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There’s a lot happening here in September and we want to make sure you know about these three in particular:

We’ve pulled a bunch of local event calendars together and put them in one place for your convenience - bookmark the Calendar page on our website for easy access!

🍩 Eagle vs. Avon: the valley's donut rivalry just got real. One shop sold out 1,000 donuts in under an hour — twice. Read the full debate.

The valley is home to a host of people who love to travel, as well as being a preferred destination for travelers who live elsewhere. There are some who live amongst us who have turned their passion for globe-trotting into careers in the travel industry.

We’ll be diving into ski season planning soon enough, but in this issue we want to introduce you to two people who regularly make magic happen for their clients - London, Dubai, Zermatt, Chile, Borneo, and anyplace else you can think of to go!

Read more…

The market data through the end of July are in and we crunched the numbers to give you our perspective - never a dull moment!

The Fall Ridge building just steps away from the Vail Golf Course Clubhouse with convenient access to Vail Village via the town rec path and the in-town free bus system. There are only a handful of four-bedroom units in the building and we have had the privilege of working with two of them this year. Check out the tastefully appointed Residence 312 here.

In the latest instalment of his Stammtisch series, Jean-Claude Moritz takes us back to Vail in the '70s, '80s, and '90s for the story of "bumper-skitching" — the local kids' favorite (and thoroughly ill-advised) pastime of grabbing the back bumper of a Town of Vail bus and letting it tow you down the snowy street like a human waterskier. On big storm nights, Bridge Street became their personal tow-rope playground, with kids crouched behind snowbanks waiting to latch on unnoticed by the driver. When they weren't skitching off buses, they were "training" in the Vail Athletic Field parking lot, getting dragged in circles behind a friend's Volvo through the snow.

It's a nostalgic, tongue-in-cheek look at growing up in Vail with zero supervision and a lot of questionable judgment — dangerous, dumb, and, as JC tells it, absolutely glorious. He closes with a toast to bumper-skitching as "the dumbest, most exhilarating winter sport never recognized by the IOC," and to the valley that somehow kept them all alive to tell the tale. (Standard disclaimer applies: please don't try this at home.) Read the full piece here!

If you've driven Cooley Mesa Road over the past several months, you already know the pain. The stretch from McGregor Drive west to Buckhorn Valley Boulevard feels like it's been under some kind of construction since spring.

It has been — Gypsum's been widening that road to match the lanes on either side of it, adding turn lanes into a new neighborhood going in nearby, and generally trying to keep up with an airport corridor that's grown faster than the road ever expected. Annoying in the moment. But it's also the clearest sign yet that this corner of Gypsum is turning into something different than it used to be.

Here's what's actually going on out there.

Vail Brewing Company's new Gypsum outpost poured its first pints on June 1. This isn't a satellite taproom — it's a 15,000-square-foot production brewery, the company's biggest space yet, sitting alongside the original EagleVail brewery and the Vail Village tasting room. The new license lets VBC add cocktails and wine to the lineup, so it's less a beer stop and more a full bar with house-made beer at the center of it.

Right next door to the business park, Siena Lake — the long-in-the-works residential community south of the airport — is finally becoming a real neighborhood instead of a construction site with a sales trailer. Homes are going up around the seven-acre lake, the first residents are moving in, and the plan still calls for live-work units and mixed-use commercial fronting Cooley Mesa Road itself. That's the other half of why the road is getting torn up: Gypsum is adding dedicated turn lanes into Siena Lake as part of the widening project, and Eagle County chipped in over $3 million toward four-laning Cooley Mesa from Navajo Road out to the business park specifically because of the growth Siena Lake and the airport corridor are both driving.

Practically, that means a few hundred new neighbors within walking distance of the brewery, the hotel going in, and everything else on this list. The construction pain now is basically the bill coming due for the growth everyone can see coming.

A 140-room dual-brand Hilton — a Hampton Inn & Suites paired with an extended-stay Home2 Suites — broke ground in late June at 135 Lindbergh Drive. Indoor pool, fitness center, firepits on an outdoor deck, meeting space. It's targeting an early 2028 opening and is being billed as one of the first new down-valley hotel builds in 25-plus years. Once it's open, it'll bring the district's first steady stream of overnight guests who aren't just passing through on their way to a flight.

Costco still anchors the retail side, but up Highway 6 near Trail Gulch Road, both 10th Mountain Whiskey & Spirit Co. and 808 Distillery are open and pouring — informal après stops for the industrial/airport crowd, even though neither serves food. Between VBC's new tasting room, a hotel bringing in overnight guests, and Siena Lake filling in next door, don't be shocked if this area finally gets its first real restaurant in the next year or two.

This was, for a long time, just Gypsum's big-box strip — Costco, the airport, some warehouses. It's turning into an actual place: somewhere you'd go for a beer, somewhere people are moving into, somewhere with a hotel and airplanes and a distillery and a lake. The road construction has no doubt been annoying - but it’s a sign that the neighborhood requiring it is finally showing up.