By Bruce Schoenfeld A foot of unexpected snow had fallen overnight, rendering the wild Colorado countryside pristine. Clambering over Meadow Mountain, under a morning sky the color of blueberries, a snowshoer reaches a rolling pasture bordered by tall aspens and pines. The only sounds are the crunch of the snowshoes against the untrampled whiteness and the exhale of breath into the clear mountain air.
Civilization seems impossibly distant.
But that evening, at a faux-Austrian lodge called the Tyrolean, which was originally built to mimic the chalets of the Alps, dinner begins with an appetizer of grilled yellowfin tuna with tropical fruit salsa, vanilla vinaigrette and yuca chips. It continues with wild boar spring rolls with spicy Vietnamese Sriracha sauce. This is food the true Tyrol has never seen. Not many adventurers can live like this, but that's the lure of Vail. Conceived four decades ago as an Alpine outpost in the Colorado wild, Vail has only lately come of age.