The Gallegos Corporation, Vail, Colo.

There’s nothing small, however, about The Gallegos Corporation.. With 600 employees at some of the tonier resort locations in the Western United States, his company takes on some of the highest-end work for outdoor and indoor stone in the past 35 years.

And, the company continues to grow, mainly because Gerald Gallegos has an aversion to a word: No.

MAKING HIS WAY

As an apprentice working out of Denver in the late 1960s, Gallegos occasionally traveled back across the Continental Divide to his hometown of Minturn, a small mining town on Colorado’s Western Slope. Five miles down the road to the east, a relatively new ski area – Vail – was just starting to make a name for itself.

Residential and commercial buildings began popping up everywhere in the Vail Valley at the ski area’s base. One day, a friend asked Gallegos to build a fireplace in one of the new homes.

And, one fireplace led to another.

“That’s how I got started,” Gallegos explains. “I decided to stay here and buy a pick-up truck, a mixer and some wheelbarrows.”

During the winter in those lean years, construction was at a standstill, he says, so he tended bar and worked as a bouncer during the snowy months.

“In the summer,” he adds, “I’d go back to doing masonry.”

Gallegos finally found enough work to open the doors of Gallegos Corp. in 1970.

It grew immediately, thanks mostly, Gallegos says, to the development of Beaver Creek Ski Resort situated only a few miles west of his hometown.

“In 1980, when Beaver Creek really started, I did two large commercial buildings there,” he says. “Since then, we’ve probably done 75 percent (of all the stone) there.”

Beaver Creek, one of the more-notable ski communities in the West, is his business card.

“When people ask us to show them our work,” he explains, “I say, ‘Let’s go to Beaver Creek.’”

Because it’s a resort town, most of the residents have homes in other parts of the country. The work at Beaver Creek led to furnishing high-end – very high-end – homes all over the country with natural stone, granite and marble.