The Real Pioneers of Vail.
A Family Graveyard Older Than the Ski Resort.

We've called Intermountain home since the nineties. We live on Bellflower, one street below the Ruder Family Graveyard on Bassingdale.

Most people in Vail have no idea it's there. Plenty of people who live here don't either. It's a chain-link gate between two houses, and unless you're looking you'd take it for somebody's back fence.

There's a small white sign wired to it. Black serif type, the kind you'd order online:

RUDER — Family Graveyard — Please be respectful.

Behind it is an aspen grove. An old split-rail fence at the back, gone silver, propped up here and there. A dirt footpath worn through the grass. Someone has wired a spray of pink artificial flowers to the gatepost.

The markers don't announce themselves. Most are flat to the ground, and you don't see one until you're standing over it.

Here's what's in there.

Jacob and Mary Anna Ruder came into the Gore Creek Valley in 1887 and homesteaded 160 acres. Those 160 acres are Intermountain. Not near Intermountain — they are it. My street is on the Ruder homestead, and so is yours if you live here.

1887. That's fifty-five years before the 10th Mountain Division was up here at Camp Hale, training to go kick Hitler's ass. Seventy-five years before the resort opened. These people were farming this valley before any of the history Vail tells about itself had started.

They farmed lettuce. Read that again if you've spent a winter in Vail. Lettuce, at 8,000 feet, in a valley that holds snow into May.

And it wasn't a hobby. In the 1920s lettuce was the crop up here — they called it green gold. Minturn advertised itself as the lettuce capital of the world, the prize variety was Everkrisp, and it shipped out on the Rio Grande. For a few years this was farm country with a real export.

Then it fell apart. The deer ate the fields. Nobody yet knew enough about rotating crops or treating the soil. Green gold turned out to be a short run.

The Ruders built three houses in Vail over the years — before there was a Vail. Jacob and Mary lived in one of them until they died in the 1930s. The last Ruders out here were Ralph and Bea and their three kids, and the family held the land until the early 1960s, when they sold to a developer.

You know what happened next.

The graveyard isn't originally Ruder. The story that's come down — told by the family, printed in the Vail Daily — is that before Jacob and Mary, another couple had started the homesteading process on this land. The wife went into labor, and neither she nor her newborn daughter survived it.

He buried them under a big tree.

He transferred the homestead rights to the Ruders. The ground under that tree became the family cemetery, and it's been one ever since.

The tree is still standing inside that fence.

Beverly J. Billows. April 22, 1931 to July 24, 1934. Three years old.

Her marker isn't stone. It's a stamped tin plate from Farnum's Home Mortuary in Glenwood Springs — the temporary kind, the sort a funeral home sets down to hold the place until the family orders a headstone. It has been standing for ninety-two years. Either the stone never came, or it never could.

Glenwood Springs is sixty miles down valley. In 1934, that was the nearest mortuary there was.

Forty years later, a different family, the same age: a little girl born in 1969, died in 1973. Both her parents' names cut into the granite beneath hers.

There's a flat stone for a man who died in 1971 at twenty-seven — beloved husband and father. And under the big tree at the back, a woman who died giving birth and the daughter who died with her.

A mother and a newborn. Two three-year-olds. A young father. It is a small piece of ground, and most of what's in it is children.

None of this was unusual. Children died out here.

No City Market. No Vail Valley Medical Center. No Steadman Clinic. No hospital, no doctor, nothing quick down valley when something went wrong. When a three-year-old got sick in 1934, you had what you had.

It's stark to look at now. But this wasn't an easy place to make a life, and the ground shows it.

The people who were here had a name for this valley, and it wasn't a kind one. That's a story for another day.

Chuck Ogilby — former Town Council member, and the man who hired me to build the first house I ever built in Vail — lives in the Ruder home.

He bought it in 1969. It's been described as the oldest inhabited house in Vail. He and his wife Merideth raised their kids in it, and over the years he added on to it, including hauling an old cabin over from near the East Vail interchange and attaching it.

So: the man who gave me my start in this valley lives in the farmhouse of the family buried up the road from me, on the ground their lettuce grew in, in the neighborhood built on their 160 acres.

Thirty years in this valley before I put all of that together.

Leonard Steve Ruder Jr. July 25, 1941 — June 17, 2021.

Black granite, polished, still glossy enough to hold the reflection of the aspens and the sky. Five years ago.

I live one street away on Bellflower. I've walked past that cemetery for more than thirty years, and somehow I missed that a burial happened. No procession I noticed. Nothing I saw in the paper. A family came up through the aspens, did what that family has done on that ground since the 1890s, and went home.

That stone reframed the whole place for me. However well I thought I knew it, I'd still been reading it as history — old graves, old names, a piece of the valley's past. It isn't. It's a working family graveyard, still in use, a hundred and thirty-odd years after the first grave was dug under that tree.

The family looks after it. In a 2006 interview with the Vail Daily, Bob Ruder said he gets out there a few times a year and intends to be buried there himself. Asked about the arrangements, he said: "Get a coffee can and find a spot, and it's all OK."

Fair question.

We don't drive anyone here. There's nothing to drive to — it's a fence between two houses on Bassingdale, the road right above Bellflower, and it isn't an attraction. Don't make a trip of it.

I'm writing about it because it's in my neighborhood, and because most stories about Vail begin in 1962, when the ski resort opened. The history of this valley didn't begin there. That version skips seventy-five years, a lettuce farm, and a man who buried his wife and newborn daughter under a tree.

If you live in Intermountain, you already walk past