A History of Bachelor Gulch

I remember driving up Daybreak Ridge before there was a Ritz-Carlton Bachelor Gulch.

We bring guests to Bachelor Gulch year-round on our Beaver Creek car service.

They had a little hot dog stand at the bottom of the Bachelor Gulch Express, one chairlift and a hot dog stand. That was it. The whole base operation. A few guys in a trailer running the show.

Up the ridge was nothing. Just Trapper's Cabin sitting up there alone, the way it had been for years. The gate guards at the bottom would check the tread on your tires before letting you up in a snowstorm. Bachelor Gulch wasn't Bachelor Gulch yet. It was a ski lift and a piece of mountain that hadn't decided yet what it was going to become.

I was up there driving a 1994 Toyota 4x4 with a Stihl 044 in the bed and a job site to get to. I was working on one of the first homes built on Daybreak Ridge, three years on that job. I was there. Before the Ritz. Before Bear Paw. Before Snow Cloud, Hummingbird, Settlers Lodge, Horizon Pass, all of it. Just me, a chainsaw, a four-wheel-drive truck, and a piece of mountain that hadn't decided yet what it was going to become.

Thirty years later I drive the customers who stay in those homes. Some of them, I helped build the bones of.

So here's what's actually up there now, neighborhood by neighborhood, lodge by lodge. A guide to Bachelor Gulch and the mountain communities around it, from the guy who was hauling logs up the ridge before any of it had a name.

A Quick Lay of the Land

Bachelor Gulch is the middle village of Beaver Creek Resort. Three villages make up the resort:

• Beaver Creek Village, the original, the most polished, where the bulk of the dining and shopping lives
• Bachelor Gulch, the gated, secluded one in the middle, anchored by the Ritz-Carlton Bachelor Gulch
• Arrowhead, the western one, quieter, closer to Edwards

You ski between all three. The lifts and the trails connect them. The shuttles run between them. You can stay at any of them and reach the others by sliding down a run.

But the three villages have very different personalities. Beaver Creek is the showpiece. Arrowhead is the hideaway. Bachelor Gulch is the gated luxury enclave where the buyers tend to want privacy and the architecture leans toward the great national-park lodges, heavy timber, stone, big windows, ski-in/ski-out from every door.

That's the world we're going to walk you through.

Daybreak Ridge, The Spine of Bachelor Gulch

Daybreak Ridge is the road and the neighborhood. The road climbs from the Bachelor Gulch entry gate up to the high homesites that look out over the entire valley, the Gore Range, Beaver Creek mountain, the back side of Arrowhead, the whole valley laid out below.

The houses up here are the trophy houses of Bachelor Gulch. Twenty-mile views in three directions. Custom log and stone, mostly. The kind of place where the lots sit far enough apart that you can't see your neighbor's lights through the trees.

The point isn't who lives on Daybreak Ridge. The point is that the people who can buy anywhere chose this ridge.

When I first started driving up Daybreak in the mid-'90s, most of the lots were still trees. I was working on one of the first homes built up there, a custom log house at the top of the ridge, three years on that job.

You had to pack a lunch. No restaurants in Bachelor Gulch. No cafe at the lift base. Just one chairlift and a hot dog stand, and Avon was twenty minutes down the hill. By the time you drove down and back you'd eaten two hours of your work day. So everybody on the crew packed a lunch and a thermos and ate sitting on a stack of logs.

The gate guards at the bottom would check the tread on my tires before letting me up in a snowstorm. (That 1994 Toyota 4x4 with the Stihl 044 in the bed didn't always look like it belonged on this road. But the guys at the guard shack knew me, and they knew if my tires were bad I wasn't getting up there anyway. So they checked. And I was glad they did.)

Thirty years later I'm driving up the same road in a nice new warm Suburban with a heated steering wheel and heated seats, somebody else in the back. The trees have grown in. The gate guards don't check my tires anymore, they just wave me through.

Some things change. Some things don't. The view from the top of Daybreak Ridge is exactly what it was in 1996.

Strawberry Park, Holden Road, and the End-of-Day Run

If you ride Beaver Creek today and look at a trail map, you'll see Strawberry Park as one of the lift areas, a quad chair on the eastern side of the resort, family terrain, gentle blues and greens.

What you won't see on the trail map is what it was thirty years ago, when most of what's now Bachelor Gulch was raw mountain.

Big snow days were the hardest. You'd wake up to a couple feet of snow and have to shovel for a few hours in the morning and sweat your ass off, then be cold and wet the rest of the day on the job site. Lifts running. Storm still coming down. Every other rider on the mountain getting fresh tracks while you were setting logs in wet boots. It hardened you up.

By the end of the afternoon you wanted one good run. Just one. The kind that gets you through the next day.

So that's what we did.

When we knocked off, a few of us would grab our boards out of the trucks and strap in right at the construction site. Ride down off Daybreak Ridge, through the woods, across what's now somebody's back yard, and end up on Holden Road in Beaver Creek. Ten minutes, top to bottom. Fresh tracks because nobody else knew the line.

One of the guys would drive down to meet us, the long way around the mountain, out the Bachelor Gulch gate, over to the Beaver Creek entry, in to Holden Road. A pretty far drive. We'd throw our boards in the bed of his pickup, jump in after them, and ride back up to the job site together. Grab our trucks. Head home.

We rode in Carhartts. Wood chips in our hair and down our shirts.

Good times.

(Today you can't ride through anybody's yard up there. The yards are all worth eight figures and they all have cameras. Back then, before the houses got built, the whole mountain was a shortcut home.)

Trapper's Cabin, The Original

Trapper's Cabin was the first thing on the ridge. Built in 1986, almost a decade before Bachelor Gulch was even a concept, it sits at 9,500 feet at the top of what's now Bachelor Gulch, tucked into the trees above McCoy Park.

The cabin was the brainchild of Vail Associates' mountain planner Mike Larson, who pitched it ahead of the 1989 World Alpine Ski Championships at Beaver Creek. The idea drew from the 10th Mountain Division's backcountry hut system, the network of rustic ski-touring cabins scattered through the high country between Vail and Aspen. But where the 10th Mountain huts are bare-bones, Trapper's Cabin went the other direction: catered, staffed, plush. The luxury version of a backcountry hut. Vail Associates owner George Gillett signed off on it; his wife Rose did the original interiors. Designed by Vail-based architect Jack Zehren.

When I first started driving up Daybreak Ridge in the mid-'90s, Trapper's was the only thing up there. No Ritz. No Bear Paw. No Horizon Pass. Just Trapper's Cabin, alone in the trees, the way it had been for almost ten years already.

Today the cabin is still operated as an exclusive on-mountain rental, four bedrooms, sleeps ten, staffed with a "Cabin Keeper" who handles everything from groceries to private chefs. Winter access is by private snowcat only, departing from the Osprey in Beaver Creek Village. Renovated in 2008.

It's still the most exclusive piece of lodging on the mountain. Every other lodge, every other residence, every other club came after it. Trapper's was here first, and Trapper's is still here.

The Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch, The Anchor

The Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch opened in November 2002. It's the heart of the village. The reason Bachelor Gulch became Bachelor Gulch.

180 rooms. A 21,000-square-foot spa with 19 treatment rooms. Direct ski-in/ski-out off the Bachelor Gulch Express. Zach's Cabin for private dining. AAA 5-Diamond rated since it opened. The kind of property where a family can spend a week without ever needing to leave the building.

The address is 0130 Daybreak Ridge. That's the same road I was driving up every day for three years building one of the first homes on the ridge. For most of that time, the Ritz site was a hole in the ground, and then a steel skeleton, and then a slow-rising mountain of timber and stone. I watched it go up out my truck window every morning on the way to work.

Architecturally it reads as a great national-park lodge, heavy timber, stone, big windows, sloping rooflines that look like they grew out of the mountain. From the outside it looks like the biggest log building you've ever seen.

Here's what most guests don't know, and what every builder who's worked up here can spot: it's not a log building. It's a commercial steel-and-concrete structure with logs and timber bolted on as cladding. Which is how every hotel at this scale gets built. You can't actually stack logs three stories tall and put 180 rooms behind them, code won't allow it, engineering won't support it. Being log crafters, we used to make fun of it. Just a big commercial job dressed up to look like the real thing. I'm glad I had nothing to do with it.

But the cladding is real timber, the stonework is real stone, and from every angle that matters, it reads exactly like what it's supposed to read like: a great mountain lodge dropped into Bachelor Gulch.

The illusion works. That's the whole point.

Bear Paw Lodge, High on the Mountain

Bear Paw Lodge sits high on the south side of Bachelor Gulch, above the village core, with unobstructed views down the valley to the Gore Range, Red and White Mountain, and Castle Peak. Two- and three-bedroom condominiums, heated outdoor pool, three hot tubs, heated underground parking. Built in four phases during the Bachelor Gulch buildout era, finished alongside the Ritz-Carlton.

When I first started driving up Daybreak Ridge in the mid-'90s, Bear Paw wasn't permitted yet. It was just paper, a planned condominium project on a mountainside. By the time we finished Horizon Pass in November 2002, Bear Paw was up and running with the rest of the village.

If you're staying at Bear Paw, the Cabin Fever trail is your ski-in/ski-out, it runs right past the lodge. Useful detail: Cabin Fever is one of the first runs to open in winter and one of the last to close in spring. That's a real edge on early-season and late-season skiing, most ski-in/ski-out units in the village can't say the same.

Plus, Bear Paw guests get complimentary access to the Ritz-Carlton's outdoor pool and hot tub. Which is a nice perk if you want the Ritz experience without the Ritz price tag.

Hummingbird Lodge, Mid-Mountain, Inspired by Yosemite

Hummingbird Lodge sits mid-mountain in Bachelor Gulch, just above and overlooking the Ritz-Carlton. Four buildings, A, B, C, and D, set among the Roughneck and Cabin Fever ski runs, with direct ski-in/ski-out access to the Bachelor Gulch Express.

Architecturally, the lodge takes its cue from The Ahwahnee in Yosemite National Park, the iconic 1927 grand lodge that became the model for national-park architecture across the American West. Floor-to-ceiling granite fireplaces, wide-plank hickory floors, butternut cabinetry, vaulted ceilings, big windows framing the down-valley view.

Hummingbird was built by RA Nelson, Chupa Nelson's outfit, which started in 1976 and has put a hand on most of the resort architecture in the Colorado Rockies since: Vail, Beaver Creek, Bachelor Gulch, Arrowhead, Aspen, Snowmass, Telluride. Chupa came to Vail in 1966 to ski, ended up on the original Vail Ski Patrol, and then spent the next sixty years building the valley. He's the kind of figure that anyone who's been in the trades up here for a few decades knows by name. Real builder. Real legacy.

The lodge has a private clubhouse with two outdoor hot tubs, a fire pit, fitness room, and a game lounge. Heated underground parking with elevators that take you straight to your unit, useful in February when you've got skis, kids, and groceries.

If the Ritz-Carlton is the public face of Bachelor Gulch, Hummingbird is the quieter version, same view, same access, same finish level, but with the privacy of a residential building instead of a hotel lobby. Smart-money play if you're staying more than a few nights and want the space.

The Other Lodges of Bachelor Gulch Village

Bachelor Gulch Village is officially anchored by the Ritz-Carlton hotel and residence club, plus a handful of standalone lodges. We've covered Bear Paw and Hummingbird above. Here are the rest of the named properties up there.

Settlers Lodge

A boutique 16-unit building near the top of Bachelor Gulch Village, on Bachelor Ridge Road. Smaller and quieter than the other lodges. Two-, three-, and four-bedroom condominiums with stone fireplaces, ski lockers, and a private hot tub set into a stone patio with a cascading waterfall and pond. Adjacent to the Roughlock ski trail (locals call it the "tunnels and bridges" run). Ski-in/ski-out, heated underground parking, complimentary access to the Ritz-Carlton pool and hot tubs. Bachelor Gulch Club membership included with most purchases, a $35,000 value.

Snow Cloud Lodge

27 luxury one-, two-, three-, and four-bedroom condominiums right at the base of the Bachelor Gulch Express lift, next door to the Ritz-Carlton. Wood ceiling beams, stone fireplaces with heavy timber mantels, granite countertops. Lobby with grand fireplace. Steps from the lift, with all the village amenities and Ritz-Carlton spa access available. Best location of the lodges if you want to roll out of bed and onto the chair.

The Residences Bachelor Gulch (formerly Timbers Bachelor Gulch)

A 54-unit fractional-ownership building directly connected to the Ritz-Carlton by an indoor hallway. Two- and three-bedroom luxury residences. Owners get fractional weeks (typically two ski weeks plus one summer week per year), full Ritz-Carlton spa access, daily housekeeping, ski valet, daily lift tickets, private dining at Zach's Cabin, and discounted greens fees at Red Sky Ranch. The smartest play in Bachelor Gulch if you want hotel-level service without buying a whole-ownership condo. Originally developed by The Athens Group as part of the Ritz-Carlton project; rebranded from Timbers a few years back.

Zach's Cabin

The private on-mountain dining room for Bachelor Gulch Club members and their guests. Lunch and dinner. Snowcat-access in winter, walk-in during summer. Eclectic mountain cuisine, elk tenderloin, buffalo carpaccio, rack of lamb, Colorado smoked trout. If you're staying somewhere that grants you Zach's access, Settlers, Hummingbird, the Residences, or as a Bachelor Gulch Club member, go. It's one of the few places in the valley where a private on-mountain meal is part of the experience, not an upcharge.

The Bachelor Gulch Club

The members' club at the heart of the village. $35,000 to join as of recent listings. Membership unlocks: private dining at Zach's Cabin, members' lounge access at the Ritz-Carlton, fitness classes, member events, discounted greens fees at Red Sky Ranch Golf Club. Membership comes included with most lodge purchases (Settlers, Hummingbird, Bear Paw, varies by unit). The Club is the social glue of Bachelor Gulch. If you're staying as a guest in any of the lodges, ask the front desk what Club privileges your unit comes with, it varies.

One More Story Before You Go: Horizon Pass Lodge, November 2002

I've been working my way through the village, naming the lodges and the houses and the trails. I want to close on one of them, Horizon Pass Lodge, top of Bachelor Gulch, because that one has my fingerprints on it.

I trimmed a bunch of units up there as a sub. Me and my buddy Pete.

We finished in November 2002, same month the Ritz-Carlton Bachelor Gulch opened down the hill. That deadline wasn't a coincidence. The whole village was launching at once. Horizon Pass had to be ready.

It was a hard job. Like every big commercial job at that level, lots of trades tripping over each other, schedule pressure, never enough room. Pete and I ran around trying to get it done as fast as we could.

The last day, we were close to finishing. Decided to just stay late and knock the rest out instead of coming back the next morning.

When we wrapped, middle of the night, building empty, we'd trimmed the entire top floor. We packed up our tools, loaded the white Ford E250 Econoline van, and drove off into the dark.

Never had to set foot in that building again.

That was a good night.

If you're staying at Horizon Pass: Parking includes one free space per unit. Extra cars park down at the Wolf Lot at the entrance to Bachelor Gulch, and that's not a fun walk in ski boots. Plan accordingly.

Twenty-three years later, I drive customers up to Horizon Pass in the warm Suburban with the heated steering wheel and the heated seats. Same building. Same parking. Same Wolf Lot down at the entrance to Bachelor Gulch where extra cars get parked. Different version of me at the wheel.

The guy who wrapped up that top floor in November 2002 is the same guy driving up Daybreak Ridge today. Just thirty years older, with a phone full of repeat customers and two grown sons and a company my wife and I built.