Vail Village covered bridge Eagle Valley Ceramic Art Tile
— a wooden roof, the creek below, the village beyond.
Not only on a wall.
“The wooden bridge over Gore Creek, at the head of Vail Village. It went up in the late 1960s, when Fitzhugh Scott was laying out the new resort village in alpine vernacular and wanted a covered entrance the way the small bridges back east are covered. In winter snow piles on the roof. In summer the flower boxes spill petunias over the rail. The creek runs loud beneath it in May when the high country melts. People stop in the middle and photograph it. Almost everyone.
Vail Village covered bridge Eagle Valley Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The bridge crosses Gore Creek at the northern edge of Vail Village, in Eagle County in central Colorado, about 100 miles west of Denver along Interstate 70. The town sits at roughly 8,150 feet (2,484 m) in the Gore Creek valley, with Vail Mountain to the south and the Gore Range to the north. The covered bridge went in around 1969 as part of architect Fitzhugh Scott's master plan for the village, which Vail Associates began building from raw meadow in 1962. The bridge connects the Vail Village Transportation Center, where the buses arrive, to Bridge Street, the pedestrian spine of the village.
The bridge wears each season differently. By Thanksgiving the snow has usually started and the wooden roof carries a foot or more through midwinter, with white piled along the rails and the village string-lights running underneath. In late April and May the snowpack on Vail Mountain melts down through Gore Creek and the water under the bridge runs fast and loud for a few weeks. By July the flower boxes are full of petunias spilling over the wooden sides. September turns the aspens above town gold; by Halloween they're down and the village is quiet again until the lifts open at Thanksgiving.
The bridge is a public pedestrian crossing with no fee, no hours, and no posted rule against stopping in the middle. It carries foot traffic between the Vail Village Transportation Center and Bridge Street, the village's main shopping and dining stretch. Most arrivals from outside Eagle County come via Eagle County Regional Airport in Gypsum, about 35 miles west, or Denver International, about 120 miles east. In winter the Colorado Department of Transportation runs Bustang and Pegasus coaches up Interstate 70 from Denver. The bridge itself takes about 30 seconds to cross. Photographers tend to set up on the Gore Creek side, looking back at the village with Vail Mountain behind.