The 10th Mountain Division

Colorado's ski industry owes much of its existence to soldiers who learned to fight on skis. During World War Two, the Army built Camp Hale high in the mountains near Leadville to train the Tenth Mountain Division, its first and only mountain infantry division. Beginning in nineteen forty-two, troops trained there in skiing, climbing, and survival at extreme altitude before deploying to the mountains of northern Italy in the final winter of the war, where they helped break entrenched Nazi defenses in costly fighting.

When the survivors came home, many could not shake the high country. They became the architects of Colorado skiing. Aspen Mountain opened in nineteen forty-six with help from the veteran Friedl Pfeifer.

Arapahoe Basin was founded that same year by the veteran Lawrence Jump. And in nineteen sixty-two, the veteran Pete Seibert, who had been gravely wounded by a mortar in Italy and told he might never ski again, opened Vail, now one of the largest ski resorts in North America. In two thousand twenty-two the training ground itself was protected as the Camp Hale Continental Divide National Monument, more than fifty-three thousand acres honoring both the soldiers and the Ute people for whom the land remains culturally important.