Vail Covered Bridge

The Vail Covered Bridge is a wooden footbridge over Gore Creek that has served as the main entrance to Vail Village since the ski town's founding in the early 1960s. When Vail was first platted, the crossing was just a plain timber bridge — functional, but nothing special. That changed in 1965, when Vermont transplants John and Cissy Dobson moved to town and bought a lot on Bridge Street directly across from it, opening a shop they named the Covered Bridge Store as a wink to their New England roots. The name only made sense, though, if the bridge itself had a roof, so the Dobsons lobbied their friend and fellow New Englander Pete Seibert — Vail's founder — to put a "lid" on it. Seibert and Vail Associates agreed, John Dobson paid for the modest gabled roof, and the bridge has carried the name ever since.

The Dobsons went on to become fixtures of early Vail civic life: John served eight years as the town's mayor and sat on the town council through numerous improvement projects, while the couple helped raise funds to build the Vail Interfaith Chapel. Their original Covered Bridge Store suffered a serious fire in January 1968 — the building's occupants escaped safely, though the fire's cause was never determined. The bridge itself survived and remains one of the most photographed landmarks in Vail, its rustic timber-and-shingle roofline framing countless ski-town postcard shots at the foot of Bridge Street.