Podcast Ep204 Christian Beckwith
Didrik Johnck: Welcome, welcome to The No Barriers Podcast. You'll hear from our host Erik Weihenmayer in just a second. But before we dive in, let me tee things up for you. In this episode, Erik sits down with Christian Beckwith, the creative force behind the Ninety Pound Rucksack podcast to pull back the curtain on one of America's most legendary yet undertold stories.
The 10th Mountain Division in its role in the dawn of America's outdoor recreation industry, think high altitude grit, audacious problem solving, and a relentless spirit of innovation, all under impossible odds. An unprecedented unit of World War II climbers and skiers, the 10th was dispatched to fight Axis powers in extreme cold and mountainous terrain.
Not only were their efforts critical to Germany's surrender, these veterans returned home to develop ski areas across the country and start companies like Nike and the National Outdoor Leadership School. Erik and Christian are about to blast open some history, challenge your assumptions, and remind us all what it means to build something extraordinary when the world needs it most.
All right, then, let's do this. I'm producer Didrik Johnck, and this is The No Barriers podcast.
Erik Weihenmayer: It is easy to talk about the successes, but what doesn't get talked about enough is the struggle. My name is Erik Weihenmayer. I've gotten the chance to ascend Mount Everest, to climb the tallest mountain in every continent, to kayak the Grand Canyon, and I happen to be blind. It's been a struggle to live what I call a no barriers life, to define it, to push the parameters of what it means, and part of the equation is diving into the learning process and trying to illuminate the universal elements that exist along the way.
In that unexplored terrain between those dark places we find ourselves in and the summit exists a map. That map, that way forward is what we call no barriers.
Hey everybody. Welcome to the No Barriers podcast. This is Erik Weihenmayer. I'm gonna jump right in and talk about this ice festival I was at a couple months ago. It was in Cody, Wyoming. It's a really beautiful community event, and they asked me to come speak and uh, Friday night I was like sitting in the audience.
I hadn't even looked at the program and Christian came aboard, started talking about the 10th Mountain Division in his podcast, Ninety Pound Rucksack. And my gosh, I was hanging on every word. Christian, welcome to the podcast. You're like, way of telling stories is, super brilliant. I was. I was so blown away.
I like, wished it hadn't ended and I'm so glad, that I got to meet you and run up afterwards and shake your hand.
Christian Beckwith: likewise, I, we have some mutual friends in, Luis Benitez and Charlie Mace. And I've heard about you for many years, so it was just really great to actually see you and, yeah.
Make your acquaintance. And it's a delight to be here today.
Erik Weihenmayer: Luis, who I climbed Everest with, and Charlie as well. Luigi, we call him Luigi and we call him Mama Luigi. 'cause he,he's got motherly qualities to him in a good way.
Christian Beckwith: That's hilarious.
Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah.
Christian Beckwith: Yeah. One of my favorites.
Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah, he's awesome.
And so it was great to meet you and hear about the work that you're doing. man, you just, as you put it, you like. fell into this rabbit hole, this project that probably never ends. The Ninety Pound Rucksack.
Christian Beckwith: Tell me about it. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, get into that Alice, I'm Alice in Wonderland, partway down the rabbit hole right now, and I can't see, I'm far enough down. I can no longer see where I fell in and I have no idea where the bottom is.
Erik Weihenmayer: You haven't hit the ground yet? No, I'm far from hitting the ground. I just dabbled in the writing process, and so I know, man, when you go deep it's hard to even come out again. It's like painful. You gotta reemerge gray faced and coffee breath and messy hair and just I know, I came outta my third book, 15 pounds heavier and I was just like, oh my God, I haven't seen the sun in a year. So I just, it's like a, it's get a little taste of what that is.
Christian Beckwith: Yeah. It's Alaskans in March. they've just gone through this epic winter that's had, where they've seen no sun for months at a time and they emerged blinking into the sunlight. That's sort of what I feel like.
Erik Weihenmayer: Oh man. But what a fascinating topic. So as we talked about a little bit before we went live, No Barriers to the organization helps people with disabilities, people who face adversity, break through barriers and build a new mindset that helps them, equips them to take on a more fulfilling, adventuresome life and maybe make the world a little bit of a better place. instead of being shoved to the sidelines.
And when I was listening to the story of the Ninety Pound Rucksack and the 10th Mountain Division, I was just thinking this is the no barrier story, but not maybe on an individual basis, but at a macro level, like as a whole nation. Trying to build something out of nothing and pushing through just one obstacle after the next with this incredibly daunting thing happening in the world.
Hitler, taking over the world, and not a lot of time to build up our, our skills and our knowledge and our resources. Like we as America. we're a bunch of farm boys, right? We started with no, hardly any like negligible mountain knowledge compared to Europe, right? Like we had no, not any kind of big tradition of climbing, right?
Christian Beckwith: Yeah, that's right. , I have done a deep dive on this and there was a, nascent, mountaineering community, but it was primarily the province of the rich, essentially. The folks with the resources to take the sort of weeks and months off necessary to go try an objective up in Alaska or in, Canada, in the coast range, or, even in the greater ranges. That was really not possible for folks, in the middle of the Great Depression, who, were scrapping to find work and trying to put food on the table.
And so the people that were able to actually go and do these expeditions were coming primarily from backgrounds of affluence and they were able to go to Europe, for example, and learn to climb with guides. And then they were bringing what they learned either back to the lower 48 or taking it to places like the coast range or the Fairweather Range or in up in the, uh, Saint Elias range, or even to places like the Karakorum and the Himalaya. The, it the same could not be said necessarily for skiing. Skiing had enjoyed this relatively incredible boom in popularity right before the war, and it was a function of the Great Depression, in part because the railroads had to stave off bankruptcy.
And somebody in 1935 came up with the bright idea of what they called ski trains, which were designed to take people from, for example, Boston up into the hills of New Hampshire, and helped take them out of their misery of a dreary Boston winter and insert them in the middle of, the grandeur of the White Mountains.
And that became incredibly popular over the course of a few short years. There was also the advent of the, li the rope toe. So suddenly you didn't have to walk to the top of a hill in order to enjoy your turns. So skiing had surged in popularity, and there were anywhere between, the estimates ranged from around 500,000 to maybe even 3 million people who skied before the war.
And we had a body of knowledge about how to ski before the war. We had some of the equipment that had been built to accommodate those downhill ski adventures, but the whole idea of moving comfortably through the mountains in all conditions. The people that actually knew how to do it in this country, you could count, you could almost count on one hand.
I mean, I've counted the number of climbers in America before the war that had the technical skill sets to climb something like the Grand Teton. So this is where I live in, yeah. Jackson, Wyoming. This is the iconic peak in the Teton range. And there were 12,000 members of the various climbing organizations in the US before the war. Of those, I've calculated somewhere between 500 and 1000 people had those skill sets.
the understanding of Petton Craft, for example, the understanding of how to belay and, rope work in general. Around a thousand folks might have been able to get up the grand before the war. And we were going up against Germany and the Axis powers, and by comparison the, the German Alpine Club, German and Austrian, Alpine clubs had something like a quarter million members before the war.
So they had this long legacy of mountaineering and they also had a longer legacy of skiing. And they had a longer legacy of using ski as tools to navigate in the mountains. And as we entered the war, we were going up a against a force that was simply much greater than anything we'd ever encountered before.
And there was a study that was commissioned by the War Department in 1941 to figure out what it would take to defeat Hitler and the Axis powers by 1943. And the determination was that in order to do so, we had to go from the army that we had in 1940, which was around 200,000 soldiers and eight divisions to an army of 215 divisions and 8.8 million soldiers by 1943.
So in, in three years time, we had to ramp up on a level that had just never been, it had never been done in human history before. And by comparison, the German army had the Gebirgsjäger and these are the mountain hunters. They had three full divisions of mountain troops before the war. They would have 16 full divisions of mountain troops by the end of the war. We were starting from absolutely nothing. We'd had no doctrine developed around cold weather or mountain fighting since 1914. We had no clothing. It hadn't been touched since 1914 either. We really, because we had no mountain knowledge as a country, we had no, doctrine. We had no handbooks.
The only handbook that existed in 1939 that was in common usage was one by Sir Jeffrey Winthrop Young, who was a British climber. And it had been written in, it was called Mountain Craft. It was written in 1920. I mean, we just had, we were starting from scratch with this entire was a joke too, right? Well, all the equipment came from places like Germany and Austria and Italy, and they weren't really exporting their equipment to the US once we became embroiled in the war.
Erik Weihenmayer: Isn't it funny, like how America, we're such upstarts, right? Like we're kind of complacent until our backs are against the wall and then we're able to just pull off something so freaking crazy. Building this 10th Mountain division, that became incredibly competent, right?
Christian Beckwith: And I think World War II was the catalyst for that. And it's just been so interesting to study, the impetus for this, this bizarre and mad human experiment of, of ramping up militarily the way we did because it took every bit of resource that we had as a nation. And it was all to fight, the right wing fascism, authoritarianism, and tyranny that was embodied by Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese.
And it's just been bizarre over the last couple of months to watch, i you know, the rise of authoritarianism at home and abroad and ask, asking myself what these people that I'm following in my podcast, what they would have thought of this because they were willing to die to safeguard ideals that are now under threat.
And so that's just been this complete trip of a side story that I hadn't, I hadn't expected at all.
Erik Weihenmayer: Oh, I mean, when I was listening to your podcast that was coming, that was ringing true for me constantly. Like how these stories are so powerful and so relevant and teach us so much, and then we immediate, not immediately, but pretty quickly, we forget it all. We go through the same thing, was a Churchill that said history rhymes.
Christian Beckwith: Yeah. Yeah. I just, I keep coming back to this idea of service. Like I, the effort it took to build up to the point where we could take on the axis powers was so unprecedented that it required not, you know, you're never gonna get unanimity.
particularly today, you're not gonna get, if you get 50%, you're ahead of the curve. But it was sort of a national unanimity that resulted in the strength necessary to win this war. And I just keep coming back to the willingness of the, the men and women to sacrifice and to serve on behalf of their country.
And it, the real catalyst was Pearl Harbor. it was after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that people like my main protagonist in Ninety Pound Rucksack dropped outta school and signed up. And so the fellow I'm following is a guy named John McCown. Macco McCown. Okay. Yeah.and he'd come to the Tetons in 39 to learn to climb, and then came back in 40 and like millions of Americans around the, around the country, at the time of Pearl Harbor, he was attending school.
He was in, his first year of law school when the bombing occurred, and he dropped out the next day. And this mountain troop had begun...
Erik Weihenmayer: By the way, just to interrupt, um, we have so many veterans from our No Barriers programs who, you know, 9-11 was their catalyst, right? Mm-hmm. Like they were in law school, they were doing different jobs and quit immediately and signed up to serve. so yeah. That's the, maybe the equivalent of today. Yeah. But anyway, keep going.
Christian Beckwith: Well, it's just, I suppose it does take a catalyst of that magnitude in order to spark this sort of, this mass mobilization that occurred. But it did happen, and it did spark this mass mobilization. And without it, we never could have, we never could have defeated Hitler, but the result was, the harnessing of an entire nation's might.
And so this happened at an industrial level as manufacturing got harnessed for the war effort, and it happened at that human resource level. And what has been fascinating to me is to watch, at this microscopic level of how, I'm a climber and skier. I've been skiing longer than I've been climbing, but I identify first and foremost as a climber.
And the story of the 10th Mountain Division, it's often told is a, the story of skiers. But what's fascinating to me is to watch it from the perspective of, of climbers and see America's very best and brightest rise to the occasion on a level that has never been seen before since. And John Mcowen, one example.
He dropped out, he joined the unit when it was. First being stood up as a test force at Fort Lewis Washington. And, from there he went to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning. And from there he ended up at Camp Hale, where he began to train as an instructor. Began to train the new recruits that were pouring into Camp Hale, which was the staging area for the first full mountain division the country had ever stood up.
And that would eventually come to be known as the 10th Mountain Division. But there were plenty of others too that I'm just so impressed by. One of them was a fellow named H. Adams Carter and H. Adams Carter for 36 years was the editor of the American Alpine Journal, and he passed away in 1996. And for whatever reason, I still haven't figured this out, American Alpine Journal picked me to edit the journal after him.
Erik Weihenmayer: I remember you discussing that in one of the, uh, rucksacks. Yeah. Yeah. You got to hang with him.
Christian Beckwith: You? no, I never met him.
Erik Weihenmayer: Oh, you never met him. Okay.
Christian Beckwith: He passed away. He'd passed away. I've met his wife, who's absolutely lovely.
Erik Weihenmayer: That's right. You met his wife. Yeah.
Christian Beckwith: But H. Adams Carter, this is a, a case study of this sort of just incredible, dedication to the j to the mission that was going on throughout the country.
He took it upon himself to, he was a polyglot. He spoke French and German and Italian and Spanish. And he had been in Switzerland in 1939 with another member of the Harvard Mountaineering Club. Another fellow who's part of what's known as the Harvard five. And they were some of the, um, the first climbers in America to really elevate American mountaineering to the global stage.
To the world stage. And so this fellow's name was Bob Bates, and Bob and Ad were in Switzerland, and they were climbing in 1939 when they observed the maneuvers of the Swiss mountain troops. And they looked at each other and Hitler is rattling his saber. So this is the summer of 39, of course Hitler invades, Poland, September 3rd, 1939.
And Ed and Bob looked at each other and said, you know would it make any sense for America to have mountain troops of our own in case we get embroiled in a war, for example, in the European Alps. And so when they got home, Ad took it upon himself to identify and assemble and then translate all the material in the United States that he could find on cold weather and mountain fighting.
And it was a Herculean task. It was a doctorate that he undertook of his own volition on his own dime and managed to pull off in about a year. And his research, he summarized it into something called Suggestions For Mountain Troops that came out in 1940. And that paper actually, it became sort of the basis of the American Mountain warfare doctrine and it to this day remains that sort of foundation level research that everything else has been built upon. And the fact that he did all of this while teaching, during he, he was a teacher. He did all of this on top of his regular duties as a teacher. And eventually, once we got embroiled in the war, he actually got scooped up by the War department and was put to, put to work in the Pentagon.
But Bob Bates was another just fascinating character who began to test all this new equipment that had to be developed to outfit this test force that was getting stood up in, in, in Washington state because America had never manufactured the sort of clothing or material that was necessary to fight in cold weather conditions and mountain conditions.
And so, right. Ad and Bob, and people like Best of Robinson and Dick Leonard and a bunch of other folks in something called the Office of the Quartermaster General, they simply dedicated themselves 100% to this effort to outfit the mountain troops. And where this is so fascinating is it not only allowed the mountain troops to be able to train to fight in these sorts of conditions.
But after the war, all this equipment and clothing and food that had been developed at such great expense for the mountain troops became army surplus. And so the tens of thousands of American G.I.s who had learned to be self-sufficient in winter conditions and backcountry conditions on this clothing and on this equipment, were able to buy it for pennies on the dollar in the post-war economic boom that ensued and take their families out for the very first time into the backcountry.
And so it really was the spark for outdoor recreation as we know it in America today.
Erik Weihenmayer: Hey everybody, this is Erik and I want to take a little break from our interview to tell you about No Barriers. Obviously, we're interviewing these amazing No Barriers pioneers, but behind this podcast is an organization called No Barriers predicated on the idea that what's within us is stronger than what's in our way. Our mission at No Barriers is to help people with disabilities, to break through barriers, to tap into the light of the human spirit and to reclaim their lives, sometimes to reclaim their potential in the business of shifting mindsets. And it's proud work and I hope you'll get involved. Learn more about us. Check out our newsletter, nobarriersusa.org, nobarrierspodcast.com.
It reminds me of Hugh Herr, a friend of mine who uh, is a double link amputee and one of the founders of No Barriers and it was the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where people were military were losing legs and limbs, mm-hmm, that sparked this massive research and dollars towards prosthetic technology. And they're building like these insanely bionic limbs now. Sadly, partly because of all the loss, from war. And yeah. This reminds, we'll talk about that a little bit more. like even though this was a horrible time that people went through, the alchemy that it led to, before we move into that though, so you have this spark of an idea seeing these Swiss troops, these mountain troops, but a lot of sparks just like dwindle and go nowhere, right?
So like, what were the obstacles that these folks had to go through to actually ramp up with the Mountain Division. And like you've read the Heroic Journey, right? There's always like guardians at the gate that are like the old school, old guard. Like, we don't need this shit. and then you have the pioneers like that are pushing forward, right?
There's, it's a lot that has to actually fall into place to do all this so quickly, right?
Christian Beckwith: Oh my God. Yeah. you nailed it. That's exactly what it was. And the person in charge of building out General George Patton's army and ramping up from that, that force of 200,000 soldiers and eight divisions to 8.8 million soldiers in 215 divisions in two or three years time, was a fellow named General Leslie McNair.
And so he's given, you know, suddenly we're, we're at war. So Japan is, has catapulted us into the middle of, a global conflict on a scale that nobody's ever seen before. And America's just this, bucolic backwater where we are primarily agricultural and suddenly we've gotta become warriors.
And so General McNair, who's been given this task of building out general patent or general, general Marshall's army is looking around for models and the only one that makes any sense, that allow it would allow him to achieve the sort of scale necessary to defeat Hitler and the Axis powers in a couple of years is Ford Henry Ford, and it's the assembly line model.
And the way that the assembly line model worked was you treat everything like a widget. You make it exactly the same and interchangeable, and then you can get to scale. And so this whole idea of a specialized force that required specialized training and specialized equipment, I mean, hell, it even required a specialized base high in the mount, mountains.
This became what's known as Camp Hale, midway between Leadville and Minter in the Colorado Rockies. This whole idea was simply absurd. We didn't have the resources, we didn't have the time. We didn't have any of the, we had nothing. We were starting from absolute scratch. And so there was incredible resistance within the war department from the very top of the war department with General Leslie McNair on down to this idea of a specialized force in the first place.
Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah. 'cause I mean, before all the logistics and the bases and the equipment, you gotta have belief, right? You gotta get people in influential positions to actually say, yeah, this is important.
Christian Beckwith: Exactly right. Yeah. And so there were, the way the story is often told is that there was a fellow named Charles Minot Dole. Mini Dole.
Yeah. And he was a New England aristocrat, a blue blood. He was a Greenwich, Connecticut insurance salesman. He was Yale and Exeter. And he was part of the vanguard of American Skiing, which was primarily wealthy folks. And he had been sitting around with three other members of the Vanguard of American skiing in February, 1940 at and inn in Vermont, discussing what everybody had been discussing at that time, which was the Soviet Union's november, 1939, invasion of tiny little Finland. And the reason everybody was discussing it is because Russia was the greatest mechanized force in world history, and Finland was decidedly not so, you know, Russia. Tiny. Had something like 1.8 million soldiers in Finland had around 350,000. The Russians had, it was like thousands of tanks and thousands of aircraft.
And I think the Fins had like, you know, 80 tanks and 20 aircraft and they were all from World War I. And so. When Stalin invaded Finland, they actually brought a brass band with him because they figured they'd be celebrating his birthday in Helsinki in six weeks time. But what Stalin hadn't bargained for was the culture of outdoor recreation in Finland.
They like to be outside in all weather and all seasons and all conditions winter, as well as in summer. And so when, when Stalin invaded, the Red Army rolled through the forested hillsides of Finland, the Fins dawned camo, and they strapped on their cross country skis and they snuck like ghosts through those forests. And they would come upon these long lumbering lines of these Russian tanks, which were all painted, of course, olive green and all the soldiers are in Olive Green, easily spotted in the white landscape. And they would begin to break up these long lines of tanks into smaller and smaller pieces that they called mati, which is a measurement of, uh, firewood.
And then they would begin to take 'em out and they managed to stymie the advance of the Russian forces for four months. And this played out on a global stage before a global audience, right? 'Cause all the, everybody had gone over, the journalists had gone over to Europe to cover the war. You know when Hitler had invaded Poland and then winter hit and the Blitzkrieg became the 'sits-krieg' and everybody was sitting around.
And so when Stalin invaded Finland, the journalists went up there and they were reporting back and it was all coming into the news reels that were playing before the movies. And Americans like to go to the movies. That was our, our entertainment. And so these intrepid Finish guerillas in their white camo who were holding off a force mul many times their size.
It was the talk of the land. And Mini-Dole and his mates were talking about the fins 'cause everybody was talking about the fins. And they started asking themselves, what would happen if Germany ever invaded the US? And what would happen if that invasion took place through Canada as it had historically, and come down through the Champlain Valley in between Vermont and New York.
And what would happen if that took place in winter? How would the US defend itself? And the answer was we wouldn't because we had no force capable of defending ourselves in winter. No clothing, no equipment, no expertise. And so a few years prior, mini Dole and a fellow named Roger Langley had stood up what's now known as the National Ski Patrol.
It was called the National Ski Patrol System at the time. And it was a response to that incredible surge in popularity in skiing at the time. And of course, all the accidents that happened as a direct result. And so what Mini-Dole and Roger Langley and two Olympians, Alec Bright and Robert Livermore were talking about, was a possibility of harnessing this network of 2000 ski patrollers around the country as a Finish style northern border defense force that could protect the border in the winter.
And Roger Langley had written to President Roosevelt in, um, the summer of, I think it was the summer of 40, he'd been politely rebuffed, at which point, Mini-Dole had launched into high gear and. Started a lobbying campaign that essentially wore the war department down until, this is the common narrative, until the war department finally relented and said, okay, we do this test force outta Fort Lewis.
The reality of the fact is there was sort of a shadow effort going on behind the scenes with the American Alpine Club, which was comprised of very well connected. Climbers of great resources. And so they knew Henry Stimson, who had been an American Alpine Club member who was now the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of War, sorry.
And, at the same time, there were also global events that were taking place that convinced Leslie McNair to finally relent and to green light the activation of this test force in Fort Lewis. So it's like all things, you know, history simplifies the past so that we can better understand it. And that simplification has taken the climbers out of the equation.
Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah. But continuing, you had mentioned that way more skiers obviously, but, so I'm just gonna absolutely digress here. Have you ever skied on those old crappy little skinny wooden, dull skis that they, I'm assuming they skied on I want to try it and just go see if I can terrify the shit outta myself.
Christian Beckwith: Seven feet long, thin as pencils. And you've got, uh, you know what were known as Kandahar cable throw bindings, you know these metal bindings that you strap in sort of like a telemark ski, but an old school telemark ski. And then they had these. single leathered boots that you know these days.
we wouldn't even walk around in those things 'cause they were so damn clunky. But yeah, I did strap 'em on at ski Cooper, which is where the troops train right outside of Camp Hale and it's terrifying. And the reason I call my project Ninety Pound Rucksack is because they used to train on this gear with Ninety pounds on their backs.
And the thought of like, we, we held this thing the other day, called the Ninety pound rucksack challenge.we had 15 ski areas around the country and three backcountry areas. And we actually did this in Italy as well as in the US. And it takes place on February 18th at 7:00 PM which was the anniversary of the signature offensive of the 10th Mountain Division once it deployed to Italy, which was the ascent of something called Riva Ridge.
And so, you know, around the country people would dawn backpacks and ascend a slope in honor of these guys and their contributions to both, victory and World War ii, but then also outdoor recreation after the war. And I carried 90 pounds up Mount Glory, which is our local easy access, Teton Pass objective and every step of the way it just was, oh my God. So
Erik Weihenmayer: a lot of ACL tears I imagine, in the Army imagine. Did you do stats on how many knees went out, like before they even got to the war?
Christian Beckwith: I have found a lot of references to hospital visits. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, that level of number one, you only do it when you're in your twenties, right?
Because Yeah. Right. You're too dumb to know any better. But just on every level, this monumental effort, it was unprecedented and staggering in its scope and its impact both during and then after the war.
Erik Weihenmayer: You, we talked about the rabbit hole that you fell into. what compelled you at f you did jump, so like why take that leap?
I remember one of the podcasts I listened to you being interviewed and you talked about just from time to time being godsmack, you know, just being blown away by the story. So like what, what made you jump?
Christian Beckwith: I'd been,I've been in the climbing world for, I hate to say it, a few, a number of decades now and, over the years, first with my first magazine here in the mountain Yodel, and then that led to the American Alpine Journal, and then I started ALP in this magazine.
I've documented the world of climbing for some time. Yeah. And so there hasn't really been a, a history of climbing in the Tetons written. And I had embarked on a, an effort to write a climbing history book of my home mountains and I'd gotten all the way up to the war.
And then of course the war hit and I'd transcribed all the summit registers from all the various high peaks of the Tetons, So that I could understand the ecosystem of the climbing community here. I wanted to know more than just who was climbing what. And I wanted to see what their partners were like and where they were hanging out and they, what they were experiencing on the summit.
And then of course, I got to the Warriors and those Summit Register entries came to a screeching halt and for somebody writing a book on the climbing history of the Tetons, that was a little problematic. And so I'd heard about this unit called the 10th Mountain Division, and I knew a number of Teton climbers had gone into it, and I knew a number of Teton climbers after the war came out of the 10th.
So I started studying that, and along the way I figured out a way to tell the entire story of the 10th Mountain Division from the perspective of Teton climbing with one very important exception. And that was this, the ascent of this, objective called Riva Ridge. And Riva Ridge was the linchpin of Hitler's gothic line.
And so this is the fortified series of summits and ridges in Italy's Apennine mountains that Hitler had used to tie up allied forces for more than 500 days. And so I'd studied the Riva Ridge action and I could not find a single Teton climber that had anything to do with it. But then I was reading over a military account of the action, and I came upon a name of a fellow called John McCown , and the light bulb went off.
And I went back to those Summit Register entries that I transcribed and I looked through it and lo and behold, there's John McCown in 1939 with his brother Grove and their friend Ed McNeil, and they're all over the place. And then they're back in 1940 and they're beginning to push the boat out on some seriously ambitious objectives.
And suddenly I'd found that piece of the puzzle for my Teton History book. But the more I learned about John McCown and the more I learned about the 10th Mountain Division, the more I realized the book I wanted to write was not the one of the history of climbing and the Tetons, but the history of men like John McCown and their contributions and service to this country.
Erik Weihenmayer: So cool,
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Erik Weihenmayer: So I wanna dive into just like the mechanics of a podcast too.
Before I do that though, I just wanted to say another thing I noticed when I was listening to your series of podcasts is that, the country built something out of nothing and ramped up and and it was like an amazing process. And I was thinking you've created a lot of stuff in your life.
Alpinist Magazine, which Reinhold Messer said was like, maybe the best, was the best climbing magazine in the world. and I'm not comparing you to these 10th Mountain division kind of guys, but I imagine what attracted to you to these pioneers is the fact that you're a pioneer in your own right.
Like in terms of the things that you built, you seem to like to create things. And I wonder if that was an appeal for you.
Christian Beckwith: Uh, well, let's see. Do you know Dan Nordstrom?
Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah.
Christian Beckwith: I remember talking to him one time and I was starting something or other, which I seem to do with some abandon without ever any foresight.
And he said, well, you're a serial entrepreneur, right? That's a sickness. And I was like, oh God, it is, it's a fucking sickness. And it's like, you can't, I can't help myself. I certainly would never compare myself to these guys because I think what they did mattered on a level that, I mean, one hopes our lives don't matter to the degree that it, they do in those times of extreme stress and need. We all try to matter in whatever way we can. We try to contribute to things that we think are important, but until the shit totally hits the fan, that need is, perhaps less pressing. But in times of, for example, World War ii, the need was paramount.
If we didn't defeat Hitler and the Axis Powers, it would be a, a reconfiguration of the entirety of the planet and how people, the freedoms that people enjoyed and the latitude they enjoyed as human beings. Yeah. So that was a sort of need that I hope to never see in, in, in this lifetime.
Yeah, so I, I think if anything, I'm just so inspired by what these guys were willing to give to this effort. They were willing to die for this effort and I really hope, having studied this thing now, I really hope none of us find ourselves in a situation where we have to make a decision that we are willing to die for something that we believe in.
But that's what they were willing to do.
Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah. I listened to you on that podcast through line and you were talking about kind of the elements of storytelling. You really do understand the storytelling in this beautiful way, the threads that run through a story. and I mentioned this earlier, you talked about these moments of being gobsmacked. So it sounds like you just listed one of them. what else blew you away in all this stuff that you've dove into?
Christian Beckwith: I think, there's the overarching story of it and the adversity that, everybody who got caught up in this unit was facing. But then there are these individual stories that emerge as well.
And one of the people I've really come away from this with, um, just tremendous admiration for four, and this just blows me away. We were, I've run the Teton Climbers Coalition. We were having a board meeting last night and I brought up this fellow's name and like our vice chair is,a senior mucky muck at the Nature Conservancy.
This man's name is David Brower. He's one of the greatest environmental champions of the 20th century. And I brought him up. And neither she nor anyone else in our meeting had heard of him. What? And that just blew my mind because David Brower from a climbing perspective was totally fucking badass.
Pardon my French. Yeah. But he was part of this, Sierra Club, mountaineering school contingent that in the 1930s did the first systematic study of the properties, of the tools that we had at the time, the ropes and the pitons and the carabiners. And they studied how much force they could hold in the event of a fall.
They actually got it down to a science, which had never been done before, even in the Alps. They then took what they had learned and they began applying it to the big walls of Yosemite Valley, and they opened up the first chapter in american big wall climbing with the first ascent of the higher cathedral spire and the cathedral spires in the valley.
And then David was part of that. And then he went on to open up Shiprock, which is an 1800 foot volcanic plug in the Four Corners area. Yeah. And he did that with Bester Robinson and Dick Leonard, and I think it was Jules Eichorn. John Drayer. And that was the first time that an expansion bolt had ever been used in climbing history.
And so he had amassed this incredible climbing, resume. And then when war broke out or when it was imminent. Best Robinson recognizing that America's troops would need some sort of handbook for how to travel in the mountains, spearheaded this effort to put together what became known as the Manual of Ski Mountaineering.
And David Brower edited that he then joined the mountain troops and when he joined, he at first ended up at Fort Lewis then went to Camp Carson, which was in Colorado, which was a sort of an interim step before Camp Hale. When he was at Camp Carson, he wrote the handbook for the mountain troops. He then went to Camp Hale and he became an instructor.
And then along with John McCown, he ended up going out to Virginia and West Virginia, and they began to train American G.I.s for what became known as low level mountain maneuvers that were critical for America's ability to invade Sicily. And to take on the Axis powers over there because they were encountering not the sort of high mountains that you were finding in the Colorado Rockies.
Right. But that sort of rugged coastal land. That was part of the Italian coast. And what's so interesting about the Virginia and the West Virginia chapter of the 10th Mountain Division, when John McCown and David Brower and company were training all these G.I.s were, they were training these guys who would then go back to their units and train people in their units.
And so there was a multiplier effect because after the war, all these people, they trained, it wasn't just the folks coming outta Camp Hale, it was the people that were being affected in other ways with these special mission trainings that after the war could go into the army surplus stores and purchase this equipment that they had learned on and use it to bring their families out to climb as well.
And of course, David Brower was part of the effort to break the Gothic Line in Italy. And then after the war became the most famous executive director of the Sierra Club. And he was pretty radical and he wasn't taking no for an answer. And he was adamant about his defense of our wild places.
And once he got fired from the Sierra Club, he became, um, the founder of Earth First. And he always fought on behalf of our lands. And people like that are, I just find them so inspiring and they're uncompromising perspective on what's right and what needed to be defended at all costs. And at first it was our country and then it was our planet. I just love that about him. So beautiful. That is and stunning.
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Erik Weihenmayer: Christian, so tell me how influential the 10th Mountain Division was in breaking the Gothic line and on Riva Ridge and so forth. It's wild, the success that they had.
Christian Beckwith: It is. as I said, the US Army's fifth army had been fighting to take, to break the Gothic Line for something like 500 days.
I think 1.8 million soldiers had fought over it on both sides for, over a year by the time the 10th arrived. And Allied Forces had actually taken this one key objective called Mount Belvedere two and possibly even three times, histories differ a little bit, but they had been unable to hold it because adjacent to it was a seven mile long escarpment called Riva Ridge.
And Riva Ridge on the Western flanks was gentle enough that the Germans who were entrenched on top could drive up the backside in their Jeeps to resupply the troops on top. But the eastern side of the escarpment was precipitous enough that the Germans basically didn't guard it because they figured it was impossible for a company of soldiers to climb.
That was the mission of the 10th Mountain Division. To take Riva Ridge secure Riva Ridge, and in doing so, allow the 10th to then take Mount Belvedere because they would take out the German's ability to repulse any efforts on Mount Belvedere because they had perfect line of sight from Riva Ridge. And that's how they had pushed back the, the Allied defenses on Mountain Belvedere two or three times before.
And so they got there in January. They reconnoitered four lines up Riva Ridge, but the very center of Riva Ridge has this line on it that is, It's very steep and it is broken by six sandstone steps. Mm-hmm. And they had simply been unable to find a way up it that they could use to facilitate the movement of, the, a full force, a full company of soldiers, 270 guys.
And that's when John McCown came into the picture. So he was given the task of finding a way up what became known as Route Three that went to the top of Monteer. And he did these sorties, these recons under of cover of darkness, because you couldn't have lights 'cause the Germans would shoot you, they were watching from the top.
And he did it in the middle of winter. And I went and did this line, really a couple of summers ago in August when it was 80, not in the winter, 85 degrees with a, basically a pack that had water and food in it. Right. And to be honest, when I was studying all this, I was like, okay, come on.
You know? 'cause everybody's like River Ridge. River Ridge, yeah. And it's around anywhere from 1600 to 2,500 feet. Average angle, anywhere between like 25 and 40 degrees. And I was kind of like. You know, come on. It's nice. It's not really, whatever, we blow it all up and it's, we've made this sort of big legend out of it, but it's not really that big.
I got a mountain right here in Jackson called s Snow King. I just went up it before we did this for, that's my daily ski. And I figured it was like that. And so I went up this thing and, five of the steps were pretty straightforward and the terrain was, it was steep. and it was like,not thick trees, but like brambles and, you know, you're pulling on, you're pulling on shrubbery to get up and steep enough.
You don't wanna fall. But I hit this one sandstone step, and I was just like, what the fuck? it went for 300 yards into either direction and it was probably 30 feet tall, 30 to 50 feet tall, and it was blank and it was overhanging. And I was just like, how, what did they...
Erik Weihenmayer: You're an experienced climber. You were scared.
Christian Beckwith: Yeah, and I eventually found my way up, but it was not a responsible family man kind of thing to do. And my wife and my daughter were waiting for me, back at the valley. And, I got up and I was just like, Jesus Christ. I had, red army ants, like I felt them in my eyes.
They were starting to stick my eyes. I was pulling on anything I could find to get up. And I just afterward was like, I can't believe, number one, he was able to figure this line out without headlamps. And then number two, at 7:00 PM on February 18th, 1945, he was able to get 270 soldiers up that line.
But doing so, helped to secure Riva Ridge. Some 1010th Mountain Division soldiers climbed it that night. And they were able to take Riva Ridge without a single American casualty taking Riva Ridge secured the way for troops the next day to take Mount Belvedere. And unfortunately, Mount Belvedere lacked the element of surprise.
And so it was a, they were able to take it, but at a cost that's almost inconceivable. And that in term paved the way for the breaking of Hitler's Gothic Line, which took place over the course of, around, three or four months. And when I've been studying this and I've been, we know what it's like to to achieve, to have that level of fitness necessary to climb things in the mountains. You need the fitness of the mountain athlete. You have to be able to go for, you're 10 or 12 or 20 or, 30 hours at a push without stopping. So it's very physically taxing. It's psychologically taxing because you have to compartmentalize the risks in order to execute the moves.
And then it's also, so often we don't do these things by ourselves. I mean, sometimes we do, but most of the time we're doing it with our partners. And in order to have the sort of trust necessary to pull off these moves and the company of the person holding your rope, you develop what in climbing we call the fellowship with the rope.
And it's just that, that, that safety system in which all members of the party understand that their wellbeing depends on their partners. And both of these things, this fitness and this, this fellowship were developed amongst the 10th Mountain Division soldiers during their times. First at Fort Lewis and then at Camp Hale.
And by the time they got into Italy and by the time they secured Riva Ridge and then took Mount Belvedere, they began to roll over the Germans so quickly that the US Army's fifth army, which was charged with resupplying them, was unable to keep up. And I think that was because of that fitness, and I think it was because of that fellowship that they had developed.
But the one thing that I don't understand is that service and that commitment to country and to putting one's life on the line in an effort to preserve ideals that you're 100% committed to that was also part of the equation. And that is something that, Yeah, like I said, I hope we never figure out what that's like.
Erik Weihenmayer: I mean, the horrors, we never hope that any of us go through the horror of World War ii, but at No Barriers. We talk about alchemy, this idea of turning lead into gold. And although, you're not wishing horror on anyone, the irony is that fellowship, that fitness, that bravery, that sense of service, through that horror, people went on to do incredible things, like to start businesses, to be in the Olympics, to David Brower, to be this incredible environmentalist. Ski resorts, the outdoor industry.
So many incredible things came from this. I mean, isn't that. A wild part of the story.
Christian Beckwith: It is, yeah. NOLS National Outdoor Leadership was started by Paul Petzel and Tap Tapley, both 10th mountain division veterans. Nike was started by Bill Bowerman, 10th Mountain Division veteran. The fields of avalanche sign science and wilderness rescue.
Basically the entirety of the ski industry, as we know. It was a function of all these guys out of the 10th. And I just love that word alchemy. I've always thought of it as like America before the war was a this great lump of coal, and over the course of, four short years, those pressures compress the country into a diamond.
And I think of the soldiers of the 10th as like one of its brightest facets. I. And I like to think of them as,that shining a light for us on the way forward, particularly now when things are so uncertain and when, we're seeing freedoms taken away even within our own borders and this rise of right wing authoritarianism around the country.
I just look at these guys and why they were willing to die. And I take a, a page from their lessons and what I think I'm trying to figure out is how can I pay it forward? They were willing to die to give me everything that I love about this country. What am I willing to do?
Erik Weihenmayer: I see it like, I'll spin a little bit, but I see it in a way as a hopeful message because it's like, if we can get through this chaos and adversity, I and some of the horrors that we're seeing happening in front of us, which aren't at the scale of what these, folks faced, then we could become a community again and galvanize and come out of it maybe stronger, potentially.
Christian Beckwith: That's what happened in the, yeah. In World War 2, we didn't know what a complete and full potential was until the time was upon us and we rose to the occasion.
And, I look around now and I look at what these guys went through and, I got a 14-year-old daughter, and God forbid, like if her phone isn't fully charged in the, it's a full catastrophe and it is just a different. It's a different, perspective. It's a different time. It's a different frame of reference, but I, you look at the evolution of humanity over, over the ages, and it is in those moments of greatest adversity that we achieve our greatest heights. We wouldn't ever wish it upon anyone and we hope to, hell, we don't ever have an experience like these guys had. But out of it came everything that we take for granted today.
Erik Weihenmayer: Christian, there's a book coming at some point,
Christian Beckwith: right?
Oh God, I hope so. Yeah. Yeah. the whole point of this, the podcast is the real time research for the book that I'm writing about John McCown.
And he really becomes the, um, he's emblematic of the journey of all these guys. Through the lives that they had before the war into this incredible, period of transformation that was personal and at the same time, national transformation into what we all now take for granted.
Erik Weihenmayer: Maybe it's not gonna just be one book. Maybe it's gotta be, oh my god, like five books. there's, who is I listening to? This guy that was doing like a presidential biography on like Johnson or something, and he is like on the volume seven and he's like 87 years old. He is oh boy, Liv, to finish this last one, you're gonna be like that guy.
Christian Beckwith: I feel like, yeah, you ever, have you ever listened to, hardcore history? Yeah, totally. This is turning into like hardcore history for climbers.
Erik Weihenmayer: So great though. Keep it up, Christian. Thank you. It's so valuable. It's so beautiful. It helps us understand where we are today. Keep it up and I'll continue to be listening and be a massive fan.
Christian Beckwith: Erik, I really appreciate those kind and generous words. I need all the help I can get. Okay. As you know, we've commiserated about the writing process before and Oh my gosh. Yeah. And just hats off to you for everything that you're doing and that you've done over the years. And my friends have always spoken very highly of you.
And I've been a fan from the sidelines for many years. It's great to be, to talk to you now. Thank you.
Erik Weihenmayer: Hopefully we get to ski together. Not on wood skis on good ski, so I know. All right. Thank you Christian. No barriers to everyone.
Didrik Johnck: The production team behind this podcast includes producer Didrik Johnck, that's me, an audio engineer, Tyler Kottman. Special thanks to the Dan Ryan Band for our intro song guidance, and thanks to all of you for listening. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, share it, and hey, we'd be thrilled for a review.
Show notes can be found at nobarrierspodcast.com. There's also a link there to shoot me an email with any suggestions or guest ideas for the show. Thanks so much and have a great day.
