Corridors of powder: skiing with the super-rich in Colorado

Simon Mills slopes off with the super-rich in Colorado
Simon Mills2 February 2016

A first for me: the ten-person gondola I’m in has free Wi-Fi and heated seats. Better still, the cheek-warming benches automatically adjust the temperature under your ski pants the higher you go and the colder it gets. I get so comfortable that I almost consider abandoning my skis and going around again. I’m now toasty all over, my boots having been warmed up by my personal ski valet. Looking down over the slopes, I spot mountain photographers happy-papping couples. The chip embedded in my lift pass lets me email these holiday snaps to friends or post them on social media from the mountain. The same chip logs all details of my day: vertical feet skied, mileage of trails covered and my top speed.

Welcome to Vail, Colorado, where the concept of luxury skiing is taken to a whole new level. Every winter, this 50-year-old, purpose-built oligarchs’ paradise dukes it out with Aspen, 100 miles away, for the title of America’s most glamorous, luxurious, glitziest, well-heeled, best-catered, hardest-partying and celebrity-studded ski resort. It’s the skiing world’s equivalent of Ibiza v St Tropez.

Currently, Vail has the edge. As one fellow visitor put it: ‘Aspen attracts People magazine celebrities, Vail is for Forbes or Fortune magazine types. It’s where billionaires come to have fun in private.’ Indeed. Aspen gets Paris Hilton and Donald Trump (who once watched his then wife Ivana and his then mistress Marla Maples have a cat fight outside Bonnie’s restaurant), Vail with its Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons and (my choice) The Arrabelle hotels and security patrolled condo buildings has become a winter haven for presidents and their families: Michelle Obama has been seen on the Vail Mountain slopes with her daughters Malia and Sasha.

Not that Vail is short on celebs. Its annual film festival at the end of the ski season pulls in the likes of Kate Bosworth, Michelle Monaghan and Tom Sturridge, and film-biz execs fly their Lears and Bombardiers into Eagle Vail Airport, which is only half an hour from the slopes (Denver Airport is two hours away). Heidi Klum, Cameron Diaz, Jay Z, Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake and Goldie Hawn have all been spotted in town.

Everything about the place is set up for maximum comfort: from the aforementioned ski valet (who says ‘Good job!’ and high-fives me when I recount each day’s adventures on the slopes) to the changing rooms at Décimo, the mountain’s premier fine dining spot, where I freshen up before my lunchtime feast of hazelnut and ginger buffalo carpaccio and creamy risotto in changing rooms equipped with showers, lockers, cosmetics and complimentary slippers. There’s even a Club Cat snowmobile that you can book to take you to the Game Creek Club for a private on-mountain dining experience and then ride snow bikes back to the village on floodlit pistes.

Not that it’s all white napkins and silver service: the party scene here is as healthy as the crowd’s bank balances. A sign outside Décimo informs me that had I been in Vail a week later I could have caught superstar DJ Paul Oakenfold playing at a rocking late-night party when the venue transforms itself from high dining to vertiginous raving.

To soothe the next-day weariness, the Rich Kids of Instagram head to the Wildwood Smokehouse, a hipster barbecue joint that serves up a delicious recarbing menu of chicken and wild rice soup, barbecue brisket and pork. There’s also a trendy ten-pin bowling alley (Bol Vail), a branch of Nobu (Matsuhisa Vail) and the biggest piste-side ski café I’ve ever seen — a Pennsylvania-style wooden barn the size of an aircraft hangar with its own branch of Starbucks. But then, that’s Vail through and through: a local joke has it that the V in Vail stands for ‘vast’.

Which brings me to the skiing. While plenty come to see and be seen, the seven back bowls of Vail’s 5,289 acres are legendary. Lift queues are non-existent and the snow is groomed to Kardashian standards. We spend our days skiing Vail’s backcountry before heading to The Arrabelle for a pine-scented rubdown in the hotel’s spa. Yes, its Bavaria-on-steroids architecture and its Notting Hill property prices may be a bit of an acquired taste for any skier used to the Alps, but there’s certainly nowhere else in the world quite like it.

Luxury chalets

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DETAILS

Simon Mills was a guest of Vail Resorts and Ski Independence. Ski Independence offers 7 nights at The Lodge at Vail, A RockResort, including breakfast from £2,097pp based on two sharing and including direct BA flights and transfers (0131 243 8097; ski-i.com). For further information on Vail Mountain, including Vail Resorts’ lift pass product The Epic Pass, visit vail.com or snow.com

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