The marker reads:
"VAIL
Colorado Historical Society signs located at Vail Pass rest area on I-70, installed 1999
PANEL 1 TITLE:
Vail Mountain stood bare just days before the resort's 1962 grand opening. As luck would have it, a late December storm blanketed the area, dumping several feet of powder on the untracked slopes. Fortune just kept smiling on the newly born ski area, which 10th Mountain veteran Pete Seibert, rancher Earl Eaton, and others built from scratch in an undeveloped valley. Conceived as an intimate European-style resort, Vail paired winter recreation with shopping, dining, and other attractions with emphasis on convenience and customer service. The formula proved enormously successful - too successful, perhaps. America's best-known and busiest ski area by the mid-1970s, Vail evolved from the cozy, tight-knit village Seibert envisioned into one of America's best-known, largest, and busiest resort communities.
Mountain Road Building
Colorado's early mountain motorists rattled along at a few miles per hour, content merely to keep their wheels on the road. Those high-country routes generally followed old wagon trails and lacked drainage, grading, and paved surfaces. The 1910s brought scattered improvements, but modern roads remained scarce until the 1930s, when Charles Vail became state highway chief. During his tenure (1930-1945), Colorado's paved highway mileage increased from 500 to 5,000, shortening travel times from days to hours and unifying the state's economy. The interstate highways (begun in the 1950s) and Eisenhower Tunnel (opened in 1973) propelled Colorado's tourism and ski industries and revitalized stagnant local economies. Still, there never seemed to be enough roads. By the 1990s traffic was a chronic concern, posing new challenges to the masters of mountain mobility.
Also found on this panel:
Largest Photo: State highway 4
Technological improvements in the 1920s, such as concrete, added miles of paved road to Colorado's ever-expanding highway system. Both horses and cars worked together to build this stretch of State Highway 4 in Eagle County.
Colorado Historical Society
Photo: Eisenhower Tunnel construction outside
By going beneath the Continental Divide, the Eisenhower Tunnel became Colorado's most reliable east-west route. The westbound tunnel (shown under construction in 1970) was named for President Eisenhower. In 1979 an eastern bore was completed and named for Edwin Johnson, a former Colorado governor and U.S. senator.
Colorado Historical Society
Photo: Vail Village
Two factors guided Vail's developers - convenience and charm. Slopes run right into town, cars are not allowed in the central cove, and much of the architecture resembles a Bavarian village.
Courtesy Vail Resorts
Small insert photo of Vail Valley
Vail Valley, 1985
Courtesy Vail Resorts
PANEL 2: THE 10th MOUNTAIN DIVISION
Camp Hale
The 10th Mountain Division, created for alpine and winter combat during World War II, girded for battle on the steep, inhospitable terrain of Camp Hale (about twenty-five miles southwest of here). Built at an old railroad sheep-loading stop, the base opened in 1942 with 8,000 recruits, many of them veteran mountaineers. Their specialized training kept them above 10,000 feet for days on end, poling cross-country under ninety-pound loads. These exercises increased endurance and taught important wilderness and cold-weather survival skills; however, they also landed hundreds in sickbay with frostbite and hypothermia. Camp Hale housed 15,000 military personnel (and hundreds of German POWs) during the war; today the area serves thousands of civilian skiers, who glide down some of the old training slopes at Ski Cooper or make cross-country journeys on the 10th Mountain Division Hut System.
Steeled for combat by the rigors of Camp Hale, the men of 10th performed heroically in World War II. Under the command of Maj. Gen. George Hays, they fought through the Apennine Mountains north of Florence, Italy, in the winter of 1944-45, leading the way for the Allied advance into the Po River Valley. Nine German divisions fell before this determined outfit, whose own casualties (over five thousand killed or wounded) attest to the grimness of their task. After the war, returning 10th Mountaineers applied their training to more peaceful pursuits, launching many major ski resorts across the country and generating improvements in ski equipment, safety, and instruction. For such achievements, nineteen former 10th Mountain Division soldiers were enshrined in the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame by 1999.
Also found on this panel:
Largest Photo: Troopers snowplowing in two lines
Near Camp Hale, 1943. While training, 10th Mountaineers carried rifles and wore heavy packs loaded with ammunition, shovels, cooking utensils, and extra clothes in case of extreme weather.
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Second largest photo: Igloo
Members of the 10th learned cold weather survival techniques such as constructing igloos like this one built near Camp Hale in 1943. The bi-level design allowed sleeping bags, cooking supplies, and other equipment to be kept on the warmer upper level.
Colorado Historical Society
Third largest photo: F Company on Riva Ridge
Atop Riva Ridge in Italy's Apennine Mountains, February 1945. The successful assault of this rocky and nearly vertical escarpment justified all the tough training in Colorado's mountains.
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Photo: Rock Climbing, Camp Hale
Though known for their skiing abilities, rock climbing, repelling, and numerous other mountaineering skills were equally important. Most of Camp Hale was dismantled by 1945. In 1992, the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and today it is managed by the U.S. Forest Service.
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
PANEL 3 TITLE: MOUNT OF THE HOLY CROSS
It is as if God has set His sign, His seal, His promise there - a beacon upon the very center and height of the Continent to all its people and all its generations...as if here was a great supply store and workshop of Creation, the fountain of Earth.
- Samuel Bowles, The Switzerland of America (1869)
A cross of snow, shining on a mountainside? Surely just a wilderness mirage. But this rumor (which began circulating in the 1860s) proved true. The 1,500-foot-tall marvel, mapped and photographed by Frederick Hayden's 1873 survey team, struck a chord deep in the nation's imagination. Poets and painters immortalized it, while hordes of pilgrims trekked westward to see for themselves what must be a divine portent. The difficulty of the journey only made it more meaningful; this was a trial of faith. Shrine Pass Road, dedicated in 1931, brought such a flood of believers that President Herbert Hoover was compelled to place the site under federal management. Years of weathering have blurred the image somewhat, but it remains a miraculous sight - a glimmer of redemption, lifting spirits skyward.
William H. Jackson and Thomas Moran
To capture the Mount of the Holy Cross on film, photographer William Henry Jackson had his own cross to bear - the sixty pounds of bulky camera equipment he lugged to the top of neighboring Notch Mountain. Jackson, a master shaper of perceptions (his 1873 shots of Yellowstone helped launch the national park movement), framed the mountain as a perfect union of heaven and earth. The photos inspired painter Thomas Moran (himself an accomplished iconographer) to commit this national treasure to canvas. Hovering in the mist above a rugged, Edenic landscape, Moran's Cross was both a proud defender and a soaring inspiration, beckoning America toward its glorious destiny; though the path may be arduous, God's grace lay at the end. Such was the promise discerned in that beacon of rock and snow.
Also found on this panel:
Largest Photo: photo of the Mount of the Holy Cross
Mount of the Holy Cross, William Henry Jackson, 1873
Colorado Historical Society
Second largest photo: Thomas Moran painting
Thomas Moran completed several paintings of the Mount of the Holy Cross - often sacrificing accuracy for artistry. In this 1890 version, Moran turned the mountain around in order to juxtapose it with a nearby creek.
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Photo: Pilgrims at Mount of the Holy Cross
Pilgrimages to the Mount of the Holy Cross became popular after Shrine Pass Road made the remote site more accessible in the 1930s. Today the mountain is the centerpiece and namesake of the Holy Cross Wilderness Area.
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