Earl Eaton, a Founder of the Vail Skiing Resort, Is Dead at 85

The NYT reports: Earl Eaton, a dreamer who grew up glorying in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado as a hunter, a hiker, a prospector and a skier, then looked anew at a nameless 11,570-foot-high mountain and envisioned what became Vail, one of America's most popular ski resorts, died on May 25 at his home in Eagle, Colo.

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The story has been told and retold: On March 19, 1957, Mr. Eaton led his friend Pete Seibert on a seven-hour climb up a deserted mountain. They crested the hill and before them, on the other side, was a vast landscape of largely treeless bowls filled with powdery snow and boundless panoramas of skiing terrain.

"My God," Mr. Seibert said, according to many accounts in the Denver press over the years. "We've climbed all the way to heaven."

What is now Vail Resorts Inc. opened in 1962 and grew to become one of the biggest and most popular snow sports destinations in the United States, welcoming millions of visitors.

After the trek to the mountaintop, Mr. Seibert and Mr. Eaton named the mountain Vail after a local highway engineer, obtained permits, brought in investors and bought the property as surreptitiously as possible, saying only that they planned a rod-and-gun club.

"Everybody else thought we were crazy, but we thought we could do any damned thing we decided to do," Mr. Seibert said in an interview with Sports Illustrated in 1989.

Results were quick. In 1964, the same magazine said that "never in the history of U.S. skiing has a bare mountain leaped in such a short time into the four-star category of ski resorts."