The Sixty Two Society Was Supposed to Open Last Summer. It's Opening This Month Instead.

Walk to the top of Bridge Street right now and you'll find scaffolding coming down, not going up. That alone tells you something the past year of press releases didn't: the club everyone in Vail Village has been calling a "summer 2026" project is not opening on the timeline you've been told. It's opening now, weeks before the lifts spin, and almost nobody watching the mountain report noticed the shift.

Every piece written about The Sixty Two Society since early this year, including trade coverage and the club's own press materials, pointed to a summer 2026 debut. That's not wrong exactly. It's just stale. A hiring post for the club's own "Founding Team," live on its site this month, tells a different story: the team is staffing up for what it calls a mid-September opening. Given that we're sixteen days into September as this goes to print, that means the doors at the base of Gondola One are either open right now or will be within days, not months. If you've been walking past the old Los Amigos space assuming you have all fall to check it out before it opens, you don't.

Why the date matters more than it sounds

This isn't a footnote about a restaurant's soft-launch schedule. It's a correction to how the whole Bridge Street timeline has been reported, and it changes what a Vail Village resident should actually expect to see happening around Seibert Circle this month versus what they've been told to expect.

Brad Kaemmer, the Vail native behind the project, closed Los Amigos in April 2025 after 53 years in that space, first as his family's La Piñata, later as the cantina generations of skiers ended their days on. He's been candid about why he took the risk of gutting a beloved après spot at the literal foot of the mountain. "Over the years, the energy on Bridge Street has been eroded," he told Vail Daily during construction, describing a corridor he grew up on that he felt had lost some of its pull as the village's pedestrian gateway to Gondola One. The $9 million renovation, capped at 62 members and named for the year Vail Mountain opened, was his answer. A public dining room open to everyone sits alongside a members-only side with ski valet through Gorsuch, a 2,000-bottle wine cellar, and a new fire pit built into the Gondola One plaza itself, on land Kaemmer says he had to negotiate for separately from Vail Resorts.

None of that changes with the earlier opening. What changes is the sequence locals should watch for. A "summer 2026" opening would have meant the club spent an entire ski season already in operation, tested, staffed, and known, before this winter's crowds ever walked through. A mid-September opening means the opposite: the Founding Team is getting roughly two months of quiet operation, member onboarding, and service kinks worked out before Vail Mountain's 2026/27 season opens. That's a compressed runway for a five-story build with a 2,000-bottle cellar and a custom onyx bar depicting the original Vail trail map in hand-forged iron. Locals walking that stretch of Bridge Street this month are watching a soft launch, not a finished product on display.

The corridor filled in while everyone was reading lift reports

The Sixty Two Society isn't the only thing that changed at the top of the village this year, and the more interesting pattern is how much of it happened quietly, while local attention was fixed on ski season announcements instead.

Here's the corridor as it actually stands, corrected against what was reported when each project was announced:

Zuma is the clearest example of a business that's no longer news but should still register as a change for anyone who hasn't been inside The Sebastian since last winter. Chef Rainer Becker's izakaya, his first U.S. mountain-town location after more than two dozen locations worldwide, opened as scheduled in December 2025 in the space that used to house Leonora. It's now heading into its first complete ski season rather than its debut one, which means the DJ booth, the sushi bar, and the après crowd it was built for are no longer a novelty. They're the new baseline for that corner of the village.

Colletta is newer and easier to have missed entirely. The Westin swapped Richard Sandoval's Stoke & Rye for Colletta, an Indigo Road Hospitality Group trattoria concept, this past summer. If your last reservation at the Westin predates this year, the restaurant you remember isn't the one currently seating guests.

And the Swiss import wave, Capranea and Dahu, arrived even earlier, in November 2025, with a combined boutique in Lionshead and a flagship on Bridge Street itself. Both brought European skiwear and, in Dahu's case, a dedicated boot store, to a stretch of the village that already skews toward outfitting skiers before they ever touch a lift.

Put together, four separate ownership groups made real changes to the same four-block radius inside twelve months, and the only one that generated sustained local buzz was the one tied to a beloved closure. The other three slipped in during a summer when most of Vail's attention was on trail maps and pass pricing.

What opening day actually tells you about the sequence

Vail Mountain confirmed on August 18 that its 2026/27 season is tentatively set to open Friday, November 13, matching last year's November 14 start almost to the day and landing on the early side of the mountain's historical range. Beaver Creek, by contrast, typically waits until the week of Thanksgiving to open, closer to November 25 or 26 in most seasons. Locals who split time between the two resorts already know this gap exists, but it's worth restating here because it frames exactly how much runway The Sixty Two Society is working with.

A club that staffs up in mid-September and opens before October is out gets roughly eight weeks of service before Vail's lifts start turning, and closer to ten before Beaver Creek's do. That's meaningfully more time than a summer 2026 opening would have implied, since summer visitors and shoulder-season locals are a different crowd than the ski-season base the club was built to serve. The earlier-than-reported date isn't a delay dressed up as good news. It's actually the opposite: the club gets to work out service for a slower, more forgiving crowd before the corridor fills with the Thanksgiving rush that both Vail and, two weeks later, Beaver Creek will bring.

If you live along that stretch of the village, the practical takeaway is simple. The construction fencing you've been walking past for over a year is either already gone or will be within days, not by the time the leaves finish turning and not sometime deep into next summer. Whatever version of The Sixty Two Society you end up seeing through those windows this month is the same one that will be seating members and the public alike when opening day traffic hits Bridge Street on November 13.

Vail Village doesn't often get corrected this cleanly. Most of what changes here happens in increments small enough that residents absorb them without noticing the exact week. This is the rare case where the actual date is public, sitting in a hiring post rather than a press release, and worth checking before you make plans around the version of the timeline everyone else has been repeating.

If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth, given how much of its immediate surroundings have turned over in the past year, that's a conversation grounded in specifics rather than a listing sheet. DeDe Dickinson has spent more than three decades watching Vail Village change block by block, and knows which shifts move value and which are just noise. Schedule a private Vail market consultation when you're ready to talk through what a stretch of Bridge Street this dynamic means for your own address.