Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  Teaming up with Friedl Pfeifer and his ski-area dreams seemed as natural as the snow. Paepcke needed the physical component to his Greek ideal, and Friedl needed the kind of people Walter Paepcke could bring into the ski business. In early 1946, Paepcke, Pfeifer, Johnny Litchfield, Percy Rideout, and a number of other investors, including Minnie Dole, formed the Aspen Skiing Corporation. Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze, an ardent skier and Elizabeth Paepcke’s brother, was the single biggest shareholder, contributing $75,000.

  That summer Paepcke’s money and Pfeifer’s expertise built the world’s longest chairlift on Aspen Mountain. Actually, it was two chairlifts, one after the other, from the edge of town to the top of Roch Run. The chairs traveled nearly three miles and gained over 3,000 feet of elevation. They were single chairs, like Sun Valley’s, with footrests and blankets attached for the long ride—forty-five minutes bottom to top. Lift tickets cost $3.75 a day; a season pass sold for $140. When the snow came, skiers queued up for the chance to ride so high to such great terrain. Lift lines became an instant fact of life. Friedl also got his restaurant that summer, the mountaintop Sundeck, co-designed by Fritz Benedict, the architect, who also had come back to Aspen. On January 11, 1947, the official party began. A special train arrived bearing the governor of Colorado, assorted senators and congressmen, and a huge media contingent. There were skiing and jumping exhibitions, ice skating, fireworks, parades, and a black-tie dinner hosted by the Paepckes at the newly resplendent Jerome. A little more than a year after Friedl Pfeifer’s return, not even a year and a half since the end of the war, Aspen was being hailed by The New York Times as “the winter sports center of America.”

  The same story, with somewhat less fanfare, unfolded at hundreds of American ski centers. Tenth veterans across the country, thrilled to be alive and reconnected to the sport they loved, jump-started a boom that was unprecedented in the history of outdoor recreation. Where before the war, a few hundred rope tows dotted the northern landscape, by 1970 there were over seven hundred full-fledged ski areas in the United States, most with chairlifts and base lodges and trail-grooming machines descendant from the 10th’s snow-going Weasels. A few hundred thousand skiers ballooned into something on the order of 13 million.

  Vail founder Pete Seibert told The Denver Post in 1985 that “the ski industry would have developed without us, but probably ten years later.” In retrospect, that statement seems too modest. The energy that 10th vets brought to the ski business—as coaches, racers, ski instructors and patrollers, ski school directors, filmmakers, shop owners, publishers, writers, and equipment manufacturers and importers, as well as ski-area developers—would have been difficult to replicate. Surviving the war had given many 10th men a new sense of purpose. And, as Bob Parker says, “Our mountain training gave us two things. One, an unusual work ethic. And two, we knew we could do almost anything we asked our bodies to do in terms of physical effort and mental effort.” The ski troops naturally fell back in with each other, drawing on the camaraderie of battle, yes, but even more from their days together at Camp Hale and Mount Rainier. “The men of the 10th formed a small but determined self-elected elite,” writes historian Morten Lund in Ski Heritage, “that constituted a brotherhood in the sport.”

  That brotherhood created outright a score of new ski areas, including Arapahoe Basin, Aspen, and Vail in Colorado; Snow Valley in California; Mount Bachelor in Oregon; Mission Ridge and Crystal Mountain in Washington state; Lutsen Mountain in Minnesota; Sugarbush and Pico Peak in Vermont; New York’s Burby Hollow; Sandia Peak and Santa Fe Ski Basin in New Mexico; Iron Mountain and Pine Mountain, Michigan; Seven Springs, Pennsylvania; and Otis Ridge, Massachusetts. Sixty-two ski areas were either managed by or had ski schools directed by 10th alumni, and an estimated two thousand ski troopers became ski instructors. Vets played key roles in forming the National Ski Areas Association, the Professional Ski Instructors of America, the trade group Ski Industries America, and various regional umbrella groups such as Colorado Ski Country USA, Ski Utah, and Ski New England.

  Camp Hale had already been substantially demolished by the time the ski troops returned, but Colorado, with its history and its reliable, high-elevation snow, remained a magnet. At Aspen, Friedl Pfeifer ran the ski school until 1964. He recognized the need for a true beginners’ mountain (Aspen Mountain was and is unrelentingly steep) and so developed Buttermilk Mountain just outside of town in 1958. He created the world’s first professional racing circuit in the 1960s. Hollywood discovered Aspen, as it had Sun Valley a decade earlier, and Friedl squired the likes of Gary Cooper and Lana Turner around the mountain, his impeccable hair and aviator glasses as stylish as his low, swooping turns.

  Steve Knowlton (Headquarters/86th Regiment) became the town’s first ski bum. He swept out Mike Magnifico’s shop and repaired skis at night, so that he could ski and train all day. He trained well enough to compete in the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz on a team with fellow troopers Gordy Wren (E/87), Dev Jennings (I/85), Wendell Broomhall (A/87), and Joe Perrault (126th Engineers). Sgt. Walter Prager, back coaching at Dartmouth, also coached that Olympic team.

  Pete Seibert (F/86) recovered from wounds suffered on della Spe (shrapnel to the face and knee) and joined the vets in Aspen. Despite one leg noticeably shorter than the other, he became a legendarily beautiful powder skier while nursing dreams of starting his own ski area. With 10th men Ben Duke (L/86), Bill “Sarge” Brown (L/86), and Jack Tweedy (E/86), Seibert built his dream from scratch out of a Colorado sheep meadow near Vail Pass, terrain that is an hour’s ski tour north of the Resolution Creek–Ptarmigan Pass area of D-Series fame.

  Vail opened in 1962 with Colorado’s first gondola, a pedestrian village patterned after the little Alpine towns Seibert had seen during the war, and a young marketing director named Bob Parker. Parker’s path since the war had been a serpentine but not altogether atypical one. He went back to school, not to St. Lawrence but to the University of Washington to study English. Parker knew, as a nineteen-year-old, the first time he set eyes on Mount Rainier that “this was god’s country” and that assuming he survived the war, he would spend the rest of his life out west. With his degree in hand, he returned to Europe as an education advisor to the Army. In Germany, he skied in the Army championships, spent time with Sarge Brown, who ran the Mountain Training Center in Bavaria, and worked as a stringer, or “European correspondent,” for Bil Dun-away (10th Recon/MTG) who had succeeded Dick Wilson (M/85) as editor of Skiing magazine, which was started in 1946 by Merrill Hastings (A/86). The brotherhood was already well established.

  Parker, the man who went through Italy wearing a “liberated” pair of German mountain boots, tells this story about a visit he paid to the famous ski-boot maker Hans Rogg in 1951:

  When we reached the Po River, our squad took jeeps along the river to look for the big guns that were shooting at us. Lying on the levee bank, we heard small-arms fire, and saw Germans swimming for the other side, pursued by bullets hitting the water. Our sergeant told the GIs who were firing to quit shooting at helpless Germans, which they did. Meanwhile, we watched this little guy with long black hair tiring, and beginning to sink. A big blond German grabbed him with a perfect lifeguard’s carry, swam him to the north bank, dragged him out, and they disappeared over the north levee.

  In 1951, I was in Hans Rogg’s little shop in the basement of a bombed-out building in Munich to be fitted for a pair of his superb ski boots. We got to chatting about the war—both of us were in the mountain troops opposite each other. Turned out he was the little guy with the long hair. His life-saving buddy was a German Olympic swimming champion.

  At Vail, Parker admits, “None of us knew much about marketing.” But along with Seibert and Brown, they had an eye for ski terrain and a nose for what the skiing public wanted. By the time Parker retired in 1997, Vail had become the biggest, most successful ski resort in North America—biggest single-mountain acreage (five thousand acres and counting) and over a million skier visits
per season.

  The boom was fueled early on by the sudden availability of inexpensive war-surplus gear. Hundreds of thousands of civilians got their start skiing on white-painted Army skis and white bamboo poles with baskets as big as dinner plates. And it wasn’t just the leftovers from Camp Hale; the War Department had ordered tens of thousands of skis that were never used. New skis could be had for $5 a pair. A complete outfit, including skis, boots, poles, parka with fur-trimmed hood, wool pants and gaiters, long underwear, and mittens, would set you back in the neighborhood of $75. And it wasn’t just ski gear flooding the market. Thousands of olive-drab nylon climbing ropes were for sale too, ropes that were far better—stronger and suppler—than anything the mountaineering community had seen prior to the war. Climbers and hikers snapped up the 10th’s fine multipurpose mountain boots with the revolutionary Vibram soles and luxuriated in the first down sleeping bags to be widely available. Thanks to the Mountain and Winter Warfare Board, much of this surplus gear was superior to anything produced commercially. For many years into the peace, 10th Mountain Division equipment went along on first ascents (and first ski descents) across America and indeed all over the world.

  Tenth men dove with gusto into the business of manufacturing and distributing ski equipment. John Woodward (HQ/87), one of the original patrol leaders and MTG officers, managed a ski shop in Seattle and later became a partner in the Anderson & Thompson Ski Company, an early distributor of cable bindings, steel ski poles, and ski racks for automobiles. In the 1960s Anderson &Thompson introduced the fabulously successful, American-made K2 skis. Hans Hagemeister (10th Recon) imported skis and skiwear from Europe. Sun Valley ski instructor Don Goodman (E/87) designed and manufactured the Goodman Release Binding, one of the first safety release bindings.

  Several 10th men got involved in the ski-lift business, which took off in symbiosis with the ski areas. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1948 (and winning that year’s coveted four-event title for skiing in downhill, slalom, cross-country, and jumping), John Jennings went to work for the Heron Company in Denver. This was the same Bob Heron who had engineered the tram used for evacuation and resupply on Riva Ridge. The same Bob Heron who cobbled together old mine cable and equipment purchased by Friedl Pfeifer and fashioned Aspen’s historic Lift 2. The same Bob Heron who built the world’s first double chairlift at Berthoud Pass west of Denver, and the first-ever triple and quad chairs at Boyne Mountain, Michigan. Over the years Heron-Poma (the Denver company was eventually swallowed up by the French giant Pomagalski S.A.) designed and installed over 120 chairlifts and several aerial tramways, including the ones at Squaw Valley, California, and Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire.

  Harry Poschman didn’t want to build ski lifts; he just wanted to ski the mountains they opened up. That first December home, December 1945, Harry found that he couldn’t return to his beloved Sun Valley; the lodge was still being used as a Navy hospital. So, he took off for the mountains of Utah, where Alta, which had stayed open throughout the war, was just about the only place with lifts running. Harry got a job the day he arrived. “I swore I’d never pick up another shovel after the service. But my first job in Alta was shoveling snow!” For four years, through Alta’s typically prodigious storms, Harry worked as a lift operator by day and a bartender by night. In 1949 he moved briefly back to southern California and the mountains of his youth to help John Elvrum (HQ/86)) put up the first chairlift at Snow Valley, near Lake Arrowhead. Then it was off to Aspen, where Friedl Pfeifer proffered a job with the ski school. That was it, heaven-on-earth for the Arlberg style-master. Harry bought a house with six bedrooms, turned it into the Edelweiss Inn, a chalet-style bed and breakfast, and settled in with his wife and two children. And he never missed a powder day for the next twenty-five years.

  Bob Woody, one of the youngest recruits when he joined the 10th in 1944, was still only twenty years old when the Army let him go.

  Did the war make me a man? No. I still got sweaty palms when asking a girl on a date, and one time when I went in to buy a suit after the war, the salesman said, “Hey, sonny boy, what do you want?” I came home with fantasies of the good life. College. Coeds. A career as a foreign correspondent in trenchcoat and eye patch and dangerous liaisons with beautiful blond spies. Then the perfect pipe-smoking tweedy job in some ivy-covered academia.

  Instead he went to Dartmouth (no coeds until 1972) along with his best war buddy Newc Eldredge. After school, international ambitions notwithstanding, the romance of skiing worked its magic. Pulled west—first to rural Colorado, then to Idaho, and finally to Salt Lake City—he traded on his facility with words at various small newspapers. Then one day at Alta, in two feet of fresh powder on Sunspot—the moment still sparkles in his mind—“I realized, this is it; I’m staying.” He had his skiing; by then he had a growing family; and he had his words. The trenchcoat didn’t seem so important. He remained business editor of the Salt Lake Tribune for more than thirty years. And to this day, he teaches skiing every week of the winter for a University of Utah program on the nearby slopes at Alta.

  CHAPTER 16:

  A New World Outside

  On a blustery day in May 1995, eight 10th Mountain Division veterans sat in the park in Telluride, Colorado, and talked about their war and the world they came home to. (All eight were featured in the film Fire on the Mountain, a documentary look at the mountain division, which premiered that weekend at Telluride’s annual Mountainfilm Festival.) Some of the former ski troopers wore their white canvas anoraks, and they all sported the 10th’s versatile mountain cap with visor and earflaps. They had brought along examples of their rucksacks, box-toed mountain boots, trigger-finger mittens, and other pieces of gear. White-haired David Brower (HQ/86) of Berkeley sat on the left with even whiter-haired Paul Petzoldt (MED/85) of Jackson Hole, next to him. Then came Bob Parker (HQ/87) from Santa Fe, sporting an elfin gray goatee, and Phil Lunday (126th Engineers), also of Santa Fe. Bob Woody’s friend, Newc Eldredge (L/85), of Newport, New Hampshire, was there with his trademark handlebar mustache. Boulder’s Hugh Evans (M/85) stood next to Ben Duke (L/86) from Littleton, Colorado, and Dick Wilson (M/85) of Grantham, New Hampshire. A bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey sat on the table in front of them. It was cold enough for a nip—isolated snowflakes swirled through intermittent sunbeams—but none of the men needed help in loosening up.

  Bob Parker began by telling the audience—clad in the latest Gore-Tex and pile, “You’re looking at a bunch of old ski bums from World War II.”

  Which was true, but only a very small part of their story. These men not only revolutionized ski sport in America after the war; they represented a revolution in the way Americans today think about the outdoors, how they spend their money and their leisure time, and how they view the planet as a whole.

  In the prosperity of the postwar years, recreation changed. And the most dramatic shift occurred away from the lined court and the measured field, and out into the natural world. The new sports were self-propelled, individual pursuits, with no winners and losers and no scorekeeping. Hiking, camping, backpacking, trail running, fly-fishing, mountain biking, trekking, adventure racing. The gravity sports: skiing and climbing, whitewater kayaking, surfing, hang gliding, BASE (building-antenna-span-earth) jumping. Sports that required knowledge of, indeed intimacy with, natural forces and environments—weather, altitude, wind, water, snow, and rock.

  The returning mountain soldiers didn’t by themselves create all of this, but they did a lot to drive it, by example and with their business endeavors, and in the process they passed along their passion for the outdoors to future generations. They were an exceptionally influential bunch. (Harry Poschman complains, half-seriously, that “the legend of the 10th Mountain” spread wider after the war than it ever had during training or combat in Italy.) Far from simply inspiring a few ski bums, as Bob Parker wryly put it, the 10th’s elemental love helped create a new awareness in America of wild landscapes and of how an active generation might claim a place in
it. Inevitably, in the process, Americans discovered how fragile the environments are that support this new recreation, how finite wilderness is, and how important its preservation.

  Some 10th veterans actively fostered these notions, made this their life’s work—people like David Brower, who became the first executive director of the Sierra Club, and Paul Petzoldt, who founded the National Outdoor Leadership School. But it wasn’t just the outspoken teachers who made a difference. Hugh Evans became a mining engineer; Bob Parker, after his time at Vail, studied to become an archeologist (and fifty years after the fact, was finally able to write about some of his war experiences, including Punchboard Hill); Jacques Parker worked as an illustrator. They either moved to the mountains or skied every day they could, and they passed the tradition on to their children.