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It’s 50 years since Earl Eaton stumbled across what was to become Vail Mountain while prospecting for uranium in Eagle County, Colorado. The mountain could not really be seen properly from the road, so Eaton dragged his friend Pete Seibert up to have a closer look - easier said than done. Seibert, a former US racer, was one of America's celebrated 10th Mountain Division troops until he was invalided out of the army after his kneecap was smashed by shrapnel in Italy. This did not stop him strapping on his skis to accompany Eaton when he set out to explore the mountain. After climbing through deep snow for seven hours, they finally crested the summit. "The first time I saw it" said Seibert, "I knew it was as good as any ski mountain I'd seen."

To Aspen’s chagrin, 100 miles away, Vail evolved into America’s biggest single mountain resort, with a “footprint” stretching seven miles from east to west. With something like the ‘front-side’ 1,500 acres of ‘corduroy’ slopes criss-crossed with getting on for 200 runs and 34 lifts, (including some 14 high-speed quads) Vail has a wealth of well-groomed slopes for novices and intermediates, while powder skiers can take their pick from seven back-bowls and Blue Sky Basin, where the two main features – Pete’s Bowl and Earl’s Bowl – commemorate Vail’s founders. The bowls, where powder piles up as winter progresses (in a good year Vail can expect at least 350 inches of snowfall) and very little is groomed – account for around 3,790 acres of skiing, producing a grand total of 5,290 acres of skiing terrain.

Vail opened for skiing in 1962 – just a year after nearby Breckenridge, an old Victorian mining town turned ghost town. Along with the much longer established Aspen, Vail and Breckenridge would be rivals for 35 years – until they “merged” in 1997. In reality this meant that Vail purchased Breckenridge and “Breck’s” Summit County sister resort of Keystone too – and “Vail Resorts”, perhaps the most powerful skiing alliance in the Rockies, was born.

It wasn’t easy at first. Aspen, which had somehow managed to cultivate an uneasy but superficially cordial working relationship with its arch rival, drew its daggers again. Jim Felton, the long-serving PR director for Breckenridge who used to throw snowballs at buses bringing Vail skiers to try its main rival’s slopes, suddenly found himself serving the old enemy. At the time, a newspaper cartoon depicted the joint territories as “Vail Resorts – formerly Colorado.”

All three Vail Resorts, along with Vail’s original sister resort of Beaver Creek, are available on the same lift ticket. That’s all fine and dandy, but unless you change accommodation accordingly, you’re need to drive to each alternative resort if you want to take advantage of this arrangement. Distances are not a problem – Vail to Breckenridge, for example, is around 37 miles, and to Keystone 35 miles. But driving from Vail to either of the other resorts involves negotiating Vail Pass, which can be a daunting experience if the weather turns nasty on I-70, especially if you’re being overtaken by huge trucks surging over the pass like something out of Steven Spielberg’s early movie-masterpiece, Duel.

We based ourselves in the labyrinthine 500+ room Beaver Run resort hotel in Breckenridge, where at busy times the only direct lift to our floor (the apartment number – 33420 suggests a hotel the size of a city, but the first three digits actually refer to Building 3, Floor 3) was so impossibly busy that you had time to do a little shopping or sit down and make some progress reading War and Peace before there was any room to get into it.

However the Beaver run was undeniably close to the slopes at Breckenridge where we had the excitement of riding the resort’s latest pride and joy, the Imperial Express Superchair – the highest chairlift in North America. The lift takes you almost to the top of Peak 8 (at 12,840 feet it only leaves skiers and boarders to walk the last 158 feet to the summit). More significantly, it accesses a lot of the terrain on Peak 7, which until last winter was only half-heartedly served by a T-bar. There was a poignant reminder during our stay of why it has taken a long time to get skiers onto Peak 7 in any numbers.

Just 20 years earlier, on February 18 1987, eight skiers were caught in a massive avalanche there, prompting one of the biggest search-and-rescue operations in Colorado’s ski history, involving hundreds or volunteers and professional rescue workers. Only four of the eight skiers survived. In the 1980s Peak 7 was out-of-bounds backcountry skiing. These days, with the mountain open to the general public, safety precautions mean such an occurrence could almost certainly not happen again.

Our final day in “former Colorado” was spent enjoying a rare treat – cat skiing at Keystone. Rather more daunting than the terrain – where the deep powder was thoroughly exhilarating – was one of the two guides, Frank “The General” Worsham. He put the fear of God into one or two less experienced members of our group by treating the adventure rather more like a mission into the Mekong Delta than a day of powder skiing. The snowcat (number 1064 – only two digits shy of 1066, the date of a rather earlier battle) seemed almost to become his personal M48 tank and he roared out, John Wayne style: “This is the time to ask yourself if you are really an expert…this is not a day to learn how to ski powder!”

His colleague Duke Bradford (the head guide for KAT - Keystone Adventure Tours) was more reassuring. “We’ve never had to give up on a client” he said. “We’ve blasted the heck out of any dangerous cornices. The weather is mixed – we’ll take what we’re given. It’s a big day today – we’ve got two cats out. We have incredible access to backcountry – all the way to Georgetown and Bailey, 50 miles across, and in the other direction all the way to Breckenridge.”

We started off with a mellow run in Bergman Bowl that was hardly likely to get “The General” steamed up. Revolution was next, and then Patriot. This was more like it. Luckily by this time Duke was leading and “The General” was driving the cat. This made life somewhat more relaxed for the troops as we skied Liberty twice and Midnight Ride. At only around $80 a day for each of us, this was almost a steal. Especially when “ordinary” lift tickets in Colorado’s prime resorts are among the most expensive in the world.

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