The Secret History of Camp Hale
Written by Quentin Septer
Note: This is a modified excerpt from my book, Where Land Becomes Sky: Life and Death Along the Colorado Trail, available now.
After about a mile of leisurely pedaling along a dirt road, I cross a Colorado Trail blaze and hang a left onto singletrack. Beside the trail, a sign bears a cryptic message:
CAUTION: UNEXPLODED MUNITIONS IN AREA.
PLEASE STAY ON TRAIL.
Beyond the signage, a row of old concrete bunkers rises from the dirt, overgrown with wheatgrass, weeds, and sagebrush, one with the hillside.
At its height, Camp Hale consisted of 1,022 buildings — administrative offices, barracks, a field house, a hospital, a movie theater, stables. The base could house and train up to 15,000 soldiers at a time. Today, the dilapidated bunkers before me are all that remain of Camp Hale — the former training grounds of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division troops.
As World War II progressed and the Axis forces conquered cities and nations across Europe and elsewhere around the world, the United States prepared forces for combat in the European Alps. Here, at Camp Hale, the U.S. Army established a military base to train soldiers with a specialty in mountain warfare. The 10th Mountain Division, as the troop became known, began their training at Camp Hale in November of 1942, specializing not only in high-altitude combat, but in the skills of the high country — survival tactics, skiing, ice climbing, mountaineering — contextual abilities needed to wage war in the Alps. Troops skied and climbed, conducted war games in the surrounding Sawatch and Mosquito Mountains, guarded German prisoners of war.
And late in the year of 1944, the 10th Mountain Division troops were deployed to Italy, where they fought the Axis forces in the Apennine Mountains. The 10th Mountain troops won battles at Mount Belvedere and Riva Ridge, among other strategically important locations across Europe. The men fought fiercely in the Apennines. They took 25 percent casualties in some battles — the highest of any U.S. military unit in all of World War II. And they fought until the bitter end, when the Germans surrendered in May of 1945, concluding warfare in the European theatre.
Many of Camp Hale’s 10th Mountain soldiers returned to Colorado after the war. Some went on to found and operate ski areas across the state. Camp Hale remained in use after the war, too. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency began training Tibetan rebels at the site in preparation for operations against China’s Maoist government, all under a veil of secrecy. In attempts to keep folks from wandering onto the grounds and catching wind of these top secret operations, the CIA created a cover story. On July 15, 1959, Rear Admiral Edward Parker, Chief of the Defense Atomic Support Agency (DASA), informed the press that DASA would soon be conducting atomic testing programs at Camp Hale. “Atom Unit Making Tests Near Leadville,” a Denver Post headline read the following day. The Camp Hale-trained Tibetan rebels were ultimately deployed during the Cold War, but, as the historian T. C. Wales puts it in the Journal of Military History, “the CIA never succeeded in establishing even a rudimentary permanent intelligence network within the country.”
In 1965, the Forest Service acquired the land upon which Camp Hale sits. The site was incorporated into the White River National Forest. Now, as I traverse the former grounds of Camp Hale, not much remains of the region’s legacy but weathered concrete bunkers overgrown with grass and sagebrush — a testament to the largely forgotten past of this strange and historic place.