Ed Grange Recalls the Vision for Vail

BY KRISTEN HANNUM

It was a bold request, some might even say outrageous. Would Holy Cross Energy build out electric lines — miles of line — to power a risky new venture that its promoters were calling “Vail”? The gondolas were on the way that late spring of 1962, but the downhill dreamers who were trying to make their vision of a new ski area a reality had already spent all their capital; they couldn’t pay Holy Cross, a nonprofit electric co-op, anything up front. Public Service Company had turned them down. One other thing: They wanted their electric lines buried throughout the European-style resort they’d built at the slopes’ base.

One of the men at Holy Cross Electric Association who caught the vision of what Vail could become was Ed Grange. He saw the possibilities in the Gore Valley and helped push the small, local co-op to take a chance on this unproven idea for a ski resort far from population centers. Today, at 84, he still smiles as he skis on what are now world-renown runs.

Vail has turned out pretty successfully. It’s celebrating its 50th anniversary this winter and is the country’s largest ski resort. Plenty of Coloradans know its story: Pete Seibert, a former soldier from the 10th Mountain Division, returned to Colorado after World War II and became friends with Earl Eaton, a prospector, hiker and skier born in Eagle. Eaton told Seibert about a secret, no-name mountain he’d discovered. The two founded the brand-new town and ski area, naming the mountain Vail and opening it for business in December 1962.

Less well known is the key role played by what is now Holy Cross Energy in Vail’s earliest years — or the role a couple of sheep men played in the story leading up to Vail’s founding.

Ed Grange, the retired general manager of Holy Cross, chronicles the Vail story and others in his history of the co-op: Holy Cross Electric: In the Beginning, The First 30 Years. It was a personal project since in many ways the co-op’s history is also Grange’s history.

“He was involved from the beginning,” says his son, Tom Grange, who works for Holy Cross as a dispatcher. “There are very few of those people left who know what went on in those early days.

Born on a Roaring Fork Valley ranch in 1928, Ed Grange remembers what life was like without electricity. Water had to be hand-pumped; there was no running water, no indoor plumbing. His mother cooked on a woodstove that also heated her iron. A gasoline-powered washing machine out on the porch made “a god awful noise.

The electric co-op would change their lives. “When I drive down the road and see lines, I see comfort,” Grange says. “Without the co-op philosophy, all this area would have been without electricity for years.”

Grange includes Aspen’s fight to secede from the co-op in his book as well as stories like the laborer who didn’t come in to work until noon, explaining that Holy Cross “only pay[s] me half of what I’m worth and so I’m only going to work half the day.” Grange also chronicles the tragic death of lineman Lawrence “Dutch” Brooks, electrocuted in 1954. Grange incorporates enough details about transformers, substations and transmission line construction to delight utility aficionados. And he writes about those Greek sheep men in the Gore Valley.

In the 1950s, the Gore Valley, now known as Vail, had no town in it whatsoever. Sheep far outnumbered people during the summers because a couple of successful sheep men from Utah, Gus Kiahtipes and Pete Katsos, summered their thousands of ewes, rams and lambs there. The Pulis family from Denver also owned a summer home in the valley. The first record of Kiahtipes, Katsos and Pulis requesting electricity from Holy Cross came in 1951. Grange writes that the co-op turned them down, noting: “Seasonal consumers who refused to guarantee the minimum revenue required to justify the construction of this lengthy line.”

The original gondola descends into Vail Village in the early 1960.

“These two sheep men, Gus Kiahtipes and Pete Katsos, kept pestering us to bring electricity to them,” Grange remembers.

“We can’t do it,” he told them. “It’s only the two of you, and you’re only there for part of the year.”

Kiahtipes brought his ailing sheep to Carter Jackson, a Glenwood Springs veterinarian, when the animals needed medical treatment. “Here would come Gus with sick sheep in the back of his Cadillac,” Grange remembers Jackson saying.

Neither Kiahtipes or Katsos gave up easily, however, whether it was on ailing ewes or getting electricity. In 1958, the Holy Cross board finally agreed to build a singlephase line from Minturn to nearly the bottom of Vail Pass. Katsos and Kiahtipes got their electricity.

Not long after that, new customers began signing up in the area. Curious, Grange looked into it and learned they were all members of the Transmontane Rod and Gun Club, whose members, he was told, were affluent people from Denver and elsewhere who wanted to fish and hunt on private property.

“It was undercover,” Grange explains today. “It was actually Pete Seibert and Earl Eaton. They didn’t want anyone to know what they were up to. That’s how they were able to buy up most of the land in the upper valley.”

Seibert and Eaton’s dream — Vail — was almost miraculous in how it came together, but they couldn’t convince Public Service Company, an investor-owned electric company, to build power lines to their project.

“Public Service said, ‘You’ll never make this work, a ski area so far from Denver,’” Grange remembers Seibert telling Holy Cross’s pioneering general manager George Thurston in the spring of 1962. The for-profit utility wouldn’t build the lines without a hefty down payment.

“But we were already serving Aspen,” Grange says. “We thought it was a good idea.”

Thurston and Grange took it to the co-op board, pointing out that Holy Cross had already built that single-phase line to Katsos and Kiahtipes, and that made the Gore Valley part of the Holy Cross service territory. The board approved the request to service Seibert and Eaton’s dream ski area and village. “We’ll all be in trouble if you two are wrong,” Grange remembers directors saying.

“The main thing was that we had a foothold in the valley,” Grange says. “We already had lines, we just needed to convert them. We already had the right of way and the poles.”

Grange remembers Holy Cross serving Vail’s earliest lodges with underground lines by the summer of 1962. That was the co-op’s first experience with building underground lines.

Public Service (now known as Xcel Energy) wasn’t the only doubter. Thurston had a meeting with Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company regarding placing the phone lines for Vail on Holy Cross’s poles. “You’re making a big mistake; they’ll never succeed,” Granger recalls the telephone executives telling Thurston.

Vail opened on December 15, 1962, but only a few runs were open because the snow had been terrible that year. Tickets were free on that first day and just $5 for the rest of the season.

A Holy Cross employee discusses power line construction
plans in Vail circa 1962.

Despite that shaky start, within two years Vail was internationally acclaimed as a world-class resort. It was another step to an economy built around skiing rather than ranching for Colorado’s high mountains and for Holy Cross Energy. Today the co-op brings electricity to the ski areas of Aspen, Aspen Mountain, Buttermilk, Snowmass, Sunlight, Beaver Creek, Arrowhead and Vail.

“I think we’re the biggest ski area provider in Colorado,” Grange says.

That does seem likely.

It’s good news for Grange, who still skis at age 84, although he usually sticks to Snowmass these days instead of skiing all the local areas the way he did in the mid-1990s. In those days, the meters on each lift at each area had to be visited monthly to check the reading. Grange happily took on the task.

“We were fortunate to be in an area where we could develop the ski industry,” says Grange.

“Holy Cross was fortunate to end up with a lot of good people who made a lot of good decisions during those years of growth and change,” says Richard Brinkley, the co-op’s chief operating officer today.

“We did it as a family; that’s the co-op philosophy and George Thurston made it happen that way,” Grange says. “I was so proud of all that.”