Dr. Jack Eck Finds Safety and Work in Vail's Mining Past

The white snow of the Vail peaks didn’t just catch Dr. Jack Eck’s eye when he drove down the old Vail Pass in October 1971; it caught in his throat. He was coming off a stint as a helicopter flight surgeon with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, his body and mind still vibrating with the echoes of Southeast Asia, when he pulled over on the curve and wept. It wasn’t grief, exactly, but a sudden, overwhelming recognition of safety. He knew he was safe. He felt the safeness with the mountains, the white snow, the peaks, as Tony Mauro recorded in this 2020 Vail Valley Voices oral history for the Vail Library.

But the peace was short-lived. Before the dust of his new life had even settled, the rough edges of the valley’s industrial past reached up to claim him.

We often think of Vail’s early days as a story of pristine alpine beauty and ski resort glamour, but if you look closely at the records, you’ll find a grittier undercurrent. Eck’s first week on the job, hired by Tom Steinberg to be Vail’s third doctor, wasn’t spent resting. Steinberg told him there was a mine cave-in down at Gilman, just up Highway 24 above Red Cliff, and asked him to go look.

So, Eck drove. He got lost getting down there, winding through Minturn and climbing up the mountain, back and forth, until he found the mine. It was an active zinc, lead, and silver operation then, fenced inside what would later become an EPA Superfund site, but back then, it was just work.

The scene was chaotic and superstitious. The superintendent, a man who didn’t know if Eck could do much of anything, asked him to take a look at a guy buried up to his waist in the tunnels. Eck walked alongside one or two other men, navigating a network of underground tunnels so vast you didn’t even see it from the surface. All you saw from the road was a hole in the side of the hill.

The light wasn’t good. The air was thick. They wandered in and out of the tunnels, and when they found the miner, the reality was stark. The mine had caved in and squashed him. He was gone. Eck went over him as best he could to see if there was any way they could resuscitate him, but the weight of the earth was final.

This wasn’t a distant historical footnote; it was the immediate reality of life in the valley. The infrastructure that would eventually support the ski town was built on the backs of men digging for zinc, lead, and silver in dark, dangerous tunnels. The safety Eck felt in the snow was juxtaposed against the claustrophobic darkness of the mines that lay just miles away.

There’s a warmth to the way Eck remembers the mountains, but there’s also a heaviness to the memory of that first week. He didn’t just arrive as a doctor; he arrived as a witness to the valley’s dual nature. The beauty was undeniable, but so was the danger. The mines were still active, the workers were still digging, and the cave-ins were still happening.

You can feel it in the story. The contrast between the open, bright sky of Vail Pass and the confined, dark tunnels of Gilman is striking. It’s a reminder that the town we know today, with its polished lodges and quiet streets, was built on a foundation of raw, unrefined industry. The men who worked those mines didn’t just dig for ore; they dug for survival, often in the dark, often alone.

Eck’s tears on the pass were for the war behind him. His journey to Gilman was for the work ahead. And in that mine, amidst the chains and the old tower structure, he found his first patient in a new world. The miner was gone, but the memory of the cave-in stayed with him, a dark stain on the bright snow of his first week in Vail.