The 10th Mountain Division: America's ski troops.

The campaign for ski troops

Jeff Blumenfeld's 2024 article in Skiing History, the magazine of the International Skiing History Association, says Charles Minot "Minnie" Dole (1899 to 1976) founded the National Ski Patrol in 1938 and, from 1940, pressed for the United States to have ski troops. Search summaries of a National Ski Patrol document say the patrol went on to recruit many of the division's soldiers, which it calls the first time a civilian organisation recruited troops for a special military division. The patrol's own event page returned an error, so that claim is unconfirmed.

From the 87th to the 10th

The US Army's history, "Bootprints in History" (2015), sets out the units and their dates:

Two founding years circulate, 1941 and 1943, and both are right for different units: 1941 is the 87th, the first mountain unit, and 1943 the division itself. The New England Ski Museum also says the division was created in 1943 as a specialised unit trained for alpine combat, and that it fought in the Apennine offensive in Italy in early 1945.

The cost of the Italian campaign

The US Army gives the casualties of the Riva Ridge and Mount Belvedere actions as 213 killed, 782 wounded and four taken prisoner. It says that of nearly 20,000 soldiers of the division who served in Italy, nearly 1,000 were killed and nearly 3,900 wounded. This site gives these figures only as the Army publishes them and names no individual soldier.

Remembering the division

The Denver archive

Blumenfeld says the Denver Public Library's 10th Mountain Division Resource Center was set up in 1987 at the veterans' request, with History Colorado and the National Association of the 10th Mountain Division, and is the official repository for the records of 32,247 soldiers who served in the division. A search summary of the library's own page gives 32,246. The difference is one record; both figures are given here.

Camp Hale - Continental Divide National Monument

The White House fact sheet of 12 October 2022 says President Biden designated the Camp Hale - Continental Divide National Monument that day, covering 53,804 acres of the White River National Forest, to be managed by the Forest Service. It calls the 10th the first and only US division trained to fight in rugged mountain terrain. Blumenfeld calls Camp Hale the country's 130th national monument.

Museum exhibits

The New England Ski Museum holds permanent 10th Mountain exhibits at its Franconia and North Conway sites.

The veterans and post-war skiing

The same White House fact sheet says more than 60 US ski areas owe their origin and development to returning veterans of the division. That is the government's statement; no list of the areas was found in the research for this site, so none is named here. The New England Ski Museum says many members helped launch or expand ski areas across the United States after the war, including in New England.

Other changes of the same years are on ski lifts and safety history, where the ISHA timeline's first useful release binding is dated to 1939; the beginnings of the snowboard are on snowboarding begins.