Camp Hale and the Soldiers on Skis
Near Vail, Colorado
About twenty miles south of Vail, in a flat mountain valley called Pando, the Army built a strange and secret place in the winter of nineteen forty two. It was called Camp Hale, and it sat at more than nine thousand feet, higher than almost any military post in the country. Here the United States trained its first and only mountain infantry division, the Tenth.
Soldiers learned to ski, to snowshoe, to climb rock and ice, and to fight in deep cold and thin air. Many were expert skiers and mountaineers recruited from ski clubs and colleges before they ever put on a uniform. In the winter of nineteen forty four and forty five, the Tenth Mountain Division shipped to Italy and broke through German lines in the peaks above the Po Valley, at a heavy cost in lives.
But the deeper legacy of these soldiers came home with them. Veterans of the Tenth went on to found or shape dozens of American ski areas, including Aspen, Arapahoe Basin, and Vail itself. When you ride a modern American chairlift, you are, in a real sense, riding on the memory of these winter soldiers.
