My grandparents, Joe and Bunny, came here from the East Coast the year before Vail Mountain opened. They were both conservationists and loved skiing and the outdoors, so they opened one of the first ski shops, Vail Ski Rentals, at the top of Bridge Street. They also built the first house on Beaver Dam Road and became fast friends with a lot of the other early Vail pioneers. 

I was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1966. My parents moved when I was 3 to help my grandparents run the ski shop. My grandparents lived down the street from us, so they were always nearby and shared their love of the outdoors with me and my sister; they would take us on hikes or picnics or overnights, and that was a big part of my growing up in Vail.

Back then, Vail was a simple place. There were only a few stores, and you would see almost everybody who lived in town daily, right on Bridge Street. Everybody really looked out for one another. 

There were no organized sports activities when I was growing up, so we just made up all our own outdoor activities—hiking or playing in the creeks, inner tubing, and climbing trees. Making forts. Things like that. It was kind of idyllic to have that mountain back there. Being able to run around there as a kid and get that exposure to the outdoors; it shaped my early life and directed where I was headed as an adult. 

I knew I wanted to do something with the outdoors and help protect the environment, so I went off to Colorado State University and got a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences. My first summer job after college was at Colorado Llama Trekking. I was the lead guide, taking families up into the Holy Cross  and Eagles Nest Wilderness areas. I don’t usually tell people what I did in the winter, because it changes their perception of me, but I was a professional snowboarder. It was in the late ’80s and early ’90s, before the Olympics and the extreme stuff, when we had slalom GS, Super G, downhill, and half pipe. I also taught snowboarding at Vail out of Gold Peak. 

In my second summer after college, I worked as a naturalist at the Vail Nature Center in Ford Park, leading daily wildflower, bird, and natural history walks. We also took hikes up the fourteeners. That’s really where I found my passion: walking outside with people and sharing the natural world with them. I wanted to continue along this path of educating people, so I went to the Teton Science Schools’ graduate program up in Jackson Hole and got a master’s degree in environmental education.

When I came back in 1997, I founded the Gore Range Natural Science School (the future Walking Mountains Science Center) with $500 from my savings account. My master’s thesis had a little appendix called “Walking Mountains” that outlined the kinds of place-based environmental education programs we would offer, but I didn’t use that name because I thought it wouldn’t be understood. I needed a more literal name that people would recognize. 

The Teton Science SchoolS, the Keystone Science School, and Aspen Center for Environmental Studies were all fairly well known and had good operational models that I could point to and we could learn from: connecting people to nature, educating people about the science of mountain ecosystems, and developing stewardship among full-time residents and visitors. The whole premise of place-based education is that if people get out there and experience these special places firsthand, it will help us feel more connected to each other and the world around us.

The Eagle County School District and the Red Cliff Town Council agreed to reopen the old Red Cliff School building for us, so the Vail Rotary Club and other members of the community came with their brooms, mops, and rubber gloves to make it happen. That became the base camp for our day and overnight programs, but we soon realized that serving the broader population of kids growing up in the valley down in Eagle and Gypsum was not very doable from Red Cliff. We wanted a more central location, so I met with the executive director of the Eagle Valley Land Trust and we scoured maps for a new location for the school, which would be called Walking Mountains Science Center. We identified six acres in Avon. I knew the owner, Oscar Tang—he was my dad’s landlord when we had a ski shop in Lionshead—so I wrote a note asking him if he would donate the land and eventually, he did. 

We developed a capital campaign for the initial buildings, but we outgrew the space within the first few years. With additional funds raised, we expanded and created the Borgen Precourt Center for Sustainability and, more recently, added housing for educators and naturalists. With 45 full-time, year-round staff, and an additional 30 in the summer, our annual operating budget is approaching $4 million. 

We now partner with the Eagle County School District so that every kindergarten through eighth-grade student has the opportunity to get outside and learn field science each year. And because of additional after-school programs and summer internships, a child growing up in the valley has an opportunity to start in preschool and work their way through high school and college doing different programs. I don’t think there are many places in the world where this kind of thing could happen; the generosity of this community is just unprecedented. I think it’s important to give back. 

My grandfather was elected to Vail’s first town council in 1966. I was elected in 2015, then again in 2019; now I’m in my second year as mayor and I’ll be term-limited in November.  My decision to run for office was a combination of being exposed to civic work and responsibility by my grandfather, wanting to contribute to the community that I love, and people encouraging me to do it. But you know, I was the shyest kid in class growing up, so it kind of astonishes me sometimes that I’m the mayor of Vail.

We have an amazing place here in Vail. When we are asked as public leaders to envision the future, we see Vail as a place where people can come to relax, slow down, and connect with the natural world. That’s what I hope my legacy will be: providing settings and programs to help people step away from their busy lives, smell the flowers, learn about the flowers, and see the interconnections.

For me, as a place-based educator, the central idea is that the mountains are constantly changing, whether it’s geologically or climatologically. If we know a place well and study its natural systems, we can experience and observe that change all around us. And we’re part of that change too. And you can take it literally and say that we go out and take people walking in the mountains, but the real takeaway is that the mountains themselves are walking.

When I go walking, I like to get off the beaten path. You won’t find me on some of the more typical hikes. I like to get up high in the Gore Range. I’ll just leave it at that.