The Tenth Mountain Division: How a War Built Colorado's Ski Industry

Pete Seibert suffered a severe leg wound from a mortar shell blast in the Apennine Mountains of northern Italy in the spring of nineteen forty-five. He was twenty years old, a member of the Tenth Mountain Division, and he had spent the previous two years training for exactly this kind of terrain at Camp Hale, a military installation punched into a Colorado valley at nine thousand two hundred feet above sea level. After the surgeons were done with him, Seibert did something that struck the Army as eccentric. He wrote in his journal about a mountain he intended to build a ski resort on someday. He had never seen the mountain. He had it picked out in his mind.

He found it in nineteen fifty-seven, on skis, climbing a ridge above the Eagle River valley while the ranchers below watched him with curiosity. The mountain was called Vail. He opened it for business on December fifteenth, nineteen sixty-two.

Seibert was not alone in this trajectory. Friedl Pfeifer, another Tenth Mountain veteran, had co-founded the Aspen Skiing Company on December fourteenth, nineteen forty-six. Lawrence Jump helped establish Arapahoe Basin that same year. The pattern is not coincidental. These men learned to ski in order to fight a war in the Italian mountains. When the war ended, they came home to the only landscape in America that felt like the one they had trained on.

The Tenth Mountain Division trained at Camp Hale from nineteen forty-two to nineteen forty-five. The Army chose the site because it was high, cold, and remote enough to simulate the Alpine conditions of northern Italy and southern France. The soldiers packed artillery up fourteen-thousand-foot peaks on their backs. They slept in snow trenches at temperatures that dropped to forty below. Some of them died not from enemy fire but from the mountain itself.

What they built after the war, the infrastructure of Colorado skiing, the resorts, the lifts, the culture, runs directly from that experience. More than sixty Tenth Mountain veterans went on to found or lead ski areas across the American West. The High Country's resort economy, Vail, Aspen, Arapahoe Basin, Winter Park, is not a product of postwar leisure culture stumbling onto a nice landscape. It is the direct creation of a combat infantry division that trained here.

The camp itself became part of a national monument in two thousand twenty two. There is not much to see from the highway: grassy meadows at high altitude, a monument, a historical marker. What happened here is in the resorts downstream.