A Life on Gore Creek

I grew up in Barnegat, New Jersey. A small town on the Jersey Shore. My first job, at fourteen years old, was counting clams.

The creek runs past the same town our family-owned Vail car service has driven for eleven years.

That's not a metaphor. I worked for a clam wholesaler. The clams came in by the thousands. Somebody had to count them. That somebody was me.

I tell people that story now and they laugh. But it's where I learned the thing that ended up mattering most: how to outwork everybody around me. Not the smartest guy in the room. Not the most connected. Just the one who showed up first and left last.

Forty years later, I still run my business that way. So does my wife. So do my kids.

I was a rookie. I just outworked everybody.

Killington

I left New Jersey for Killington, Vermont, when I was nineteen. I went to ski. I stayed because I got a job on the snowmaking crew.

If you've never made snow on a New England mountain in January, here's what you need to know: it's the hardest physical job in skiing. You're outside all night, in temperatures most people would call dangerous, dragging frozen hoses up icy slopes, fixing guns that have iced over, walking miles in pac boots that never quite dry out.

It's also one of the most important jobs at any ski resort. No snowmakers, no ski season. Every turn anyone takes at a resort with snowmaking, that turn exists because somebody on a graveyard shift made the snow underneath it.

I loved it. I was a rookie kid from New Jersey on a crew full of Vermonters who'd been doing it for twenty years. I just outworked everybody. That was my whole strategy. It worked.

The Couch in Vail

I came to Vail in 1994. I was twenty-five. I had a duffel bag, a Therm-a-Rest, and a buddy who'd said I could sleep on his floor in West Vail until I figured something out.

I figured something out by going straight to the construction sites and asking who needed a guy who'd work hard.

Somebody did. Then somebody else did. Then somebody else did. Within a few years I wasn't sleeping on a Therm-a-Rest anymore. I was running my own crew. Within ten years I owned a construction company. Within fifteen we'd put up some of the most beautiful homes in this valley.

I met Kyla here. We got married here. We had our kids here. We bought our property on Gore Creek and built our home with my own crew, on land that backs up to the same water that runs through Vail Village. The same creek that runs past Russell's, Up the Creek, El Segundo. That same creek runs through every chapter of our family's life.

Not only do we know the history of Vail. We're part of it.

What Came Next

By the early 2010s the construction work was steady but I was tired of swinging hammers in my forties. Kyla and I sat down at the kitchen table one night and talked about what came next.

We knew this valley. We knew the roads. We knew the weather. We knew which chains to put on which tires for which pass on which day in which storm. We knew the difference between Vail Pass at 4 a.m. in February and Vail Pass at 4 a.m. in April. We knew which restaurants stayed open late and which ones closed early. We knew which hotels had the easiest pickup zones and which ones made you wait twenty minutes at the wrong door.

So in 2015 we started Vail Powder Cars. Just us. One car. One driver. One dispatcher (Kyla, at the kitchen table, with a phone and a notebook).

Eleven years later we're still family-owned. Still dispatched from our kitchen on Gore Creek. Still showing up first and leaving last. Our kids work the business now too. The next generation of Sinks in this valley.

The other guys you can hire to drive you to and from the airport are good companies. Some of them have a hundred cars. Some of them are owned by guys in Denver who've never run a chain in their life.