Green Travel

Vail’s Off to Pastures New

By David Godsall

Colorado’s Vail Resort has the biggest mountain in the Rockies. Now an expansive new development is giving it a heavy dose of green cred, along with the personality it never had.

Vail has always suffered from an identity crisis. Aspen has the glitz, Steamboat has the Wild West thing, Mammoth has California surf culture. All Vail’s got is 5,300 exquisite acres of Rocky Mountain perfection, the most skiable terrain for a single mountain in North America. But that’s about to change. The global greening of the ski industry is now a legitimate planning and development trend (not just a marketing trend), and skiers are making the environment a priority when they book a winter getaway. After all, powder hounds have an interest in the preservation of snow. With a multibillion-dollar transformation underway, Vail is placing a big bet on sustainability and hoping it will find its identity in the process.

When Vail Village was still a sheep pasture, Aspen, an actual town since the mid-19th century, had already hosted the FIS skiing world championships. Vail had to start from scratch, which meant importing a look and feel from elsewhere. They pulled it off nicely in some places. The Lodge at Vail, for example, achieves its appeal by mixing themes from the Rocky Mountain West and the Austrian Alps. But Vail Village had a homely sibling. The stucco-and-plywood Lionshead base area to the west had a distinctly 1970s style that was already looking long in the tooth by the mid-’80s. And a top-tier resort with top- tier ticket prices shouldn’t have a dodgy neighborhood.

In need of a fresh start, Vail shed the tarnished Lionshead name and called the area Vail Square. Before the new development, the only reason to hang out in the square was to wait for the shuttle to the village. Now there’s a skating rink with a fire pit, new restaurants (ranging from the posh French fine dining spot Centre V to the Blue Moose pizzeria) and a vibrant retail scene. The centerpiece of the renovation effort is a 500,000-square-foot complex called the Arrabelle at Vail Square. Housed in what looks like a handful of quaint Austrian mountain homes, its 36 rooms are all lavishly appointed with canopy beds and heavy walnut furniture. The quality of the execution ­– the details and materials – is what makes the Arrabelle’s imported aesthetic work. The Lionshead area would already be unrecognizable to a Vail veteran and the new Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons hotels that are currently under construction will keep the ball rolling.

With so much progress made on the style front, what Vail needed next was the substance to match its new image. The resort had already been offsetting 100 percent of its energy usage with wind power for a few years, but this is now being done everywhere from Jackson Hole to Sugar Loaf. If Vail was going to be redefined as the Green Resort, it needed to stay ahead of rivals like Aspen on sustainability issues. It needed a plan that was more advanced and comprehensive (not to mention more expensive) than anyone else’s. Enter the new Ever-Vail project. This third base area, under development to the west of Vail Square, was just awarded the highest LEED rating possible for “neighborhood development.” The idea is to approach energy use, waste, water use and other environmental considerations from a holistic perspective, as a unified system.

It’s a major investment made on the assumption that ski resorts should be leaders in sustainable development, the corollary being that the greenest resort will be rewarded with condo sales. The model has yet to be proven, and that’s exactly why it might work. The reinvention of the Lionshead area means Vail can go star for star with Aspen when it comes to hotels and restaurants, but with leadership on environmental issues skiers care about, it could soon gain something more important: its own identity.

(David Godsall is a writer and editor with Spafax Canada in Montreal who has grown fond of snow and emphatically applauds any effort to keep it.)

TOP IMAGE: VAIL RESORTS / JACK AFFLECK