Minturn Saloon

The story

Long before Vail was carved into ski runs, Minturn was a railroad and mining town built on hard labor and harder drinking. In 1901, E.B. Reeves and M.R. McKinney opened a joint on Main Street that eventually took the name The Mint. The back bar sitting inside was already old news by then: hand-built in Missouri during the 1830s, it spent decades behind the counter of a Leadville brothel before the railroad hauled it down the pass to its current home.

Over the next century, the building morphed into a pool hall, an underground gambling house, and a boxing venue run by Jeff Taylor, a former sparring partner of heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. Local wives used to pay young messengers to slip past the card tables and drag their husbands back to dinner. In 1976, owner Bob Cherry took over, drank tequila with his friend John Wayne, and hung Duke’s portrait above the room alongside a strict operating motto: 'If John Wayne didn’t drink it, we don’t make it.'

When off-piste skiers started poaching the unpatrolled backcountry out of Vail's Game Creek Bowl gate, the steep terrain deposited them right on the edge of town, creating the infamous 'Minturn Mile.' The saloon became the mandatory finish line. Skiers still clomp across the threshold in plastic boots, order Tex-Mex and margaritas served in glass ski boots, and sit beneath walls packed tight with fifty years of snow sports memorabilia, signed movie stills, and taxidermy.