to New England to raise a family. Seibert's family was not wealthy, although it was cultured. Seibert's investment in Vail was critical, and it would seem to have come from his wife. They later divorced. Seibert later was fired from the company he founded, and then tried to repeat his magic at a resort in Utah. There, he failed. In 2002, it is to be a site of the Winter Olympics.
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Colorado Department of Local Affairs, Property Tax Division
Selected bibliography
BOOKS and DOCUMENTS
Brown, Robert L. Holy Cross: The Mountain and the City. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1970.
Clawson, Janet Marie. Echoes of the Past: Copper Mountain, Colorado. Copper Mountain Resort, Colo, 1987.
Colorado State Planning Commission. The Present Status of the Highways of the State and A Preliminary Plan for the Future System. April 1937.
De Leuw, Cather & Company, Engineers and Planners, Chicago. Northern Colorado Trans-Mountain Highway Location and Economic Feasibility Study Chicago, Ill: 1970
Fay, Abbot. Ski Tracks in the Rockies: A Century of Colorado Skiing. Louisville, Colo.: Cordillera Press, 1984.
Goetzman, Arthur R. Quest for the Golden Circle: The Four Corners and the Metropolitan West 1945-1970. Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Gooding, John D. The Archaeology of Vail Pass Camp, a Multi-component Base Camp below Treelimit in the Southern Rockies. Highway Salvage Report No. 35, Denver: Colorado Department of Highways, 1981.
Hauserman, Dick. The Inventors of Vail, Edwards, Colo.: Golden Peak Publishing Co., 2000.
Seibert, Peter W. and William Oscar Johnson. Vail: Triumph of a Dream. Boulder, Colo.: Mountain Sports Press, 2000.
Sprague, Marshall. The Great Gates: The Story of the Rocky Mountain Passes. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1964.
Thomas, Thomas A. Roads to an Uncertain Future: Transportation and Transformation in Colorado's Interstate Highway Corridors in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Ph.D. thesis in history, University of Colorado-Boulder, 1996.
Wiley, Marion C. The High Road. Denver: Bicentennial project of the Division of Highways, State Department of Highways, State of Colorado, 1976.
INTERVIEWS
Parker, Bob. Retired vice president of marketing for Vail Associates. Telephone interviews September 1999 and November 1996.
"Charles Shumate for Colorado Reflections," two interviews broadcast on KOA-AM in 1983 or 1984, University of Colorado at Denver, Auraria Library.
PERIODICALS
- American Forests
- American Highways
- American Public Workers Association Reporter
- Citizen, Highway Section.
- Colorado Magazine
- Denver Municipal Facts
- Denver Post
- Grand Junction Sentinel
- Holy Cross Trail
- National Geographic
- New York Times
- Rocky Mountain News
- Summit County Journal
- Vail Trail
- Vail Valley Times