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Vail, Colorado
Vail was founded specifically as a ski resort in 1962 by Pete Seibert and Earl Eaton, two former 10th Mountain Division soldiers who had trained in the surrounding mountains during World War II and returned afterward specifically to develop the terrain they'd come to know during military training into a ski destination. The resort's "Back Bowls," a series of open, ungroomed bowl-shaped terrain on the mountain's back side, gave Vail one of the largest single-mountain skiable terrain footprints in North America upon opening and remain one of its most distinctive features relative to competing resorts built around more conventional groomed-run layouts. Vail Resorts, the publicly traded company that grew out of the original resort, has since acquired dozens of other ski areas across North America and Europe, building the Epic Pass multi-resort season pass system that's reshaped how a large share of American skiers now plan their entire ski season across multiple resorts rather than a single home mountain. Vail's combination of its founding by World War II mountain-division veterans, its expansive Back Bowls terrain, and its parent company's transformation into the dominant force in North American ski resort consolidation has made it one of the most commercially and historically significant ski destinations in the entire country.
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Chamonix, France
Chamonix hosted the first-ever Winter Olympics in 1924, a designation only formally recognized as the inaugural Winter Games retroactively, since the event was originally billed simply as "International Winter Sports Week" before the International Olympic Committee later designated it the first Winter Olympiad. The town sits directly at the base of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps and in Western Europe, and the Aiguille du Midi cable car climbs nearly 9,000 vertical feet from the town to a high-altitude station offering direct views across the Mont Blanc massif, one of the most dramatic cable car ascents anywhere in the world. Chamonix has built a global reputation specifically as a center for extreme and off-piste skiing and mountaineering, including the famous Vallée Blanche off-piste run, a roughly 12-mile glacier descent requiring a mountain guide, that's drawn serious backcountry skiers from around the world for generations. Chamonix's combination of hosting the first Winter Olympics, its dramatic position beneath Mont Blanc, and its reputation as a global center for extreme off-piste skiing and mountaineering has made it one of the most historically foundational and adventure-focused ski destinations in the entire world.
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