The German soldiers on top of Riva Ridge slept soundly in their dugouts on the night of Feb. 18, 1945. True, enemy American troops were nearby, but to reach the German positions in the mountainous terrain of northern Italy, the Americans would have to scale cliffs as much as 2,000 feet high – a seemingly impossible feat.

However, as dawn broke the next day, the astonished Germans awoke to grenades and gunfire. Somehow, the American soldiers had taken the entire ridgeline in the middle of the night. As it happened, the feat the Germans had considered impossible was just the sort of mission their adversaries had spent years training for. The Americans they faced weren’t ordinary infantrymen; they were the elite alpine troops of the 10th Mountain Division.

This highly specialized fighting force broke the stalemate with German troops in Italy at the end of World War II. Part of the reason the 10th Mountain Division was so effective was the training the men received at Camp Hale, situated 9,250 feet high in the Rockies of Colorado, between Leadville and what later became Vail.

These elite mountain troops left a dual legacy. In war, they turned the tide against the Germans in the Italian campaign. In the peacetime that followed, the division’s veterans returned to Colorado to play a huge role in inventing the state’s ski industry.

When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, the U.S. Army had no special mountain troops – it was strictly a flatland force, as recounted in The Winter Army by Maurice Isserman, the source for much of this article. This didn’t sit well with Charles Minot “Minnie” Dole, who had just the previous year founded the National Ski Patrol. Many European nations had ski troops. Finland, for example, was able to stave off much larger Soviet forces thanks to the mobility of its soldiers on skis.

In July 1940, Dole visited the War Department in Washington, D.C., advocating for the recruitment of skiers to create a special unit of U.S. mountain troops. The officials he met with unceremoniously brushed him off. Undeterred, Dole went straight to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, telling him in a letter on July 18, 1940, that “it is more reasonable to make soldiers out of skiers than skiers out of soldiers.”

This set the ball rolling. Dole met with Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall, who authorized ski training for a small number of troops that winter. However, it wouldn’t be for another year, in November 1941, that the Army formed what came to be known as the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment, to be stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington state. It was the first regiment of the 10th Mountain Division.

The Army asked Dole and his National Ski Patrol for their assistance recruiting and vetting skiers and other outdoorsy types for the mountain troops. The patrol created a three-page questionnaire for candidates, quizzing them about their outdoor qualifications and asking for three letters of recommendation from athletic coaches or other qualified people.

In the early 1940s, skiing was a pastime largely enjoyed by the privileged classes who could afford to attend college. Consequently, many mountain troop recruits came from college ski clubs. At a time when only 10 percent of U.S. Army soldiers had attended college, some 50 percent of 10th Mountain Division soldiers had – and that doesn’t count the high school graduates who were planning to go to college before enlisting.

Volunteers for the new mountain unit included some of the best-known skiers in the nation, such as Torger Tokle, a young Norwegian immigrant famous for shattering distance records in the ski jump.

The mountain troops, few but steadily growing in number, spent the winter of 1941-42 practicing skiing techniques on Washington’s Mount Rainier. However, their stay in Washington was only a layover until their permanent base was finished being built in Colorado.

In the Eagle Valley of Colorado’s Sawatch Range, home of the state’s three highest peaks, civilian laborers spent the better part of 1942 building Camp Hale for the new mountain units. Workers built barracks, mess halls, warehouses, training facilities, office buildings, theaters and more – enough for the thousands of men who would train here. For ski training, lifts were installed near the camp on the beginner-level B Slope and further afield near Tennessee Pass at the larger, more advanced Cooper Hill.

The Army chose to build Camp Hale in Colorado’s Sawatch Range because the high altitude meant that winter effectively lasted six months a year. When the troops finally got there in late 1942, they would learn just how cold that long Rocky Mountain winter could get.

The 87th Regiment arrived in full force at Camp Hale in December 1942. It was soon joined by the 86th Regiment and later the 85th Regiment. Together, these three regiments – a combined 14,000 men – would form the 10th Mountain Division.

The soldiers began their training, practicing marksmanship on the rifle range and undertaking long days of skiing. By February 1943, commanders thought the men were ready to go on maneuvers to put their training to use. A battalion from the 87th Regiment was tasked with ascending 13,209-foot Homestake Peak and creating a defensive line below its summit.

The training maneuvers were supposed to last eight days. However, they were canceled when, after the first full day, 25 percent of the troops were already out of commission with frostbite or other maladies largely related to the extreme cold. Part of the blame for the fiasco went to the officers, who were not drawn from the same pool of skiers and outdoorsman as the enlisted men. Afterward, the officers decided to rely more heavily on the expertise of their men.

When the 10th Mountain Division soldiers weren’t practicing skiing and rock climbing, they explored Colorado on 36-hour weekend passes. Some went to Denver, where a few of them horrified the staff of the Brown Palace by demonstrating rappelling techniques in the hotel’s nine-story atrium. Others went to Glenwood Springs, Grand Junction and Aspen, where at the Jerome Hotel they drank a concoction called “Aspen Crud” – a milkshake fortified with bourbon.

Friedl Pfeifer, who had been a champion skier in his native Austria before joining the 10th Mountain Division, was particularly impressed by Aspen, which didn’t then have a ski area. He could envision ski runs coming down into town. Reflecting on his first visit to Aspen, Pfeifer later recalled that he “felt at that moment an overwhelming sense of my future before me.”

The division spent all of 1943 training, with the exception of the 87th Regiment, which was deployed to the Alaskan island of Kiska. The island had been occupied by Japanese troops since the previous year, and the Allied forces’ amphibious landing on Aug. 15, 1943, was expected to meet with stiff resistance. Yet when the mountain troops and other units came ashore, not a single shot rang out.

The soldiers of the 87th Regiment spent all day ascending the 1,800-foot ridge at the center of the island. As night fell, gunfire broke out. The shooting lasted all night, but when morning came, no Japanese soldiers could be found. It turned out that the Allied troops had been firing at each other in the dark. Some 28 Americans were killed, including 19 from the 87th Regiment. The regiment rejoined the division at Camp Hale in January 1944.

The next major training event came in March 1944, when the division, nearly full strength at 12,000 men, participated in what was known as the D-Series maneuvers. The soldiers, carrying 90-pound rucksacks, set off into the wilderness on skis to engage in mock combat scenarios in temperatures as low as 35 degrees below zero. The three-week training exercise was so grueling that later, once the men were fighting in the actual war, they joked that if things got any worse, it would be as bad as D-Series.

By mid-1944, the soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division were well-trained – too well-trained for many of the men’s liking. After two years practicing for mountain combat, they were ready to see some real action. They shipped out of Camp Hale in June 1944 and were stationed in Camp Swift in Texas, awaiting deployment. That finally happened at the end of the year, when the division’s three regiments boarded ships in Virginia bound for Italy.

When the 10th Mountain Division arrived in full strength in Naples in January 1945, Allied forces had been fighting the Germans in Italy for more than a year. Rome had been captured, but the Germans were making a stand at what was known as the Gothic Line. This defensive line had strong fortifications in the Apennine Mountains, guarding the Po Valley and its major city of Bologna. The mountain troops would be part of the Allied push to break the Gothic Line.

When 1st Lt. David Brower got to the front lines in the Apennines, the scene was familiar. “We were soon in snow-covered mountains with a cold snowstorm in progress,” he said, “and we could think back to Camp Hale and D-Series.”

The 10th Mountain Division’s position faced a German force that was dug in on the slopes of Mount Belvedere. The Germans also occupied Riva Ridge on the division’s left flank, which overlooked the approach to Mount Belvedere. The prospect of attacking such formidable positions was daunting. Lt. Col. Henry J. Hampton said it was like sitting “in the bottom of a bowl with the enemy sitting on two-thirds of the rim looking down upon you. There was about as much concealment as a goldfish would have in a bowl.”

Before the division would attempt a full-scale assault, it sent small groups of soldiers on patrols. Though the mountain troops had trained extensively on skis, the only time they used skis in combat was in a few small patrols in the first few weeks after their arrival.

Staff Sgt. Dick Nebeker was on one mission that had the men ski toward some German-occupied stone houses. Someone hit a tripwire, alerting the Germans, who opened fire. The Americans got down on their bellies to take cover. They soon realized they were better off without skis and took them off, never to put them on again. “Two winters at Camp Hale trained us for 10 minutes of creeping and crawling under enemy fire with skis on,” Nebeker said.

During January and the first half of February, Allied commanders were trying to figure out how the division would take Mount Belvedere. Several attempts by other American divisions had failed to capture the mountain, but all of these attempts had ignored Riva Ridge. With Germans occupying the ridge, they could see everything the Americans were doing and call in accurate artillery fire.

The 10th Mountain Division was tasked with scouting out a way up Riva Ridge. During nighttime patrols, the mountain troops found five trails up the steep cliffs, several of which required technical climbing with ropes and pitons, just as they had trained for at Camp Hale.

The attack on Riva Ridge began as darkness fell on Feb. 18, 1945, when men from two battalions of the 86th Regiment began ascending the trails. They were instructed to hold their fire until morning so as not to alert the Germans that anything was amiss. A fog rolled in during the six hours it took to scale the cliffs, helping conceal the Americans when they reached the top of the ridge at 1 a.m.

The mountain troops took the entire ridgeline with only one man wounded and none killed, catching some Germans asleep in their foxholes. The Germans then counterattacked, inflicting more casualties, but the 10th Mountain Division held strong.

Meanwhile, the bigger assault on Mount Belvedere was to commence just before midnight the night after the assault on Riva Ridge. The 85th and 87th regiments had to cross minefields while under heavy machine gun and artillery fire. Despite intense German opposition, the men from the 10th captured the summit of Belvedere just before dawn.

But there were other smaller, connected ridges and mountains nearby still left to capture. Some of the most intense fighting happened on Mount Gorgolesco, where the Germans had heavily fortified the summit. Sgt. Hugh Evans was fighting his way up Gorgolesco when he came across his good friend Tech. Sgt. Robert Fischer lying on the ground, shot through the lungs. Fischer kept repeating: “Oh God. Please not now. Please not now.”

Evans began to tear a piece off a jacket to make a bandage, but Fischer died before he could apply it. Evans’ eyes filled with tears of rage. He charged up the hill toward the German machine guns. He called for others to join him, and a few did. He and two other men got within a few feet of the German positions and threw grenades, then jumped into the trench.

For the next 10 minutes, Evans kept moving, throwing grenades and firing his automatic weapon. When it was over, eight Germans were dead, 20 were captured, and the objective was taken. Evans was awarded the Silver Star for his exploits.

Commanders had expected it to take two weeks for the 10th Mountain Division to capture all the objectives on the Belvedere massif. Instead, it took them just five days. It was the first significant progress in the Italian campaign in four months. But the cost was steep, with the division losing 192 killed in action and 730 wounded.

By March 1945, the end of World War II in Europe was in sight. Soviet armies were closing in on Berlin from the east, while American and British armies were entering Germany from the west. Meanwhile, the 10th Mountain Division and other Allied forces in Italy were starting to break the Gothic Line.

The division launched another offensive to take more mountains and hills, losing another 146 killed and 512 wounded. Among the dead was ski jumping champion Torger Tokle, who volunteered to go with a bazooka man to take out a German machine gun. They were hit by artillery fire, which detonated the bazooka rounds they were carrying, killing them both.

Even with the war clearly drawing to a close with the steady collapse of enemy defenses in Germany, Allied commanders planned one final offensive in Italy to finally break into the Po Valley and Bologna. The assault began on April 14, 1945, when 1,000 Allied bombers and 2,000 artillery guns rained destruction on the German lines.

The Germans were making a last stand, forcing the 10th to pay dearly for every inch of territory. The division’s objectives were a series of numbered hills, with particularly nasty fighting happening on Hill 913 – Medic Murray Mondschein wrote that “913 made Belvedere look like kindergarten.”

Bob Dole, the future U.S. senator and presidential candidate, was a lieutenant in the 10th during this attack. He later wrote that the Germans “started pouring artillery, machine gun and mortar rounds into the clearing in front of us, mowing down dozens of American soldiers, shredding others, pulverizing still more.” While attempting to help a wounded comrade, Dole was shot in the upper back, paralyzing his right arm.

On Hill 909, Pfc. John D. Magrath charged a German machine gun nest, killed two of the gun crew and wounded three. He then dropped his rifle, grabbed the German machine gun and neutralized two more enemy machine gun positions. Soon thereafter killed by a mortar shell, he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

In the three days it took to take the hills, the division lost 286 killed and 1,047 wounded. But they were beginning their descent toward the Po Valley, entering flat terrain for the first time since arriving in Italy. They were now advancing at a rapid pace.

By April 20, 1945, they reached the valley and captured a bridge. Other Allied troops entered Bologna the next day. That same day, the 10th sent a task force to press the retreating Germans. The task force advanced 55 miles in two days, reaching San Benedetto di Po and crossing the Po River on boats.

The division pushed forward to Lake Garda, where Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had abandoned his villa. Men from the 10th took many of Mussolini’s personal effects as souvenirs. By April 30, the division had advanced 115 miles in 17 days. Two days later, the German armies in Italy surrendered; within a week, the German armies in Berlin did the same.

The war was over for the 10th Mountain Division. All told, 20,635 men – including combat replacements – served in the division in Italy; 983 were killed in action, 3,900 were wounded and 20 were taken prisoner.

When the 10th Mountain Division was inactivated at the end of 1945, many of its veterans who fell in love with Colorado during their time at Camp Hale returned to the state. Some came simply to become the first ski bums, but many eventually started careers in the nascent skiing and outdoors industries.

Friedl Pfeifer, who had a vision of his future in Aspen, moved there in fall 1945, having survived a life-threatening chest wound on the first day of the April offensive. He co-founded the Aspen Skiing Co. and the next year oversaw the construction of Aspen’s first ski lift.

In 1946, Gerry Cunningham founded the Gerry Mountaineering outdoor sports gear company in Ward. He invented the modern triangular carabiner and created tents used in the first summiting of Mount Everest in 1953.

Also in 1946, Lawrence Jump, with help from some of his comrades from the 10th, founded Arapahoe Basin Ski Area.

Pete Seibert came to Aspen after the war. First, he had to recover from severe injuries from an exploding shell – shrapnel tore off his right kneecap and knocked out some of his teeth. Seibert dreamed of starting his own ski resort. While exploring the area near Camp Hale in 1957, he climbed to the top of Vail Mountain and had a vision to create his resort there. Vail Ski Resort opened in 1962; the town of Vail was incorporated four years later. The name of Vail’s longest ski run is a tribute to one of the 10th’s greatest victories: Riva Ridge.