How the 10th Mountain Division forever changed combat and outdoor recreation

[00:00:00] This is Spencer McKee and I'm here with Christian Beckwith who is doing an absolutely fascinating dive into the 10th Mountain Division which obviously had a major presence in Colorado. You can still go around and tour some of those spots in Colorado today. Christian, why don't you introduce yourself?

[00:00:20] Well, you nailed it. My name is Christian Beckwith. I live in Jackson, Wyoming and I've been involved in the climbing world for around 30 years. I started my first magazine here in Jackson in like 93 or something and then I took over the American Alpine Journal then I started Alpinist Magazine. So I've been sort of focused on this intersection of the mountains and the people that love to be in them for quite some time.

[00:00:48] Now and the project I'm working on at the moment is a logical, somewhat irrational extension of these interests.

[00:00:59] Very cool. And I guess with the 10th Mountain Division specifically, that played a major role in kind of making the outdoor recreation world or at least the high alpine of the outdoor recreation world accessible. Am I right there?

[00:01:14] Oh my God, yeah. I've done enough of a dive now to have mapped out the beginnings of those impacts and influences but they are so vast that it really is turning into a PhD project on the subject.

[00:01:36] So I had a two part series called Gearheads. We're always looking at how the 10th Mountain Division was influenced by climbers and skiers going into the war going into the inception of the unit.

[00:01:52] And then how the unbelievable ramp up during World War II to stand America's very first mountain unit up from scratch influenced out direct in America.

[00:02:06] And then the real seismic impact took place after World War II.

[00:02:13] And then the real seismic impact was influenced by climbers and the fact that the 10th Mountain Division,

[00:02:18] everything that went into making them the best mountain and cold weather unit in the world that really democratized the outdoors for the first time.

[00:02:28] It also prepared the industrial base for the manufacturer of the equipment that they needed in order to fight and that after the war became army surplus.

[00:02:41] And I think importantly, you had tens of thousands of people that were cycling through both Camp Hale right there in Colorado.

[00:02:49] But there were chapters that were before Camp Hale. There was one in particular at a place called Fort Lewis in Washington.

[00:02:57] And then they had all these special, these special missions, including, I think, one to England and we can talk about that.

[00:03:05] But they were doing things like going up to Canada to try to test what was it was known as the Studebaker Weasel, but it was sort of an over snow vehicle, not dissimilar.

[00:03:15] It was a cross between a snow machine and the tank and the first of its kind.

[00:03:21] There were missions to New Hampshire to train other units in the art of military mountaineering.

[00:03:29] There was a very impressive special unit or special mission that went to both Virginia and West Virginia,

[00:03:37] and they were training up. They were training up.

[00:03:41] They were training up contingents from other divisions so that they could go back to their divisions and train their people in this art of climbing and maneuvering in the mountains.

[00:03:53] So the impact overall is in the tens of thousands of people.

[00:03:58] And these men learned the art of self-sufficiency in the back country using gear that for the very first time in the country's history had been developed in the United States,

[00:04:09] using a U.S. industrial base with companies that were from here.

[00:04:14] After the war, all that gear became army surplus. These tens of thousands of people, a lot of them had seen combat.

[00:04:21] A lot of them were PTSD. And the best place, as we now know, because we have research that supports this assertion,

[00:04:29] the best place to heal is outdoors.

[00:04:31] And so they were going outdoors using the gear that they trained on that had been developed by American companies.

[00:04:39] And they were bringing their families for the first time outdoors and both climbing and skiing before the war were essentially the province of the elite.

[00:04:49] So when I think about the 10th, I think of this incredible democratization of the outdoors because the people coming into the army were many of them were drafted.

[00:04:58] And so it was pulling from all sectors of the United States and all sectors after the war became part of this great economic boom, the postwar economic recovery.

[00:05:10] And as they began going outside using all this equipment, bringing their families with them, outdoor wreck in America was on.

[00:05:17] And today it's a $1 trillion a year industry.

[00:05:21] Yeah, I mean, the impacts of the 10th Mountain Division is absolutely undeniable.

[00:05:26] Cool.

[00:05:28] Real quick, I guess, just for all of our listeners who may not be familiar with what the 10th Mountain Division was and what it is today.

[00:05:38] What's your best short summary of what that division was designed for, what they did, and then maybe how they're seen today?

[00:05:47] Let's see.

[00:05:48] Let's see.

[00:05:49] What's the elevator pitch on this?

[00:05:50] The 10th Mountain Division was the US Army's cold weather and mountain warfare cadre that was developed specifically to take on Hitler and the Axis powers in cold weather and mountainous conditions.

[00:06:07] It was started from scratch in a country with no history of military mountaineering, in a country essentially with no great legacy of mountaineering at all.

[00:06:18] There were tiny little pockets of mountaineering, but it wasn't extensive.

[00:06:23] And they trained for a year out of Fort Lewis and then just under two years at Camp Hale to prepare for insertion, which eventually occurred in early 1945.

[00:06:37] And they were assigned to the Italian theater to break Hitler's Gothic line, which is a line of fortified summits and ridges in Italy's Apenine Mountains that had stymied allied efforts to break it for 500 days.

[00:06:54] 1.5 million soldiers had fought over it for that time without success.

[00:06:59] And the reason they hadn't succeeded was because there was one escarpment known as River Ridge that provided perfect observation and perfect lines of sight on everything below it.

[00:07:10] And River Ridge had an eastern aspect that was precipitous enough that the Germans basically didn't guard it because they assumed that nobody could climb it.

[00:07:19] And that's what the 10th mission was to go and take River Ridge and after taking River Ridge to hold it so that the rest of the division could take these other key points in the Gothic line.

[00:07:33] And this is what they did. February 18th, 1945, they climbed River Ridge under cover of darkness, took it without a single American casualty and opened the way to breaking the Gothic line.

[00:07:43] And in so doing, they ended up breaking the German back, precipitating the German surrender of Italy and hastening the end of the war.

[00:07:53] Wow. Yeah, that's that's an undeniable impact there for sure, especially just how it how it led to shorten that war and saving so many lives then.

[00:08:02] One of the so for a little bit of context, Christian, I met in Missoula at Outdoor Media Summit.

[00:08:09] We were chatting a little bit about this project that he's working on.

[00:08:13] And one of the most fascinating aspects to me was it has a heavy tie to the name of your podcast series.

[00:08:21] Why don't you go ahead and tell us about what your podcast series is named and why it's named?

[00:08:26] Well, the podcast is called 90 Pound Rucksack because beginning in those Fort Lewis days in Washington, they would train with up to 90 pounds on their backs, sometimes more.

[00:08:38] And for anybody who's ever carried a pack, we all know that you want it as light as possible because it hurts.

[00:08:45] And the fact that these guys were training with those sorts of weights and in particular on the sort of gear that was available to them, you know, in 1941, 42, 43.

[00:08:58] It just boggled my mind.

[00:09:00] Their fitness, their camaraderie, their dedication to winning a war that was the clearest example of good versus evil I've ever seen.

[00:09:12] You know, the more I've you know, we all know Hitler's just was was evil.

[00:09:18] But Jesus, the more you get into it, the more you're like, oh, my God, I mean, it's just it boggles my mind.

[00:09:26] And it really galvanized the American public in a way that I that has not happened since.

[00:09:34] And so you had these folks that were coming from all over America who were part of this effort to stand up this unit for the first time.

[00:09:44] And there were a couple of key civilian organizations that were involved in the development of the 10th.

[00:09:51] And one of them was the National Ski Patrol System.

[00:09:56] And it's currently called the National National Ski Patrol.

[00:09:59] And another was the American Alpine Club.

[00:10:01] And they both had key members that were instrumental in helping to launch the 10th Mountain Division.

[00:10:08] And the National Ski Patrol System in particular, when they became involved, they were given the very first contract that the War Department had ever given a civilian organization to recruit and vet candidates for this elite unit.

[00:10:23] And so they were pulling from perhaps the logical place to find young men who knew how to ski, which were the collegiate ski programs.

[00:10:33] And if you were looking at the the powerhouse, the alpine skiing powerhouses of the day, it was places like Dartmouth.

[00:10:41] We ended up supplying more than 180 graduates from its from its college to the ranks of what would become the 10th Mountain Division.

[00:10:51] So the folks that were coming in, not all of them, but a core nucleus of them were some of the smartest guys who'd ever worn uniform.

[00:11:02] And they're they were charged not only was standing up a mountain unit for the first time in American history, but they were charged with doing so in a country with no really no mountain culture or mountain legacy to speak of.

[00:11:20] So we had these little epicenters of climbing.

[00:11:24] Climbing, you had the East Coast in Colorado, the Tetons, Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Northwest.

[00:11:30] But I've counted the number of climbers in the country in 1940.

[00:11:35] There were 12000 members of the various organizations like the Appalachian Mountain Club, the American Alpine Club, Sierra Club, Seattle Mountaineers, etc.

[00:11:44] Of those, I've calculated the number of people that had the technical proficiency to climb an objective such as the Grand Teton, where you would need ropes and some piton craft was under 1000 people.

[00:11:57] And skiing had enjoyed a an explosion in popularity right before the war.

[00:12:05] So in the five years preceding the war, a number of factors had combined to create this groundswell of interest in the sport.

[00:12:14] And probably most importantly, it was the advent of the the mechanized lifts.

[00:12:20] So suddenly you didn't have to walk, walk up a mountain in order to get your turns, which made it very fun.

[00:12:26] And it also kind of opened it up to, you know, the coed scene.

[00:12:31] So suddenly it was sexy.

[00:12:32] You know, you could there was a little bit of there was a hint of romance in the air when you were going out to ski.

[00:12:39] And this resulted in this surge that created a base of somewhere between one and three million skiers before the war.

[00:12:51] But that definition is fairly loose.

[00:12:53] It might mean that somebody had the capacity to sit on a J bar, they called them, and go up to the top of a hill and ski down to the lodge.

[00:13:04] They weren't necessarily proficient in the art of self-sufficiency in the backcountry.

[00:13:10] And that's really what the 10th Mountain Division needed to develop the capacity for an entire unit.

[00:13:18] So a division is around 15000 people.

[00:13:21] The capacity for that division to be able to execute missions in cold weather and mountainous conditions in adverse circumstances, for example, being shot at by by Jurbans.

[00:13:33] And it's just a mind boggling.

[00:13:38] It's a mind boggling feat.

[00:13:40] The fact that they were able to train up 15000 people to be able to go to Italy and do something like climb River Ridge under cover of darkness without headlamps,

[00:13:51] silently over the course of the night, over, you know, in winter conditions and take the Germans on top of that a casualty.

[00:13:59] You know, I've gone over there and I've gone up the hard route, which was put up by the protagonists that I'm following in 90 pound rucksack.

[00:14:08] And it was legit. It was absolutely legit.

[00:14:11] He had to fix six pitches to facilitate the movement of his troops.

[00:14:15] His name was John Andrew McCown II.

[00:14:18] He was a first lieutenant by the time he got to Italy.

[00:14:21] And I went up those six pitches and five of them were relatively straightforward in the middle of August.

[00:14:30] And, you know, in a hot day where I was caring about, you know, water and some food on my back.

[00:14:37] But there was one pitch that kind of kicked my ass.

[00:14:40] And I just kept thinking about, like, how did he do this?

[00:14:45] You know, with the equipment of the day with, you know, the Germans waiting on top, like any sound, any spark, you know, any any.

[00:14:56] If he was noticed, he would they would have, you know, the goal is to kill you.

[00:15:01] And then the fact that he was able to bring 270 men of sea company up.

[00:15:06] It was called route number three on River Ridge.

[00:15:09] It I just came away profoundly odd by by the accomplishment.

[00:15:14] Yeah, that's I mean, that is absolutely amazing.

[00:15:17] Is this so is this all rope climbing up these different pitches?

[00:15:20] Are they how are they getting up there?

[00:15:23] What type of gear are they using?

[00:15:25] And I guess also, like, what type of weight were they carrying when they were actually in mission to opposed to just training?

[00:15:32] Well, the gear question is so interesting because it really is one of the key contributions of the 10th Mountain Division to American society,

[00:15:41] because all that gear had to be developed by American companies, because before the war, like I said, there was a relatively robust base for that, you know, for for for lift service skiing.

[00:15:56] So you could get skis, you can get cable through bindings, the skis were seven feet long and they were, you know, we would we wouldn't have anything to do with it right now.

[00:16:08] They were thin as as pencils, but there was a precedent there for for the skiing equipment.

[00:16:15] But the sort of equipment they needed was much more oriented to the backcountry and to mountaineering and all that equipment before the war had been manufactured traditionally in places with long cultural traditions of Alpinism.

[00:16:34] So Germany and Austria and Italy, this is where America's top climbers got all their gear before going on expedition.

[00:16:43] All of that was unavailable to us once we started fighting with Germany and Austria and Italy.

[00:16:48] So we had to build it ourselves.

[00:16:50] So this entire ramp up that was the the 10th Mountain Division's inception was accompanied by this massive ramp up in the gear that they would need in order to execute their missions.

[00:17:04] Ironically, very little of it ever made its way to Italy.

[00:17:08] There was a one story I've heard is there was a general in I think it was in Boston.

[00:17:14] It was like if this 10th Mountain Division is so, so damn good, why do they need any specialized equipment?

[00:17:19] They can just use the equipment that the regular army uses.

[00:17:22] So they were given like wool blankets instead of these mummy sleeping bags that were specifically designed for them.

[00:17:28] For example, you know, standard issue army combat boots instead of the mountaineering boots with the world's very well, not the world's first use of vibram soles, but the introduction of the vibram sole to to America.

[00:17:41] So in terms of equipment, John McCown might have gotten a few.

[00:17:48] Some of the patrol leaders got some of the equipment that they had developed specifically for them, but a lot of what they did was done using regular army issue equipment, which is mind buckling in its own right.

[00:18:00] The amount of weight that they were carrying on their backs on the night of February 18th was somewhere between 50 45 and 55 pounds.

[00:18:09] So in addition to all their personal kit, they had their rifles and ammo and grenades, things like that.

[00:18:18] And like I said, it was all done under cover of darkness.

[00:18:23] They their rifles were empty because they couldn't afford an inadvertent discharge that would have given away their positions.

[00:18:33] And they didn't have headlamps, headlamps weren't even that would that wasn't even developed at that point.

[00:18:41] And the fact that they were able to get around a thousand folks up that ridge via four different routes is simply mind boggling.

[00:18:51] What would you say was like the single most important piece of equipment to help them achieve all of this or at least I guess the single most important like evolution and equipment that helped them achieve all of this might have been the boot.

[00:19:05] The boot?

[00:19:06] Oh, yeah.

[00:19:07] So before the war, particularly for for climbers, the footwear of choice was varied.

[00:19:15] Right.

[00:19:15] So you had Keds, Keds sneakers were popular among the technical rock climbers.

[00:19:22] Not that there were a lot of technical rock climbers, but that was kind of the state of the art climbing shoe.

[00:19:29] There was a felt sold shoe called the Clutter shoe.

[00:19:32] That was also in vogue.

[00:19:34] But then the boots that were used were they had these these these souls that people would nail with try Cooney.

[00:19:43] They're called hobnails or Swiss nails or try Cooney nails.

[00:19:47] And they would you'd actually either buy the hobnails and do it yourself.

[00:19:52] Or I think you could buy pre hobnailed boot souls from various companies.

[00:19:57] But that was the state of the art.

[00:20:00] You would have these metal, you know, these metal nails in your boot and they were heavy and they conducted cold.

[00:20:10] So they made your feet cold.

[00:20:12] And when you were climbing on rock with hobnail boots at night, they sparked, which gave away your position to the enemy.

[00:20:21] And what the army needed was a boot that they could climb in and ski in and hike in without having to have multiple pairs because multiple pairs is additional weight.

[00:20:35] And as we all know, carrying extra weight sucks.

[00:20:38] I mean, that's the entire focus of, you know, for everybody who loves to climb and ski, you're trying to get your weight down as much as possible because you got to lug it on your back.

[00:20:48] So there was a fellow who was my predecessor at the American Alpine Club, American Alpine Journal, which I edited from 96 to 2001.

[00:21:00] His name was H. Adams Carter, 1939.

[00:21:03] He was climbing in Switzerland with Bob Bates, who was a fellow member of what was known as the Harvard Five.

[00:21:10] And this is a group of young climbers who kind of come into their own as part of the Harvard Mountaineering Club.

[00:21:19] And H. Adams Carter and Bob Bates, as they were climbing in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1939, observed the maneuvers of the Swiss mountain troops.

[00:21:30] The Europe is very on edge at this point.

[00:21:33] Hitler is about a month and a half away from invading Poland, the incident that sparked the start of the world of the Second World War.

[00:21:40] And they were looking at each other saying, do you think America needs to develop a mountain unit?

[00:21:47] What happens if we end up fighting in these mountains?

[00:21:50] And so H. Adams Carter and Bob Bates really kind of led a concerted effort among climbers to help start a mountain unit.

[00:21:59] And when Ad was there, he was climbing with a childhood friend, Killian Ogey.

[00:22:06] And Killian had this pair of boots and Ad kind of mocked them.

[00:22:11] He's like, what are those things? They they look like Frankenstein boots.

[00:22:14] I mean, it is kind of have these really aggressive soles on them.

[00:22:18] And Killian said, well, we're about the same size.

[00:22:21] Why don't you try them on? And Ad did.

[00:22:23] And they were a revelation because they had a soul that had been made by Vithili Brahmani.

[00:22:30] And it was a soul that addressed that issue of the the conduction of cold into the foot because Vithili Brahmani had been involved in a mountaineering accident where that cold that caused the frostbite that it ended up in a number of deaths in a climbing party that he was in.

[00:22:50] So he developed this purpose built rubber compound and used it as the sole.

[00:22:55] And when Ad was thinking about the boot issue, he realized he'd seen the solution in Switzerland when he tried on Killian's boots.

[00:23:05] But of course, Vithili Brahmani was Italian and Italy was not sending out too many examples of its boots.

[00:23:13] So Ad mounted this incredible campaign to locate a pair.

[00:23:18] And he finally found a guy underneath Mount Washington, Mount Washington in New Hampshire, in the Pinkham Notch Hut.

[00:23:25] And he essentially tackled him because this guy was wearing a pair of those boots and he sort of requisitioned them.

[00:23:33] And then he got them over to Bob, who is working in the office of the Quartermaster Generals.

[00:23:38] And the Quartermaster, the Quartermaster Court supplies everything the army needs to fight and win a war.

[00:23:44] And Bob, together with another climber who was also an official in the army, they reverse engineered that boot.

[00:23:53] And the result was the first instance of the Vibram Vithili Brahmani, the Vibram sole.

[00:24:02] And the sole did it climbed, it hiked and it skied.

[00:24:08] And so for the first time, the troops had reduced all the weight into a single pair of boots that could be used under all circumstances for all purposes.

[00:24:19] And they had this really interesting approach.

[00:24:21] And I've been thinking a lot about this. I've got frostbite issues on fingers and toes.

[00:24:26] Their key thing, which they had developed over all the expeditions they'd done leading up to the war,

[00:24:32] and they had climbed in the Yukon, opening up the largest blank spot on the map of North America.

[00:24:38] They'd climb in Alaska. They'd established America on the global Alpine scene with a sense of Minya Konka and Nanda Devi.

[00:24:47] And K2 was an attempt in 1938 that reached 8,100 meters that Bob Bates was part of.

[00:24:54] They had done all these expeditions, so they knew the kind of gear and equipment that you needed to spend protracted periods of time in extreme conditions.

[00:25:04] They'd ordered all that gear and equipment from Germany and Austria and Italy.

[00:25:10] But because they knew about this, their approach to the boot was to make it big enough that you could put in insoles.

[00:25:18] And those insoles were the key to the warmth.

[00:25:22] And so they'd experimented with all the various types of materials that would make the best insulation layer for those insoles.

[00:25:32] And so these boots, they were kind of bigger than you might imagine because they were built to accommodate those insoles.

[00:25:40] And they were single leather boots. I mean, how these guys skied.

[00:25:44] I actually tried on the skis, the boots and the, you know, cable throw can are bindings last winter.

[00:25:51] And you're just like, oh, my God. I mean, how did you ski with 90 pounds on your back and make it look good?

[00:25:57] Because I've seen movies of these guys skiing and you're like, Jesus, they were kind of throwing down.

[00:26:03] And yeah, so that boot was really one of the key items developed for the mountain troops.

[00:26:09] And then after the war, it became part of army surplus.

[00:26:12] And you had everybody going out into the great outdoors wearing these boots.

[00:26:16] Well, yeah.

[00:26:17] And I would venture to say most hikers probably have boots with vibrant soles on them, or at least have had them at some point in their hiking career, so to speak.

[00:26:25] Yeah.

[00:26:26] So that is something where it's fascinating to hear that that is kind of where that came from.

[00:26:31] I guess also one other thing or another thing I wanted to touch on, too, something that always shocks me whenever I see old clips of people climbing and mountaineering is the type of gear they're using.

[00:26:43] And I think a lot of the people that are probably listening, if they're not super familiar with the history of climbing, probably aren't familiar with those older techniques that were being used and that older gear style.

[00:26:56] So with all of your expertise in climbing, how difficult would these tasks have been with that older climbing gear, specifically looking at the climbing gear?

[00:27:09] Well, technical climbing in America existed before the war.

[00:27:15] The Stettner brothers were German emigres from Munich who emigrated to escape the rise of Hitler in the Third Reich.

[00:27:24] And because they were from Germany, they had access to that incredible Alpine tradition.

[00:27:31] So they could study how to climb by going to the Munich Alpine Museum and reading all the books of their heroes and seeing how they'd done it.

[00:27:42] And then they got to the US and they established, among other things, something called the Stettner Ledges there in the front range on Long's Peak, which was a 5.8 that stood as the hardest route ever done in America before the war.

[00:27:55] And they used equipment that they'd had shipped over from Germany.

[00:28:02] And so a lot of people were pushing the boat out for the time on routes up to 5.8, maybe even 5.9.

[00:28:13] But a lot of times they were using gear that had been made in Germany, Austria, Italy.

[00:28:19] And, you know, one case in point is the rope.

[00:28:23] So before the war, ropes were natural fiber ropes that were made out of materials like manila.

[00:28:30] Once we started fighting Japan, manila was no longer a material we could get access to because Japan had invaded the Philippines and occupied the Philippines.

[00:28:40] And manila fibers came from Manila, you know, from the Philippines.

[00:28:44] So that was no longer available to us.

[00:28:47] So Bob Bates was part of the team at the Office of the Quartermaster General that began developing a new kind of rope that could be used that would be stronger and withstand more falls than any of the natural fiber ropes available before the war.

[00:29:06] One of the fellows who had was part of that effort was out of the Sierra Nevada.

[00:29:11] And the Sierra Club Mountaineering section had the most advanced skill sets in technical climbing in the United States before the war because they actually went out and tested the dynamic properties of ropes and the capacity of somebody to catch a fall using the belay standards of the day.

[00:29:31] And they evolved those standards to optimize them.

[00:29:34] And this fellow, his name is Dick Leonard, was working on the rope solution.

[00:29:40] And he ended up connecting with a company called the Plymouth Rope Company out of Massachusetts, and they developed a larger fiber rope using a new material called nylon.

[00:29:53] And I think upon his request, it's hard to find this, you know, nail down the exact communications that resulted in this new material incorporated into rope.

[00:30:06] But the Plymouth Cordage Company developed a smaller diameter nylon rope specifically for the Office of the Quartermaster General and Dick Leonard, Bob Bates and Company to try.

[00:30:18] And when they tried it, it was a revelation.

[00:30:21] I mean, it was something like 20 times stronger than the middle of the ropes.

[00:30:24] It didn't rot from within like natural fiber ropes were susceptible to doing.

[00:30:29] And it just caught way more falls without breaking.

[00:30:34] It had a stretch that was incorporated into the considerations for belays.

[00:30:40] All of this led directly into everything that we take for granted today.

[00:30:44] And I think the point is that almost anything you can think of about what you love to do in the outdoors, you can trace back to the 10th Mountain Division and this intense effort to ramp up and ensure that they were prepared and had all the equipment and clothing necessary to fight and win a war in cold weather and mountainous conditions.

[00:31:08] Yeah.

[00:31:09] And I think a big component of that too, we've talked about the boots, talked about the ropes.

[00:31:15] Um, I imagine these guys were spending many nights in a row in, in this cold weather environment and probably with limited fire, uh, just from the sake of visibility.

[00:31:26] Um, what was their impact on like the overnight aspect in this cold weather?

[00:31:31] Like the tents and the, the sleeping bags and everything like that.

[00:31:34] You mentioned the mummy bags, but as far as the tents go, like how, what were they sleeping in?

[00:31:38] That was, that's kind of a hilarious side story.

[00:31:42] There was a fellow named Bester Robinson, and he was one of the great analytic minds in both mountaineering and law.

[00:31:49] And he, um, was a lawyer out of, out of the San Francisco area, who was also one of the pioneers of big wall climbing.

[00:31:59] So in the thirties, he led a team or was part of a team that took on some of the first big walls in American history.

[00:32:06] And they made the first ascent up among other things, something called the higher cathedral spire in the valley.

[00:32:10] And together with another very famous 10th mountain division veteran who would go on to become one of the greatest environmental champions of the 21st century by the name of David Brower.

[00:32:21] They established one of the hardest technical climbs the country had ever seen by climbing something called ship rock in the four corners area of America.

[00:32:31] And that was the first time that bolts expansion bolts had ever been used as part of a first ascent.

[00:32:37] So, um, Bester was absolutely brilliant.

[00:32:40] He pioneered a 300 mile traverse in the Sierra Nevada and winter, and really kind of perfected the art of ski mountaineering in the process.

[00:32:48] And he was so smart and he was so convinced that his ideas were better than anybody else, anybody else's ideas that, uh, he just went ahead and made his own equipment.

[00:32:58] So he made the mummy sleeping bag specifically for that Sierra Sierra Nevada, 300 miles traverse.

[00:33:06] That was super lightweight.

[00:33:08] It was a, you know, a down bag that had the properties of a mummy bag for the first time because he had determined that that was the best configuration for keeping warm in the winter.

[00:33:19] And he'd also made a tent and his tent involved a, um, he, he believed a lot of the tents using these natural fibers, they would get snow on them and then you'd sleep in them and your breath would condense and it would soak the material.

[00:33:34] And then in the morning, the, um, 20 pound tent that you'd had the night before it was now a 25 pound tent because all the moisture that it had accumulated and that it frozen into it.

[00:33:47] And so he'd come up with this rubberized compound for the walls of the tent.

[00:33:51] And he was part of the office of the quartermaster general, and he kind of rammed it down the war department's throat that his tent was the tent.

[00:34:00] And so the war department actually bought like 40,000 units of this tent.

[00:34:04] The tent, um, was impervious to, you know, high winds and it did shed any sort of a moisture very, very well, but it also didn't breathe.

[00:34:15] And it was black as, as night in there.

[00:34:17] So the soldiers, especially training in the hills around camp camp, camp hail, they hated those tents because, um, in the, you know, by the time the morning came, all that condensation would have been resulted in these feathers on the tent walls that would then.

[00:34:33] Uh, um, um, feather down onto your sleeping bags and soak them through and in suddenly those sleeping bags would be heavy too.

[00:34:40] So a lot of times what they would do is just sleep outdoors in December and January and 40 below weather.

[00:34:48] And so they got like hyper proficient at the sort of, um, all, all, everything that's required to be self-sufficient in those sorts of conditions, including sleeping on in the,

[00:35:03] many elements under the stars in all conditions in, in winter, as well as in summer.

[00:35:08] I mean, we, I don't think any of us would ever willingly do that, but these guys did it all the time.

[00:35:16] Dang.

[00:35:16] Yeah.

[00:35:17] And okay.

[00:35:17] So you mentioned camp hail there too.

[00:35:20] Uh, and yeah, to go back, that is extremely impressive.

[00:35:24] I can't imagine trying to sleep outside when it's even, you know, 30 or 30 degrees, let alone 40 below on a cliff side in the, in a combat scenario.

[00:35:34] Um, but you did mention something that I definitely want to touch on.

[00:35:37] A lot of our listeners are from Colorado or have heavy connections to Colorado.

[00:35:42] And you mentioned camp hail, which is kind of out in that Leadville area.

[00:35:46] Um, you you've been there, but yeah.

[00:35:50] So, uh, would you mind maybe just describing what camp hails role was specifically and maybe like what that's like today?

[00:35:58] Uh, probably a lot of people listening to this might want to go visit camp hail even, which was just established as a national historic monument, I believe.

[00:36:06] Um, so yeah, would you mind describing what camp hails like and kind of that Colorado tie to the 10th mountain division?

[00:36:13] Sure.

[00:36:14] As I mentioned, when the, um, first test force for cold weather and military mountaineering was activated, it was activated at a place called, uh, Fort Lewis, which is flat and rainy.

[00:36:26] And as the war progressed and the need for mountain troops became more and more obvious, they realized they needed a purpose built camp.

[00:36:35] And they wanted a camp that was at altitude and that was surrounded by mountains that had snow on the ground from November until April.

[00:36:43] And so that they could have a training ground that would, um, replicate the sort of conditions that they might end up in.

[00:36:52] And nobody knew where these guys would ever be deployed.

[00:36:55] So they had to, they had to, they were thinking Norway, they were thinking Greenland, they were thinking Japan, you know, the, um, the Aleutian islands, maybe the Alps, but they were training for all possibilities.

[00:37:06] And so the, the search was mounted to find the perfect place and camps at this point in military history were traditionally built in the South because land was cheap.

[00:37:20] And the, um, the, um, the seasons were, you know, it was warm for a long time.

[00:37:26] So your building season was really long and your training season was really long.

[00:37:32] And that's not what the 10th mountain division needed.

[00:37:35] They needed cold weather and they needed long winters.

[00:37:38] And so as the search progressed, it began looking, I'm looking kind of north over the Tetons.

[00:37:45] And it began 75 miles Northwest of where I'm standing in a place called Henry's Lake Idaho.

[00:37:52] And, uh, this was right in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and construction was actually begun on what was called the West Yellowstone training center for 35,000 people.

[00:38:04] And, um, fortunately for everybody who loves the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, it was stopped because of the Trumper to Swan, which was down to 200.

[00:38:12] Um, there were 200, uh, Trumpeter swans left in the world.

[00:38:16] And the Henry's Lake area was their breeding ground.

[00:38:19] And Franklin Delano Roosevelt's uncle was a conservationist who got wind of this camp and how it would have maybe made the Trumpeter Swan go extinct.

[00:38:28] And so he mounted this effort to get, to get that off the table.

[00:38:32] And so when it got off the table, the two guys who had been charged with finding this place were like, oh shit, now, now where do we go?

[00:38:39] So they came down to Colorado and they began poking around, trying to find a place that had access to mountain terrain for climbing and for skiing that was unpopulated.

[00:38:52] So they could build an entire camp that had a railroad access and, uh, um, a road access to provide all the materials that the camp would need.

[00:39:03] And that wasn't populated.

[00:39:06] And as you might imagine, that was rather difficult to find in Colorado in 1941.

[00:39:13] But there was this place called the Pando Valley at 9,200 feet midway between Leadville and Mintern.

[00:39:21] And as they came into it and they started going through their, their checklist of all the things that they needed for this camp, it looked like it was a pretty darn good fit.

[00:39:31] But it was, the Pando Valley is sort of like a broad sort of L-shaped valley.

[00:39:38] You know, it's got a flat, uh, relatively flat floor and it's surrounded by the, um, the peaks of the 10 mile range to the east and the Sahuach range to the west.

[00:39:49] And those are some of Colorado's highest mountains.

[00:39:51] And so they reported back and there was a lot of back and forth.

[00:39:56] The engineers hated the idea because it was super cold.

[00:39:59] The building season was like, you know, basically April until November.

[00:40:04] And they had to build a camp.

[00:40:06] They basically had to build a city to accommodate 15,000 people.

[00:40:10] And they had to do it in seven months.

[00:40:12] And so the engineers were like, this is, this is not going to happen.

[00:40:18] But necessity is the mother of invention.

[00:40:21] And it was selected as the site.

[00:40:24] Construction began in April of 1941.

[00:40:26] And by November 15th, 1942, a camp that could accommodate 15,000 men, 5,000 mules and 250 dogs was developed in the Pando Valley at a cost of around $30 million.

[00:40:40] And so that was like this instant mountain city for 15,000 soldiers who would become the 10th Mountain Division.

[00:40:51] And so, and have you, you've been there today.

[00:40:53] So like, what is it like today is in terms of like, are you able to walk around and see everything?

[00:40:58] Is there a, are there many relics left behind, so to speak?

[00:41:03] No, you go in and it's mind-boggling.

[00:41:05] There's nothing there.

[00:41:06] I mean, if you just, there is a highway.

[00:41:08] If you drive through, you're like, this was Camp Ale.

[00:41:11] It was deconstructed right after the war.

[00:41:14] And everything was taken out.

[00:41:16] You'll find some foundations.

[00:41:18] You'll find, you know, just little artifacts that refer to the fact that there was a city and that was there.

[00:41:28] And, you know, the valley floor is flat.

[00:41:31] And that was, you know, they had to move something like 2 million cubic yards of earth just to flatten it out.

[00:41:37] They had to straighten the Eagle River, which is really kind of more of a creek.

[00:41:41] But they straightened that and that's still straight.

[00:41:45] I don't know what kind of, you know, environmental impacts all that building is still having on the area.

[00:41:54] I haven't really studied that very much.

[00:41:56] But if you were to go in and nobody were to tell you about the camp for 15,000 people that had built, been built there during the war, you wouldn't know.

[00:42:06] You would just think, oh, my God, I can't believe there's this great, wide, you know, broad valley in the middle of the middle of the Colorado Rockies with nothing in it.

[00:42:16] There's nothing in it.

[00:42:18] Yeah, I would say, I mean, I've been covering Colorado for eight plus years now.

[00:42:24] Just Colorado tourism and just travel in Colorado.

[00:42:27] And the only time Camp Hale would really come up prior to its recent designation was that someone would find old munitions round that was just sitting around and it would, you know, nothing bad would ever happen.

[00:42:41] But but yeah, that would pretty much be it.

[00:42:43] Maybe like once every couple of years or so.

[00:42:46] And that was really all the conversation that it got.

[00:42:50] Do you know?

[00:42:50] So why why would they deconstruct it to that extent, especially any any clue there?

[00:42:58] Well, the 10th Mountain Division was deactivated after the war.

[00:43:01] Mm hmm.

[00:43:02] And with no division, there was no need for a camp.

[00:43:06] I have not studied the postwar use of the camp.

[00:43:11] But in the 1950s, there was a CIA operation based out of Camp Hale that, among other things, to the best of my understanding, and I'm not an expert on this, trained up Tibetan.

[00:43:25] I think it was Tibetan guerrilla soldiers for possible encounters with the Chinese.

[00:43:32] I think that how that's when it was a covert operation.

[00:43:35] So I think there was something there through the 50s.

[00:43:38] And I'm not sure when the last remnants of the camp were taken down.

[00:43:43] But if you're going down, yeah, nothing.

[00:43:46] Yeah.

[00:43:47] So you mentioned it was deactivated.

[00:43:50] We since have still kind of kept with that mountain combat tradition, right?

[00:43:56] I think I was reading there's some mountain combat soldiers and kind of a reiteration and a reiteration of the 10th Mountain Division that are in Iraq or recently been in Iraq.

[00:44:07] Well, it's so interesting.

[00:44:09] You know, the 10th Mountain Division was reactivated in, I think it was 85.

[00:44:15] And because the 10th Mountain Division is light infantry, that meant they were highly mobile, like they didn't need tank support.

[00:44:22] They didn't need all the things that a regular division needs.

[00:44:26] So they were nimble.

[00:44:27] They could insert quickly, they could maneuver under their own power.

[00:44:30] And so they became the most heavily deployed unit in the army.

[00:44:37] But they, when they were reconstituted and reactivated, they did not rebuild that cold weather or that military mountaineering capacity.

[00:44:49] But they were being deployed to Iraq.

[00:44:50] They're being deployed to Afghanistan.

[00:44:53] When Hurricane Sandy hit, they were the boots on the ground to help.

[00:44:59] And so, just as I was starting the podcast with 90 Pound Rucksack, I got this email.

[00:45:05] It still cracks me up.

[00:45:07] And they said, this is the 10th Mountain Division and we would like to invite you out to Fort Drum, which is their base in New York, to tell us the history of the 10th Mountain Division.

[00:45:20] I was like, what?

[00:45:22] I don't really, I mean, I know a little bit, but you want me to come out to tell you your history.

[00:45:28] And they had just begun rebuilding those cold weather military mountaineering capacities.

[00:45:35] And so my journey with the 90 Pound Rucksack has sort of paralleled their journey with redeveloping these capacities.

[00:45:44] So I've gone out there two and a half times.

[00:45:46] I got as far as Denver, I think it was last January, got shut down by a storm.

[00:45:50] So I had to zoom it in, but I've given presentations to them.

[00:45:53] I've also embedded with the 10th Mountain Division on a traverse from Camp Hale to Vail.

[00:45:58] And I've been helping out their 10th Mountain Alpine Club, which is a nonprofit organization that is designed to assist the 10th Mountain Division in its return to these capacities.

[00:46:11] And, you know, they inducted me into their, I think it's called their Warrior Hall of Fame, which I thought was just hilarious.

[00:46:17] And they also honored John McCown, who nobody knew anything about, by renaming their light fighter school after him as well.

[00:46:27] So it's been a super interesting and really pretty surreal journey for me to become involved with them at the same time that I'm studying the original inception.

[00:46:41] And because H. Adams Carter was the editor of the American Alpine Journal for 36 years before I took it over, he died.

[00:46:50] I never met him.

[00:46:50] I knew Bob Bates and a lot of the other five.

[00:46:53] But I have a personal, I don't know if you'd call it skin in the game, but their service so impressed me that I feel like if I can help in any way, count me in.

[00:47:07] And because I think it's a really, you know, it's a mission critical part of keeping the United States safe in a world that is unfortunately riven by war and players with, you know, suspect interests.

[00:47:26] And so I believe very firmly there should be a, a, at least one division in the United States Army that has cold weather and military mountaineering capacities because you never know where you're going to end up.

[00:47:38] Whatever I can do to help, I'm in.

[00:47:41] Yeah, no, it sounds like an incredible journey just from all the research you've done to where it's brought you today.

[00:47:47] And obviously with 90 pound rucksack coming out now too, that's a, that is awesome.

[00:47:53] And I have no doubt that after listening to you chat here, um, people definitely be wanting to check that out for a lot more information.

[00:48:01] Um, what's, I guess maybe one kind of closing question here, uh, that relates to the 10th mountain division.

[00:48:08] Uh, what's maybe just like that one little fascinating piece of information that you found out that really made you say something you would have never thought of, uh, whenever you found that out, it was just absolutely just out of nowhere.

[00:48:25] Um, I don't know if there was a Eureka moment to this, but you know, when I was studying the history of climbing and skiing in America before the war and realizing, and this is probably sounds obvious to your listeners, but that it really was the province of the elite.

[00:48:40] It was, um, available to those people in the depression who had the money and the time necessary to go skiing or climbing.

[00:48:50] A lot of times they were going to the Alps in particular, when they're going climbing.

[00:48:55] Um, and the only people that could afford to do that had cash.

[00:48:59] And so I think the one thing that really kind of blew my mind was this, um, what I refer to as the democratization of the outdoors.

[00:49:10] The, the units, um, ability to train up these tens of thousands of men to be self-sufficient in the back country under all conditions in all seasons.

[00:49:26] And the way that that led to the inception of outdoor recreation as we take it for granted today.

[00:49:33] So that was a really, that was kind of a, a slow dawning.

[00:49:37] I'm not that bright, I guess.

[00:49:39] So it took a little longer and probably take most folks to realize, but I thought that was just a fascinating byproduct of the tense development that I hadn't heard mentioned before.

[00:49:51] Yeah.

[00:49:51] And I mean, if you just look at how much public land is protected largely because there's so much interest in outdoor recreation, uh, in America now and how outdoor recreation was just made so much more accessible by all these evolutions of gear that ultimately were stemming from that.

[00:50:07] That, I mean, that's an absolutely incredible, important, uh, takeaway just from the 10th mountain division in general.

[00:50:13] That's that impacts all of us in a way.

[00:50:16] Yeah.

[00:50:16] It absolutely does.

[00:50:17] Yeah.

[00:50:18] Yeah.

[00:50:18] So I guess, uh, we'll throw out one more plug here for your show, 90 pound rucksack, um, where it can be found everywhere.

[00:50:25] You can stream podcasts.

[00:50:26] I would imagine Apple, Spotify.

[00:50:28] Yeah.

[00:50:29] Awesome.

[00:50:29] Uh, how many, how many episodes are you going to do?

[00:50:33] Oh my God.

[00:50:34] I mean, I'm like, I can't even do math.

[00:50:37] I think I called the episode two.

[00:50:40] I did a part one and a part two.

[00:50:42] So that was actually two episodes.

[00:50:43] I'm up to episode 11, which means I'm up to episode at least 12.

[00:50:48] And then I had a, like, uh, um, the Genesis of 90 pound rucksack.

[00:50:53] So who knows how many I'm in right now?

[00:50:55] And I've only made it to, uh, let's see, it was November 16th, 1942 with the opening of camp hail.

[00:51:03] So I've got about two and a half more years to go of just telling this.

[00:51:09] Well, two and a half more years of the story to tell.

[00:51:12] I hope it doesn't take me two and a half more years to do that.

[00:51:14] Um, but then I've also just developed ways for, I really feel like we have lost our, our recognition of the significance of the tense legacy.

[00:51:25] You know, and the play, the way I enjoyed is I love being outside.

[00:51:30] And, you know, now that I know more about how they contributed to my ability to be outside of just my, my respect has really become quite profound.

[00:51:39] And so I developed something last year called the 90 pound rucksack challenge.

[00:51:44] And it takes place, um, on February 18th, beginning at 7 PM.

[00:51:51] Anybody can do it anywhere.

[00:51:52] They can do it on their own.

[00:51:53] Uh, last year we did it at, um, uh, I live in Jackson.

[00:51:57] We did it on Mount glory.

[00:51:58] The tense call sign is a climb to glory.

[00:52:00] We also did it in white face mountain outside of Lake Placid where early iterations of the 10th actually trained.

[00:52:06] And then we did it at ski Cooper in Colorado.

[00:52:10] And we just encourage people to put any amount of weight they want on their back.

[00:52:14] Um, and, uh, use it as a way to lean into this legacy.

[00:52:18] So I carried 80 pounds up, um, Mount glory in a blizzard and every single step of the way, I just was thinking, oh my God, these guys were such.

[00:52:30] Badasses.

[00:52:31] Badasses.

[00:52:31] And so this year, February 18th will mark the 80th anniversary of that river ridge ascent, which began at 7 PM.

[00:52:40] And so we're inviting people from all over the country and ski areas all over the country, in particular ski areas with historic ties to the 10th to be part of it.

[00:52:51] And there were around 60 to 65 ski areas that were either started or developed or managed by 10th mountain division veterans after the war.

[00:53:00] So our objective is to build out this, um, this active opportunity for people to experience kind of on a visceral level, a little bit about of what they went through and to honor that legacy by leaning into it.

[00:53:18] And with a pack on your back at night, thinking about river ridge and all the contributions that followed.

[00:53:26] Yeah.

[00:53:26] That's amazing.

[00:53:27] And ski Cooper in Colorado is one of those 60, 65 resorts.

[00:53:31] Correct.

[00:53:31] Are there, are there some other ones in Colorado too?

[00:53:33] There's still functional.

[00:53:34] Oh my God.

[00:53:35] Yeah.

[00:53:35] Um, let's see.

[00:53:37] Uh, um, Aspen as we currently understand it was started by, uh, a 10th mountain division veteran named Frito Pfeiffer.

[00:53:48] They always started by Pete cyber, who was also involved with a basin Loveland steamboat Springs has connections to the 10th everywhere you look.

[00:53:59] Yeah.

[00:53:59] I mean, 10th mountain division veterans, there are 2000 of them became ski instructors after the war.

[00:54:04] They just, they started ski company.

[00:54:07] They were just everywhere and they really understood through the prism of skiing.

[00:54:12] And what I'm trying to do is just enlarge that prism so that we understand their contributions through the lens of outdoor recreation in general, because they were all over it.

[00:54:22] Mm hmm.

[00:54:23] Yeah, no, that's, that's absolutely incredible.

[00:54:26] Um, yeah, I mean, Hey, this, this was a fascinating conversation.

[00:54:29] I could sit here and chat about it all day.

[00:54:31] But, uh, instead I will listen to your 90 pound rucksack podcast and, uh, learn, learn a lot there.

[00:54:39] So, um, yeah, so there we go.

[00:54:41] Uh, Christian Beckwith with 90 pound rucksack, uh, podcast available everywhere, uh, that you get your podcasts from check it out.

[00:54:50] Thank you so much, Christian.

[00:54:51] Thanks for the opportunity.

[00:54:53] Great to talk to you.

[00:54:53] Thanks.

[00:54:54] Thanks.

[00:54:54] Bye.