Vail Mountain Resort5,317 acres, seven Back Bowls, and the largest single-mountain ski resort in Colorado

Vail opened on December 15, 1962 with a single Bell gondola, two chairlifts, eight ski instructors, and nine ski runs — the dream of 10th Mountain Division veteran Pete Seibert and Colorado native Earl Eaton, who first climbed the mountain together in the winter of 1957. They saw what the United States Forest Service had owned all along: a thirteen-mile, north-facing ridge with seven natural bowls behind it, sitting halfway between Denver and Aspen on the route that would become I-70.

Sixty years later it's still the largest ski resort in Colorado and the second-largest single-mountain operation in North America after Big Sky — 5,317 acres, 32 lifts (including a 12-passenger gondola, four six-packs, and fourteen high-speed quads), 278 trails, and the four-mile Riva Ridge run from the summit to Vail Village. The seven Back Bowls (Sun Up, Sun Down, Tea Cup, China, Siberia, Inner Mongolia, and Outer Mongolia) account for nearly 3,000 acres of treeless powder skiing — the largest concentration of bowl terrain in North America.

The base is a purpose-built Bavarian-themed village with two clusters: Vail Village around Gondola One, and Lionshead around the Eagle Bahn Gondola. Both connect by a free in-town bus that runs every ten minutes. The terrain runs 18% beginner, 29% intermediate, 53% expert — and Blue Sky Basin, opened in 2000 on the back side of the back bowls, adds another 645 acres of glades and chutes that ski like a permit-only backcountry zone with a chairlift back to civilization.