Sidebar by Allen Best
Camp Hale – July 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
With war clouds gathering over Europe, the U.S. Army in 1940 began making plans for training soldiers in snow and cold-weather warfare.
The first site chosen for the training camp was West Yellowstone, Montana. However, that site was rejected because of potential disturbance to trumpeter swans, a rare species. In Colorado, both Aspen and Wheeler Junction, the latter now known more widely as Copper Mountain, were studied, but rejected because of their remoteness. This was well before Interstate 70, or even much of a predecessor. Eagle Park, located north of Leadville, was selected because it was along a transcontinental railroad.
Even at the time, the 10th Mountain Division was celebrated for the distinctiveness of its mission, location, and its recruits. Never before had the U.S. Army had a special division of ski troopers. Skiers included jumper Torger Tokle, Dartmouth ski coach Walter Prager, and Steamboat racer Gordy Wren. Mountaineers included Paul Petzoldt of Jackson Hole and David Brower of the Sierra Nevada.
At 9,200 feet, Camp Hale was the highest military base in the United States, before or since.
Although the 10th didn’t see combat until the final months of the war, the division’s march from the Apennine Mountains of Italy into the foothills of the Alps was a bloody campaign that cost nearly 1,000 men their lives and injured many more, including Bob Dole, who was pressed into service as a replacement.
After the war, many 10th Mountain veterans returned to existing ski areas or to create new ones. Brower went on to lead the Sierra Club, helping rebuff a proposal to dam the Yampa River in Dinosaur National Monument. Petzoldt founded the famed National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming.
Most of the Camp Hale military reservation, nearly 250,000 acres, was returned to private owners and to the Forest Service. Some military training continued, as well as an unusual covert operation. In 1959, the CIA secretly transported Tibetans to Camp Hale for instruction in guerrilla warfare against soldiers from the People’s Republic of China.
In 1966, the remaining land in the valley bottom was transferred to the U.S. Forest Service for administration.
As for the 10th Mountain Division, it was de-activated in 1945, then re-activated as the 10th Infantry Division from 1948 to 1958. In 1985, it was re-activated at Fort Drum, N.Y as the 10th Mountain Division, Light Infantry. Its soldiers have since been deployed to Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Iraq.