- My name is Jeremy Bloom.

The sport of skiing has taken me around the world.

From the Olympic Games to unknown peaks in Alaska.

I can't imagine my life without a connection to the mountains and much of what I've experienced, in fact, what all skiers and snowboarders experience is owed to an unlikely group of men, a band of brothers who literally put skiing on the map.

This is their story.

- Sometimes to learn the greatest thing about the present you gotta step back to the past.

- In the mountains, in the woods wed take our chances with anyon - It was different.

Military skiing was entirely different than what I pictured it.

- If you think of a mountaineer, you think of a character.

You were with a group of people that had that tendency, - And there are some days you know It was so beautiful, so inviting.

Wed just take off - These guys were not only fun loving, but man, they were tough.

-We were there because we wanted to be there, and I thought they were gonna kill us all off.

Just keep your heads and remember your instructions.

We paid a very, very severe price for the number of months we were in battle against the Germans.

A thousand were killed and 4,000 more were wounded.

The greatest blessing that came out of the 10th for many of us was the great common love of the mountains, and it became the lives of most of us - The grandeur of the mountains it just gradually seeped into me and I knew that this was something that I was gonna enjoy for the rest of my life.

Thes guys not only war heroes but to me heroes in ski industry - We sort of are the fathers of the modern ski industry, the band of brothers.

We were part of that.

- The 10th Mountain Division, the 10th Mountain Division, 10th Mountain Division, 10th Mountain Division - Professional skier and guide Chris Anthony grew up in the shadows of the 10 - Living in the Vail Valley in Colorado You'd hear about this 10th Mountain Division.

You see these tributes all over the statues, and it just made me that much more intrigued to find out who they are and the personality of each and every one of 'em.

And selfishly, I get to ski some pretty fun terrain because what they did to defend our country, - The origin of the 10th Mountain Division dates back to the year 1940.

World War II was raging in Europe.

as Adolf Hitler led Nazi Germany and their allies on a massive offensive.

The United States would not join the war until 1941 after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

But many influential Americans were already well aware of the danger Hitler and his allies posed, including one new Englander named Charles Minnie Dole, who had founded the National Ski Patrol in 1938, Dole had taken notice of account detailing how a small unit of Finnish mountain troopers, allies of Germany had annihilated a superior sized Soviet army division during a fierce battle Dole's fear was that if the US didn't take action to develop our own mountain unit our enemies would've the same upper hand if we fought in the harsh terrain of Europe - The Germans, the Italians had many mountain divisions.

We didn't have any.

And so this seemed to be a very sensible way to train troops to be able to fight in Europe, where you've got the Aines and you've got the Alps.

- After months of hard selling to the war department, Dole convinced them to take action.

In 1941, President Franklin D Roosevelt commissioned the 10th Mountain Division and he put Charles Dole in charge of recruiting soldiers.

Unlike any other military unit it would be made up entirely of volunteers.

The only requirement, three letters of recommendation, and of course a love for snow and mountains didn't hurt either - I belonged to a ski club in Portland and also I was on the high school ski team, and so the word got out that they were starting on a 10th Mountain Division ski troops, and I thought that, hey, that sounds interesting, just ski during the war.

- I said, I'm gonna join the Navy And my professor, he shook his finger at me and he said, you're going to the mountain troops.

He says, you're a skier.

- I was at Exeter in New Hampshire as in school, and I'd been with Sierra Club and skied with the Sierra Club and climbed with the Sierra Club.

To tell the truth, I thought that Hitler and, and the Japanese, you know, we wouldn't have to worry about 'em as Americans until Pearl Harbor.

That's when I woke up, realized that you can't survive in this world with tyrants like that.

So that I was very much into trying to defeat the Nazis and Japan and the mountain troops Seemed like a good way to go.

- When - The - Idea of the mountain troops came up, I was head of the ski patrol at Sun Valley, I ended up in I company 87th.

My brother ended up in K company which was right next door.

We were pretty knowledgeable of and cold weather having been brought up on a farm in Northern New Hampshire.

So to us, cold weather and snow was second nature.

I mean, it was, we expected it every winter, - Cold then hell.

A friend of mine said, if you have the chance, be sure and join this outfit.

He says, it's one big country club out here.

All it lacks is the hot buttered rums.

So of course, I was very enthusiastic.

- I was working in the Grand Teton National Park and learned through the American Alpine Club that this unit was being created and I couldn't get into it fast enough.

The enlistments came primarily outta the Ivy League universities of New England and outta the Midwest, particularly Minnesota, the Norwegians in particular, the recruiting took place among men who were skiers and mountaineers, all volunteers joining the unit because they wanted to be in it.

They wanted to be with other mountain men other skiers, and so forth.

The result was we had perhaps the finest morale unit in the entire army.

We were there because we wanted to be there.

- My uncle Jimmy, was a captain in the 10th Mountain Infantry, and he was already a commissioned officer from Northwestern Military Academy.

And so when the war broke out, he naturally volunteered.

He had a very successful business going.

He had a wife.

He really didn't have to go, but it was everybody's duty at that time to do your part.

And he, being a skier and having the love for mountains, he was drawn to become a 10th mountain soldier.

- My father, Ben Duke, he went to high school in Chicago and then went on to College Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Williams had ski racing He was involved in the ski club there.

And when the war broke out, the 10th Mountain Division basically recruited guys in those New England - Schools.

My dad, Pete Seiberg, was in the 10th Mountain Division.

You know, my dad was incredibly gregarious.

He was the center of things.

You know, whenever he walked in a room, you hear that about a lot of big characters and he was certainly one of 'em.

- You know, these guys came together for a common purpose to win the war, but they also had the comradery and you know, the same love as skiing and mountains.

- I think a lot of these guys actually wanted to go to camp and just hang out with their buddies in the mountains.

They really wanted to be here.

- By the spring of 1942, high in the Colorado Rockies construction was underway on Camp Hale.

Here, the true story of the 10TH soldiers would begin to unfold.

H ow they live how they trained, and how one day they would have an impact on the world.

- The reason that Camp Hale was selected at 9,200 feet and Tennessee pass here at 10,000 was you had six month winters.

And so it became a most important part of of our existence really, as we trained for what we were going to face later on.

- I got on the train in Pueblo and went up through the canyon and then I saw white capped mountains in the background.

I knew that I was headed for snow country.

- These 10th mountain recruits might have been headed for snow country, but they weren't necessarily equipped for the conditions they would encounter.

- Hey, gearing up, my army issued 1942 fatigues - To get a sense of what it was like for the men of the 10th Mountain Division, professional skier and longtime 10th enthusiast, Chris Anthony decided to visit Camp Hale and take a step back in time.

- I'm guilty of this and I, I know everybody is They look at an old picture or they look at old video, they look at old Warren Miller stuff and they go, oh, those guys look so geeky and they can't ski that well.

Well, I tell you what, take a step back in time and actually go out and put on that equipment, step into the shoes of what those men were utilizing and it'll put everything in perspective.

This goes to show how tough these guys were, I'm wearing modern stuff underneath - And Chris wasn't alone.

He invited two of his buddies, Tony Seiberg and Scott Kennet, both world class skiers and descendants of 10th Mountain Soldiers.

New boots, some sick goggles - You know, just taking everything out and seeing what they used to wear and everything was really cool.

- That's sweet.

The first time I put all the 10th mountain gear on, we were actually in Camp Hale and we were on the old roads that those guys drove into camp and marched on and did all that.

And we put the ski camouflage on the boots, the gloves, the goggles, the hats, everything.

- Oh yeah.

It was amazing that they even used this stuff.

- And it literally, you know, looking around where I was with that gear on knowing my uncle was here back in, you know, the 1940s doing the exact same thing, it, it brought goosebumps to me.

- Yeah, it was really cool.

My grandpa was there in the same skis in the same area, and it was actually like being back in time and you got a really good feeling for what it was like to be a 10th mountain trooper.

- Where we are is what was called Cooper Hill, and it was built so that the division could be brought up here, 400 at a time.

And given ski training.

There were barracks just below, and it was a two week type of special training time then back to Camp Hale and 400 more would come up.

And over a period of the first winter in which was the winter of 1942,43, there were about 8,000 men brought up here for ski training The United States Army had never had mountain and winter warfare trained troops prior to the creation of the 10th Mountain Division.

So we were brand new, we were a new experiment.

So absolutely everything had to be new, tested, developed.

I - Helped unload a truck full of those long white sticks and some guys even called them skis.

- They were state-of-the-art skis at that time.

And there were two lengths, seven foot two, seven foot six, if I remember correctly.

- All of the rest of the equipment that we had was developed during the time we were at Camp And everything that was developed weighed 118 pounds.

I weighed 118 pounds.

They said if I put a pack on, I couldn't get off the floor.

- The basic movements of skiing were taught, period.

That was it.

And how to handle the extra weight of a pack and a rifle, particularly that rifle swinging around on your back.

It was practiced - Day in and day out.

The whole skiing technique was that a body erect right over the skis and not letting a shoulder go down on either side, but getting used to doing that, you had to have that weight on your back.

I was, at that time a lieutenant pulled an inspection of a unit one time and found the ruck sacks were all filled with pillows.

The soldier learns fast.

- It was very hard work.

You didn't have groom slopes, you had crusted or deep powder.

You were skiing in the trees, you were carrying 90 pounds You were carrying what you neede to survive in the winter in these mountains.

The object was to get down.

No matter how you get down, its fine.

- The clothing was really, really, really heavy.

It actually fit really well.

I, it almost had the same cut as a nice baggy snowboarder line these days.

But the canvas that was used for the material was very heavy.

It absorbed a lot of water, but it somehow kept warm.

That was the whole philosophy that the material could get wet, but stay warm.

- I kind of really got into how the gear worked and understood that the boots weren't just for skiing.

They needed to be used for mountaineering They needed to use, be used for snowshoeing as well as cross country skiing and downhill skiing.

So I kind of understood why the boot was made like it was.

- They were supposed to be able to move through the woods in the snow towards the enemy, and that meant either going uphill or downhill.

So going uphill, you need to use the skis as more of a snowshoe and be able to walk up the hill.

So the bindings that they designed were evolutionary.

They made a binding that could unlock and walk up the hill and then lock and they could ski down the hill.

And today we call that A.T.

gear - Imagine skiing with the equivalent to about 90 pounds of gear on a backpack.

And it's not a modern backpack.

It's pretty flimsy.

And it slides around and forward Bindings don't release.

The skis are long and straight, and once things start going wrong, it just compiles and down you go.

- Holy cow.

I mean, if you get a little bit forward, you're gone.

If you get just a tiny bit back, you're gone.

And then the skis just don't wanna turn.

How did they do it?

I cant believe it.

Much, much respect for these guys to be able ski in this stuff.

- I looked at these guys in the old vintage footage and you're thinking, oh, no prob They just are cruising along making this look so easy.

And I put on the gear, granted my boots are like four sizes too big, but the worst part is there's no ankle support.

So you have no four or back apt.

You're just kind of sitting there center trying to maintain balance.

- Just can't believe how good they are.

Like the fact that they left the ground with these on just blows my mind.

I wouldn't even think about getting an inch of air.

Whichever way you want, whichever way the snow's gonna take you, you're going.

So, - But they've made it look easy.

- Respect.

They're crazy.

A lot of props.

- A lot of what they did was kind of come in here blindly and and learn all this stuff.

You know, the stuff that we take for granted today, they were pretty much figuring it out for the first time on, you know, how the ski gear worked and how the skins worked and how the bindings worked and the boots and all that.

And it's kind of neat to put on this old gear and, and just today I was kind of staring down at my boot I was lacing it up and just thinking about, you know, those guys we put on our boots to train for a competition, they're putting on their boots to train, to go to war.

And it kind of really made a, an impact with me.

- When people read about the 10th Mountain, you hear about the best alpins in the country were brought in to train people and often served.

They were the lieutenants and the captains of the division.

But the 10th Mountain recuited cowboys they recruited ranch hands, guys digging ditches, US forest service workers and all these people who love the outdoors, but they didn't know a fig about skiing.

These guys were learning from the best alpinists of the time.

But if you've never been on a pair of skis before and you got a cowboy hat and you've been riding a horse, that's gotta be funny.

I mean, I, I can only imagine what it was like there.

We would - Be absolutely no threat to the enemy They'd see us coming and they would just keel over in hysterics.

Unreal.

I'd fall on my gun and shoot myself.

I wouldn't need those three letters of recommendation.

They wouldn't known.

I forged mine for sure.

- We had some good times skiing, but some real hard times too.

We didn't know what to expect.

I didnt.

- By 1943, nearly 14,000 men were training at Camp Hale.

And it wasn't just the skiing that was tough.

It was all about surviving in the mountains in winter.

- Well, of course D-Series was the big deal.

and that was a mock battle against an enemy.

And it happened to come in extremely cold weather.

- And I thought they were gonna kill us all off, sleeping out in temperatures down to 30 below zero without a tent.

If you put up a tent, the tents we had you perspire and it freezes on the tent.

You bump the tent and it all goes down your neck.

So if we learned to sleep out without tents, we slept on top of our skis.

We learned the tricks of the trade to survive.

Really it was survival exercise - One night I was so cold and my boots and socks were frozen.

I couldn't get my boots off and the socks were frozen to my feet 'cause I had moisture.

So I stayed up all night moving to keep from freezing and terrible experience.

- They always say, listen up This may mean your life, you know, well God, you hear that all the time.

Well, everything would mean mean your life there.

- Well, winter camping, I mean, if you don't have all your equipment all your sleeping set up right, you're gonna have a miserable, long, cold night and not get a lot of sleep.

And then these guys were up early, had to go train all day or go fight all day back into that same setup with frozen boots and wet socks and you don't have your latest, greatest polypro that dries quick.

And you know, it was tough.

- The trick that I think we learned is you had to stay cold because when you were moving with your gear, if you began to perspire, when you stop, then you're likely to freeze I wore a wool sweater wool trousers, a wool shirt over the wool sweater, the wool cap wool mittens was the best thing to keep you from freezing.

And it's the wonderful thing with wool that sort of pulls the moisture off.

And so the, the most famous picture of me is drying my socks in front of the fire.

- Their D Series was such an intense series of training in the coldest part of the winter that a lot of these guys came back and said the war was easy compared to this.

- Can't lie, it was hell.

- During their time at Camp Hale the 10th Mountain Division engaged in some of the most grueling training imaginable.

But unlike other military units preparing for a battle, inspiration came not just from the mission at hand, but also from the scenery that surrounded them day & night - Well, the mountains were the magnet to start with, that was in our blood.

And the exercises and things that we did here, did nothing but strengthen it.

- And there are some days, you know it, it was so beautiful, so inviting, we'd just take off.

Oh, beautiful.

Those were happy days.

- Yeah, we thought we were never gonna get in the war because we'd been training all this time.

And well, everybody was thinking are we ever gonna get in the war Or what are we gonna do?

- In December, 1944, the men of the 10th Mountain Division finally got their chance to help the allies to victory.

- And all of a sudden they were propelled into the war.

And even to them, it was a little bit surprising.

- Their assignment, attack and weaken the Nazi stronghold in the Apennine Mountains of Italy.

But it wouldn't be easy.

The Apennines were a virtual life and death obstacle course, and the German resistance would be fierce.

But this was exactly the kind of mission that 10th Troopers expected.

And while it would be the first time most of them had ever seen combat, no military division was ever more prepared or willing to fight.

- We had all been trained at a much higher elevations.

Our body was attuned to that type of training.

So combat in Italy from a physical standpoint, was not as severe as it was perhaps for other types units.

- On the first patrol in January of ‘45, we met the enemy head on.

I thought that first, second or two, it was still a game, but that was my first experience to realize that someone was trying to kill us.

- There was real bullets flying around them, people were dying and camp was over.

This was the real thing.

- These guys are down in this fox hole.

Bombshells are coming down and everybody else is digging into their foxholes.

And my uncle's just running from foxhole to foxhole, making sure his guys are all right.

And one guy said, man, that Kennet is crazy.

But he said it with a big grin on his face like that guy's looking after us too.

- We were in a terribly battle scarred area.

So the beautiful mountains of of Italy actually during our combat action were not very beautiful.

The villages were in rubble, everything around you was decimated.

- Between January and May of 1945, the 10th conducted attacks on a five mile front in the Apenniines, which included the steep and rugged cliff known as Riva Ridge.

And the equally challenging Mount Belvedere.

There had been three prior assaults by US forces on this region but none of them made any impact The night of - February 19, the attacks on Mount Belvedere and Gorga Lesco began.

During that attack, my platoon sergeant was riddled through the chest with a machine gun fire and I held him as he died and I was furious.

So I went up to where we'd set up some machine guns that were pointing at where the Germans were located and saw where that was and came back to the platoon and said, we're going up there.

And I took off up the mountain and I took one trench that was full of Germans that had a machine gun, then they surrendered and I went over the other side of the hill and took another one You remember those things?

Yeah.

It's hard to believe you shoot other people.

- During five months of combat, nearly 1,000 10th mountain soldiers died in battle.

One of the largest losses of life in any US division.

And another 4,010 were wounded.

- Even though we did brilliantly, we paid a very, very severe price for the number of months we were in battle against the Germans.

- You know, it was a really basically sort of a luck as to whether you survived.

And the guy next to you didn't, you know, it was, I mean, very, very dangerous.

I mean, my dad was wounded when he was there, and a lot of people that he was close to there were killed - As they were spearheading through Italy, I mean, they had been through hell and back.

Riva Ridge, Mount Belvedere and all these intense battles.

And the war in Italy was just coming to an end.

My uncle, he was in this small town and there was a German gunnery outpost and they were trying to figure how they were gonna attack it.

And when they rode past, the guy jumped up and unfortunately shot my uncle, shot him in the back.

Our level of skill & capability and our level of accomplishment can best be measured perhaps by what our enemy thought of us.

The senior German commander, at the end of the war on the 2nd of May, 1945, asks for the privilege of surrendering to our to our commanding General.

And he said that he had been a commander on the Russian front in the north of Europe and in Italy.

And that the finest military unit that he had faced as a commander of German forces was the American 10th Mountain Division.

- Within three months after the German surrender in Italy, world War II was over, American troops headed home.

And on November 30th, 1945, the 10th Mountain Division was deactivated.

- You know, you'd expect there'd be a whole bunch of just screaming and hollering, but really all the guys were just kind of quiet and you know, trying to figure in their own mind, would they get back to their What are they gonna do - After training so hard and spending so much time in the mountains of Colorado, many of the 10th mountain troopers weren't ready to hang up their skis.

- They'd been through such an, an incredible experience so early in their life and they had come back and they knew that if they had done that, there really wasn't much they couldnt do.

- I saw that in my father.

My sense is that as a result of his training and what he went through with the 10th, both at Camp Hale and in Italy, you know, molded him into the guy that he later became, which was somebody who was just afraid of nothing and knew that whatever he wanted to accomplish he could.

And I think every one of those guys felt the same way.

- I went back to my home in Chicago, was there five months and couldn't get back to Colorado fast enough.

So I made the move.

Like so many At one point we estimated there were 400 men of the 10th who had come back to Colorado, from New England, or from the mid Midwest or from other parts of the country.

We were spared in war.

We came back to the mountain environment that we'd loved.

And our entire lives from that point on here in Colorado particularly, were around us.

We could hike, we could camp, we could ski, we could enjoy what the mountains had to offer.

And it changed the lives of most of us.

Just the mountains.

The mountains.

Im sitting here above Camp Hale and just to think that at one time there was 14,000 men that lived out in this valley, from that 8,000 skiers came to be.

And through those 8,000 very passionate and fun-loving outdoorsmen was developed an entire industry.

- 10th Mountain really changed nothing less than the landscape of skiing.

pre-World War II.

The skiing industry was very elite and it was very upper class.

It was almost a sport of royalty Americans didn't really have leisure time pre-World War II.

If you ask your grandparents, they worked.

they didn't have leisure time.

Post-World War II, there was a booming economy with the middle class, newly minted with leisure time.

And what happened, the ski industry actually exploded.

The 10th mountain, came home, opened it up to the masses.

What they also did is they helped improve ski gear.

So the army came home and they developed better ski gear for the hills.

They developed nylon ropes for mountaineering.

They developed sturdier boots, sturdier bindings.

So the ski industry took a quantum leap in the quality of equipment because the army got involved in training troops for the hills.

- Today's equipment really owes a lot to those guys.

And today's equipment is just unbelievable.

I mean, with shape skis, fat skis, the latest, greatest boots, the bindings that you can backcountry tour and then clamp back down and ski these radical coolers, you know, it's great - Just now.

The major binding companies are really starting to embrace the A.T.

gear, which has even taken on a name called Side Country, where we're going beyond the lifts, beyond the ski area of boundaries by hiking and descending And realistically, that's what these guys were doing because of a necessity back then at Camp Hale.

And now we're doing it for recreation.

- The list of famous 10th Mountain veterans is staggering to name just a few, Bill Bowerman, co-founder of NIKE and creator of the Waffle Soul running shoe.

David Brower, former executive director and leader of the Sierra Club, Merrill Hastings, founder of Skiing magazine.

Paul Petzel, who pioneered the sport of mountain climbing Frito Pfeiffer, who directed the Aspen Ski School and created Buttermilk Mountain and Pete Seiber, who left an indelible imprint on Colorado history.

The sport of skiing just miles from Camp Hale.

- Pete's dream since he was a kid, was to have a ski area and when he got the chance to, to come back and go to Aspen, you know, go back to Colorado and not have to haul gear and not have to take orders and all the other things, there was never any doubt in his mind that he was going to build a ski area.

And the only question was where, for one reason or another, some place would be a little too windy another might not get much snow.

Maybe the third one's too far away from a population center or a main highway.

Just all those things that have to fit together and work - With the help of his longtime friend, Earl Eaton.

Pete Seibert discovered Vail Mountain in 1962.

Within 10 years, Vail became one of the most popular ski resorts in the world and still is today.

- Vail's Impact in Colorado.

It's the Alpha dog, it's the biggest scene setter for the ski industry, really in the U.S.

- You know, for Pete, I think he loved to be known as the founder, but, but I think we all know that it took a lot of people to put it together and make it all happen.

- You could argue that the biggest affect of the 10th Mountain wasn't with these alpha guys who really created a industry out of nothing, but it was to shock Troops that came home.The 10th Mountain brought people home, who opened ski shops, who opened ski town bars, who opened ski town restaurants.

At last count, maybe 2000 of the 10th Mountain Vets ended up either on a ski patrol, swinging chairs, or teaching ski So the 10th Mountain created this whole crew of men who they didn't wanna go back to the factory, they didn't wanna go back to the bank, they wanted to go to the mountains 'cause of the love of the outdoors that they learned overseas.

And in training the Camp Hale.

- There were over 60 ski areas developed by men of the 10th after World War II.

Here in Colorado, w ell, the first area built was the Arapaho Basin that was followed shortly thereafter by Aspen.

Then of course, Vail, Steamboat Springs, Breckenridge, all of these areas were literally put together by men of the 10th Mountain Division.

- The first kind of wave, the 10th mountain, put the infrastructure down and the second wave that was built upon that was skiing as a lifestyle, as a form of entertainment, as a form of recreation.

It was more than an activity.

You play golf, you play tennis, you live skiing.

The roots, the foundation were set by the 10th Mountain.

- My grandfather, William Bigelow Wright was a 10th Mountain veteran.

Well, I was pretty young when my grandfather passed away.

At that point, I didn't realize all of his accomplishments with the 10th Mountain Division until I was older.

When I'm skiing up in Vail, you know, with my friends and my family,I think of grandpa and I think of Pete Cyber and think of the legacy that they left behind and that I'm living it right now And I think we can all keep the momentum going in appreciation of the mountains and you know, where it came from and where it can go.

- And it's an experience that few people my age can even relate to because we're more concerned about how long the lift lines are, or the best snow, or how much powder that came down last night, or you know, traffic which seems insignificant compared what they experienced back then.

It's one of those things that everyone should remember at least be cognizant of, you know, and and appreciate because it was a lot more difficult than it is now to, to the places we get go to on snow especially.

- My dad lived to be 77.

Every day that I do go up the mountain, I, I think of my dad it puts me in the right place.

whenever I get the opportunity, whenever I see one of the 10th vets, I make a point of saying thank you for their sacrifice and for the life they gave us.

- These now 89, 90, 91, 92 year old men are still loving skiing.

They are fit, they are athletic, they are bright, they're engaged, and they are very committed to their lives, to their families, to their community, to their country.

You look at them, you can tell they stand a little taller.

They hold their head prouder and they have such a presence and such a positive energy because they know they have survived the worst.

- If you think of a mountaineer, you think of a character, he could live in a cave and take care of himself.

We had a fantastic group of characters that bonded during that three year or four year period that they were with the 10th.

Due to the hardships and the experiences they had.

You establish special friendship as you can seem they last today.

The next stop, is the silver dollar saloon.

- The greatest blessing that came out of the 10th for many of us was the great common love of the mountains.

It became the life of thousands of men after the war of both mountaineering and skiing and the great bond of the mountains holding them men together gave us something far more important than memories of war and battle.

That's what holds us together and has held us together for a lifetime.

- Tony, it's really neat that we're both descendants of, you know, guys from the 10th I feel really honored and it's neat to know that the ski roots in my family, you know, started from my uncle who became a 10th soldier and fought heroically in the war And there's a lot of times Id look up I'm in a gnarly situation, you know, where it could slide or I could get killed, you know, I always think keep an eye on me uncle Jimmy.

It's pretty cool.

- We share the same passion that my grandfather & his uncle shared 70 years ago And you can tell that it still lives on through us because we are different in age and generation, but still have the same passion for the mountains and skiing.

- It's because of those guys that we are skiing in this stuff right here.

It's all about the snow.

And they knew it.

These guys knew how to have fun.

That's Ptarmigan Hill there Across the way Machine Gun Ridge and they spent a lot of time up there shooting actually live fire as they had to crawl up that hill.

How about heading over to Machine Gun Ridge?

That'd be cool.

- It looks like some really nice skiing over there.

You can imagine these guys had to spend a lot of time up here surviving.

Only they knew that we were gonna just come up here and just rip it up with some good turns.

- I really believe that a lot of the young kids need to know about the history of their sport & the 10th.

You know, not only did they help develop this sport, they went through hell & back a lot of 'em didn't come back And for that we have freedom.

The freedom to ski these beautiful mountains and enjoy, you know what we have Well, it would be fun to have a time machine and bring my uncle to this date, take him in the back country, put him in the latest, greatest gear, and just go, this is what we do now.

Uncle Jimmy, what do you think?

He'd be blown away.

- I'm proud to be a descendent Everything that they've done has just affected my life so much and that's the reason why I am who I am today.

- It's pretty spectacular once you're skiing down a mountain and thinking about the history of how I got here, but what really put everything in scope was being above Camp Hale & gettin to descend the mountain made me realize how lucky I am because of things they've done.