Soldiers of the Summit: The Tenth Mountain Division
Near Breckenridge, Colorado
The life-size bronze soldier standing here represents one of the most unusual fighting units in American military history. The Tenth Mountain Division was created during World War Two specifically to fight in alpine terrain. Troops trained on the high ridges and deep snowfields around Camp Hale, just north of here near Leadville, at an elevation of about nine thousand two hundred feet.
They learned to ski, climb, and survive in extreme cold, then shipped to Italy in late nineteen forty-four and early nineteen forty-five where they broke through the German Gothic Line in the Northern Apennines, a series of fortified mountain positions that had stopped Allied advances for months. After the war, veterans of the Tenth came home carrying a love of the mountains. Many became ski instructors and resort founders, seeding the modern American ski industry across Colorado and the wider Rocky Mountain West.
