Ski Industry and the 10th Mountain Division

Colorado's modern ski industry was built largely by men who had learned to fight in the snow.

The Army's Tenth Mountain Division was a specialized alpine warfare unit organized in nineteen forty-two and trained at Camp Hale, a high-altitude installation near Leadville at roughly nine thousand two hundred feet. It was one of the highest military facilities ever built in the United States. Soldiers trained in skiing, mountain climbing, and cold-weather survival, enduring conditions that routinely produced frostbite and altitude sickness. The camp was remote, the winters were severe, and the training was deliberate.

The division fought in northern Italy, breaking through German defensive positions in the Apennine Mountains in the final months of the war in Europe. Roughly one thousand men from the division were killed in action. Thousands more were wounded.

Many survivors came back to Colorado after the war. Veterans of the Tenth Mountain Division founded or played central roles in developing an extraordinary number of the state's ski resorts. Pete Seibert, who fought with the division and was badly wounded in Italy, was the primary force behind the creation of Vail, which opened in nineteen sixty-two. Friedl Pfeifer, an Austrian ski instructor who trained with the division, helped build Aspen as a resort destination. Larry Jump developed Arapahoe Basin. The list goes on.

Before the Tenth Mountain Division, Colorado had a handful of modest ski areas. By nineteen seventy, it had one of the largest ski industries in the world, built on mountains that the mining era had already proved could be reached and crossed. The veterans found a different kind of use for that knowledge.