In January 1994, my sophomore college roommate, Caleb, and I bought one way tickets to Vail Colorado, on a mission to be ski bums. We each had a suitcase, skis, and $300 in cash. No cell phones. No internet. No job. No house. No plan.
There wasn’t much to research in advance, since there was no internet, and we didn’t know anyone in Vail. We flew separately to Denver, and reflected during our 3.5 hour shuttle rides into the mountains. We arrived in Vail about four hours apart – two pins randomly dropped in a strange town.
Finding each other without cell phones took a few hours, but we finally rendezvoused in front of Häagen-Dazs – which we’d picked a month earlier, from a copy of the Vail yellow pages in the Swarthmore College library. Back then, with no internet, libraries kept a copy of every phone book in America in their stacks.
Once in Vail, we scrambled for a place to live. We convinced a ski instructor to let us sleep in his basement for a few days – for a minimal daily fee. On our second day, I got a job as a sous chef at Trails End Lodge, working for the resort.
I worked either the breakfast shift or Apres-ski shift (that’s a fancy name for Happy Hour). Both shifts let me ski all day. My boss was a retired Navy admiral who wanted to live in and enjoy the mountains. He was a kind man who knew we were all there to ski, and he supported our adventures.
The Apres-ski shift was my usual shift and let me ski until the mountain closed. The breakfast shift got me on the mountain by 10 AM. Employees get a 45 minute head start on the ski lifts, before the mountain opens, so by the time the tourists were in line, I was already long gone on the back of the mountain.
Working at a restaurant included three free meals every day and a free season pass! It was perfect.
Caleb got a job with the town of Vail, as the night manager at the parking garage. The perks? A season pass and two meals per day. Paycheck? Not for another week. We lived on grapefruit (a gift from the ski instructor) and canned Safeway tomato soup.
We immediately placed a housing-wanted ad in the local paper (I saved it, see photo below!) and got a voice message the first day it ran. It was late January, and a local property manager needed to fill a three bedroom house in East Vail. We seized the offer, put another ad out about the rooms and rushed to sublet them. By the end of the week, we were in our new house, and after the first month, we were making money, as the room sublets paid off.
In order to make ends meet, Caleb and I had rented all the bedrooms, so we shared and slept in the unheated attic. There was only enough room for two mattresses, side by side (see photo). It was winter in Vail, and it was frigid at night. We slept under two comforters, wearing sweaters, hats, and ski gloves. The simple act of rolling over at night would wake me up, as my face touched the ice-cold pillow. We called it “the Womb”.
We had no drawers or closets. I kept my clothes in the firewood space in the living room (see photo). Caleb commandeered a kitchen cabinet.
The house belonged to Frank Shorter, the ’72 Olympic marathon gold medalist. It served as his summer high-altitude training base. As a cross country runner (and now in hindsight a lifelong runner), it was a really cool coincidence.
Nestled by Gore Creek in East Vail, just beneath the Bighorn Creek trailhead, the house was a cozy A-frame with a fireplace (see photos and captions). It sat at an elevation of 8,500 feet. The backyard was a massive 2,700-foot hillside, stretching up to 11,200 feet – the forested front side of Vail’s east back bowls.
Living at altitude was exciting – I remember trying to follow the baking instructions on a box of food, which called for modification at high altitudes of 3,500+ feet. We were more than twice that elevation. Coming from the humid east coast, I was struck that we didn’t need to wrap our bread or reseal bags of chips. Nothing goes stale in the wintertime in Vail.
The house was decorated with running memorabilia, including keepsakes from the ’72 Olympic Games. There was a Munich blanket, and posters on the wall (see photos). I had a cheap 35mm camera, and film was expensive. I took a decent amount of pictures, but I wish I had taken more.
The house had a bookshelf packed with suspense novels. Thanks to Frank Shorter’s library, I discovered authors like Ken Follett (Eye of the Needle), Robert Ludlum (The Holcroft Covenant and The Bourne Identity), and Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose). No internet. No cell phones. We skied, worked, and read books.
On days I skied alone, I’d bring a book in my backpack. For lunch I would get a free employee meal at Two Elk Lodge (the original one before it burned down) at the top of Sun Up Bowl. I’d dig a chair out of the snow over to the side, eat my cheeseburger and read Robert Ludlum.
Memorably, Frank Shorter’s music collection introduced me to iconic sound of The Cult. The house had a record player but only three or four albums. One was “Best of Earth, Wind & Fire” which made for a celebratory dance party the day we moved in… but the record that became my soundtrack for the winter was “Love” by The Cult.
Imagine me placing the needle on the record, with no idea what would play, as crackling static and dust came rustling to life – the first time I heard “She Sells Sanctuary” was as a ski bum at Frank Shorter’s house in Vail, Colorado as the snow fell and the fireplace roared.
We had no car, so every morning we took the free shuttle into town or we hitchhiked in the back of a pick-up, whichever passed by first.
Almost every night after work, I’d run home five miles, alone down the frontage road into East Vail under the stars. The dry snow on the road would crunch beneath me, and I’d run in silence, no music or headphones, with the moon hanging above me, and the Gore Range looming in the shadows. The peaks of Vail’s iconic range kept me company on those runs, and they watched Caleb and me ski every day from across the valley on the slopes. I started to call them my friends, and I still think of them that way.
It’s wild when a mountain range is just there. Like a compass. In the winter. Summer. Sun and the rain. They were there before me, they are there right now, and they’ll be there when I’m gone. And for my time in Vail, they were my guide home under the stars every night in the dead of winter in the middle of Colorado.
Because I worked in the late afternoons, after the mountain closed each day, and Caleb worked nights, the two of us evolved an epic daily routine: First thing in the morning, we’d ride together into town and eat breakfast at the slope-side restaurant, where I worked.
At the end of the day, when the lifts closed, I went to work, and Caleb went to bed. After work, I’d run home under the stars, and wake up Caleb. He’d head to work, and I’d go to bed. When Caleb got home at 6:30 AM, he’d wake me up… and we’d do it all over again. – for 90 days in a row.
Fun fact, I wiped out and broke my hand the first day we went skiing. The doctor asked me to bring my ski pole into the hospital and he wrapped my cast so my hand would snap into place on the pole like the old school GI Joe men with the kung fu grip. I was back skiing three days later. My thumb is still jacked up though… LOL.
What’s crazy about all of these old photos… is that I didn’t get them developed until after we got home. I flew the film back in my luggage with no idea of what I’d captured over the months we were away. Some of the film didn’t make it and was nothing but overexposed white paper. But many of the shots made it back intact.
Living in Vail for one season might seem like a short time, but at 19, with so much personal pride at stake and a one way plane ticket, it was my defining moment. Caleb and I skied almost every day we were there, hitting just shy of 100 ski days on our end of season pass reports.
During that time, we learned to recognize the smells of the different types of snow. The tree bark cooking to a dark brown in the spring sun. The sounds of the streams that ran beside every path in town. The rush of wind from the ski lift’s crescendo up the mountain – the official start of every day – as we’d swing our feet and smile unabashedly with joy. Two best friends without a care in the world, we stuffed everything we needed into a backpack each morning, and never thought beyond one or two hours ahead. I didn’t party. I didn’t need an alarm clock. I was self-motivated and happy. It was the greatest decision of my young life.
Twenty-five years later, I tracked down the house property manager, Jim Davis – a name etched in my memory – on LinkedIn and thanked him for having faith in two 19 year olds. He replied that he remembered us, and told me he’d moved back to Michigan to raise a family. It’s been surreal to reconnect with a guy who inadvertently changed my entire life for the better! He even likes my LinkedIn posts about work.
I went back to Vail for the first time in 30 years…. and I got to visit our old house, which stood there waiting as if we’d never left.
Click here to read Vail YOLO Adventure Part II: Reuniting with the Gore Range and Sending Off My Daughter 30 Years Later
Update One: The day I posted this, my dad’s law clerk from 1994 texted me. She said that the day I left for Vail was the only day she ever saw my dad nervous (and she knew him until he died).
Once I was settled in and safe in Vail, my dad and mom flew out to visit.
Don’t think I fool myself. I had the largest safety net of all time as a kid. My dad never had a safety net. It’s surreal to try to balance the scales of life… all we can do is be thankful.
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages… In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried”
-Emerson ‘Self Reliance’ (by way of John Sheaffer by way of Pat Tillman… the greatest gift of literature I’ve received as an adult)
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