Mountain Division Veteran Leaves Legacy, Lessons

By David Frey, 12-15-09

It was a December day 68 years ago when Ralph Ball’s destiny changed.

“We were playing touch football on the fraternity house lawn,” he once told me. “One of our classmates came down and said, ‘Hey boys, don’t worry about what you’re going to do next year. We’re going to be in the Army. We just attacked Japan.’”

When he learned of the newly-formed 10th Mountain Division, spearheaded by ski pioneer Minnie Dole to counter Nazi ski troops, he had little doubt where he would aim to enlist. Ball ended up at Fort Lewis in Washington, a camp was full of familiar faces: young men he knew from the ski racing circuit of Northeastern colleges.

“It was like old home week,” said Ball, a Massachusetts boy who had been captain of the ski team at Deerfield Academy and Williams College.

The 10th Mountain Division was an anomaly in the Army, comprised largely of well-educated young men, some from wealthy families, with a passion for skiing and mountaineering.

Training mostly in Rockies above Camp Hale, near Leadville, Colo., they would be among the last to deploy, but they secured legendary status in the war by breaking through what had been the Nazis’ impregnable Gothic Line. Using their mountaineering skills, they stormed northern Italy’s Riva Ridge and the Nazi outpost on Mount Belvedere and didn’t stop until they had taken over Mussolini’s mansion on the shores of Lake Garda.

I knew Ball as a neighbor, hearty, kindhearted and quick-witted, with a 10th Mountain Division sticker on his car. Into his 80s, he was a model of health and strength. He would scramble onto his roof to clean out his gutter, wrestle dandelions out of the grass one by one, pedal his bicycle to the supermarket and beat his buddies at tennis and golf.

I recently learned of his death at the age of 90, after a battle with melanoma claimed him last October. Some battles you can’t win.

Ball embraced life like almost no one else I’ve ever known. He loved the Roaring Fork Valley he called home. Even after he spent most of his time in the warmer climes of St. George, Utah, he couldn’t give up his home in Carbondale, Colo. He loved the outdoors. He loved the mountains.

In the winters, he’d come back to ski. He’d zigzag between the trees on the Big Burn at Snowmass like his own private slalom course. He was fit and fast, leaving this telemark skier, about half a century his junior, winded trying to keep up with him. He would occasionally stop, though, to look at the mountains surrounding him and be glad he lived where he did.

“If I were to die tonight, I wouldn’t say I’ve been gypped,” he once told me.

Ball knew how fortunate he had been. He had lived a long, full life. He saw the ranks of 10th Mountain Division veterans, who turned out for annual Memorial Day ceremonies at Camp Hale, dwindle each year. He knew he was lucky just to make it back alive from the war, let alone live the full life he had enjoyed.

“They all know, it’s not going to go on much longer,” says Dennis Hagen, archivist for the 10th Mountain Resource Center at the Denver Public Library.

Only about 2,500 of the original 10th Mountain Division veterans are still alive. That’s only about 8 percent of a group that once included some 32,000 soldiers. With the youngest of them in their mid-80s, the ranks are thinning quickly.

This year was a turning point, Hagen says. For the first time, the group’s Italy reunion was organized not by the veterans but by their descendants. Recent veterans from the reactivated 10th Mountain Division, a group stationed at Fort Drum in New York and engaged in combat in Afghanistan, are playing a greater role. The last reunion the original veterans organized was somberly called “Hale and Farewell.”

“It’s difficult right now,” Hagen says, “but the descendants have just done a marvelous time taking over.”

In the West, the 10th Mountain Division veterans are legendary more for their accomplishments after the war than for their fighting. These vets returned to the United States to pioneer the sports of skiing, climbing and mountaineer. Friedl Pfeiffer helped found Aspen as a resort. Paul Petzold founded the National Outdoor Leadership School. David Brower led the Sierra Club and became one of the most influential environmentalists of the last century.

Others lived lives more ordinary, or like Ball, more quietly extraordinary. After the war, Ball returned to his beloved Colorado to study, then practice, law. He ran the Grand Canyon with friends in the Fifties, surviving a dangerous mishap in Lava Falls. He’d visited Europe more than 35 times, summitted the Matterhorn and Grand Teton, climbed the Dolomites and knocked off all of Colorado’s 14ers. 

He settled in Aspen, a town he never stopped loving, and later, Carbondale. Ball loved summer music concerts, hiking around Maroon Lake and skiing Snowmass. He would visit his favorite spots year after year, knowing each time could be his last.

Sometimes, I was lucky enough to accompany him. It was never a somber experience. Ball cherished the life he had lived and taught me to do the same. These mountains he loved won’t be the same without him.