Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1138: The Birth of the Skiing in America - Tenth Mountain Division with Christian Beckwith

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Ep. 1138: The Birth of the Skiing in America - Tenth Mountain Division with Christian Beckwith · Adventure Sports Podcast

• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: We talk with adventurers from around the globe to bring you the inspiration and motivation you need to get started in the outdoors or to keep you moving if you're already there.
• 0:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now here's your host, Kurt Lindville.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hey friends, you know, I don't want to be that guy that's always asking for things, but I do want to remind you, I announced this on Monday, Happy Wednesday by the way.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: We now have a Discord server, and there is a link in the show notes.
• 0:33
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• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if you like this episode, please do share it with someone that you think will also appreciate it.
• 0:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's the number one thing you can do to keep the adventure sports podcast going and growing.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you in advance for all of that.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this episode is so fantastic.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Christian Beckworth just knocked it out of the park.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I don't want to waste any more time.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Here we go.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: I have Christian Beckwith with us, and he is just an amazing guy.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: He is a mountaineer, he has started multiple outdoors mountaineering magazines, he is working on a project about the 10th Mountain Division, which will explore a lot today.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll explain what that is and how that matters in the history of skiing and outdoor sports in the United States and around the world.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Christian is an alpineer and an avid skier of his own right.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so I'm excited to talk to Chris today about all the things that he knows that I don't know enough about.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, Christian, welcome to the program.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me on.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Adventure Sports podcast rarely gets the opportunity to do much of a deep dive into history.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: But this podcast today, this episode, we're gonna talk about history of Alpine skiing America.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're gonna talk about some of the history of World War II.
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're gonna talk about how these things are related.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Christian, let's start out first though, with a little bit more about you.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you are in Jackson, is that right?
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wow, how long have you lived in Jackson?
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, 30.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I got here in 93.
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not very good at math, so we can get this out.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I gotta run parallel.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: I moved to Colorado in 88.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm not good enough to do that off the top of my head either, but we kind of a parallel adventure, you know, I moved to the front range of Colorado and then eventually made it into first the foothills and now deeper into the heart of the Rockies in Gunnison, but you're in Wyoming, another amazing place near the teatons, Yellowstone, all those things, what drew you to Jackson.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: climbing climbing.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: So is climbing more than skiing?
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean in Jackson Wyoming if you don't ski you go crazy for nine months a year.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we also may.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the sort of skiing that we like, you know, there's a certainly a strong contingent of lift area of lift service skiing here in the valley.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are not a lot of us that just like to go out on our own and go into the backcountry and skiing the T-tons and
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've got within an hour and a half of here, we've got about, I don't know, 12 ranges that we can ski in.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not infinite, but it's taking me 30 something years just to break out of the T-times and into some of the other ranges we've got as well.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the tickless keeps growing.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've got a parallel thing going on here.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: A lifetime's not enough.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I started doing a lot of backcountry skiing, alpine touring, a few years ago.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And of course, I had done a lot of alpine skiing and stuff prior to that.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: But when we moved to Gunnison, yeah, we're surrounded by, in the immediate valley, five ranges.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then, of course, in Colorado, it just goes on and on.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: I can't begin to count how many opportunities there are.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's the same thing.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's too many mountains and too little time.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'd say that's true.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I've never climbed the T-Tons, however, I would like to do that sometime, but the T-Tons have been a big part of your climbing career.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: They have, and I'm looking at them right now, and they are plastered.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: They lost a little bit of yesterday's snow, but when we got up yesterday morning, it looked like winter out there.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was, um, yeah, I was drawn to the T-Tons in the early 90s by a magazine article I'd read.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was by Paul Gagne, he was a climbing
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: here and he'd written a two-part series on alpine rock climbing and that would alpine really just was a hook in my heart and so I had to come up and figure out what it was and just about the second I rolled into town I knew I was home.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, isn't that something how you just know?
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: I remember, I was 10 years old Christian when my family came to Colorado on vacation.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I remember stepping out of the car in the mountains for the first time and taking my first breath of Rocky Mountain air.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I thought, oh, this is it.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Somehow, I mean, I can't say specifically what my reaction was only that ever since then, I knew I would live here.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it was just kind of a given.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, when you know, so let's hear a little bit of your climbing resume, just so people kind of get a feel for what you've been up to.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, well, the t-tons are absolutely my home range, and so I spent the majority of my climbing time here.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I started my first climbing magazine here in 94, and then that led to a position editing
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: then I began going on expeditions and I started with Kyrgyzstan, so I did three expeditions over there, opened up one range visited probably three or four ranges over there.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I've done expeditions to bet and pru and Alaska and climbed kind of all over the place.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I do absolutely love the Teton's.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wish my knees would keep up with my passion because it's been 30 years of running out and down these hills.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that tends to have a little bit of an impact.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I am trying to continue to go up into them, but it does hurt a little bit more every year.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The T-Tons really are, you know, it's a range that I think it excels at two things these days and that is ski mountaineering and mountain running and in the 30s, 20s and 30s, it was
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: the epicenter of American alphanism and that continued all the way through into the fifties at which point it was it was displaced a little bit by your 70 and the great walls which anybody who's been in the valley knows that those are some of the best walls in the world and access is insane.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the teetons continue to be a place where you can get the sort of
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: easy access training that can hone the skill sets of an outputness interested in going just about anywhere and in particular in the wintertime if you want to cut your teeth on things like the north face of the grander the grand traverse you can really get the sort of experiences that are carry over to the greater ranges as well.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I've been doing that for a long time now
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: adventures around the world, but I always come home to this place in part because of the community of people that have grown up around a shared passion for in this place as well.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: These days I started something called the Teton Climate Coalition, or to have a local climbing organization about five years ago, and it allows me to pour
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I guess it's a way of saying thanks to the teetons for everything they've given me over all the years and so now I'm able to put it back into my community as well and try to make this as good a place as I can for all the climbers in our community feel a similar sort of
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: just passion and respect for these mountains.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: When you climb the T-tons, I mean, you could do just about every style of climbing that there is on the T-tons, but what has been your focus?
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I every style of climbing there is on the T-tons.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you're in a place log it up, you figure out all the variations.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, for the beginning of the year, beginning of my career here, it was mostly about taking off the classics.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then, for a while, I was trying to run as fast as I could, so I'm doing the grand, you know, just running, which, wow, creates a sort of blur of an experience that's like squitting in all the colors and the forms and the architecture become.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: more of an impression than sort of the distinct details that you might get if you're moving more slowly.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've skied an awful lot around here.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've put up a lot of first-to-sense and let's get the grant half a dozen times or so.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's really just been the place I come home to and, you know, even this summer, I've spent so much time in these mountains that over the course of the past few years, I've been starting to look around for other places nearby to go exploring as well.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the summer I discovered a whole new area in the T-tons that I had never even gone into, particularly in summer.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I put up a couple of new roots with partners and found a whole new facet of my love affair with the tea tons that I hadn't expected at all.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a range that just keeps on giving.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I love it.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's great.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think it's still amazing.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Anytime you're in the mountains, there's just so much variety and so much that you can discover.
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so many places that people don't know about, I was interviewing someone the other day and they brought up back packing and national parks.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I said, well sure, but why would you?
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: And National Parks are fantastic, obviously.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the reason I said it that way was because they're unlimited opportunities to go into places that people don't know about.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they feel like you're the first person to ever be there, even though you're not.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: But it feels so fresh and so new to discover these new hidden gems.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: I just love that.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it's fantastic.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it takes a concerted effort.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's sort of like a marriage.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to keep investing in it, keep it fresh.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you're always looking for new ways to fall in love, you can't find them.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like a few years ago, I had a fuse, my neck, I had some neck issues.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I had to take some time off for climbing.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I started just walking and I would walk from my house.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And behind my house, you can go for 30 miles without seeing anything.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: No roads, no people.
• 11:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that just opened up a whole new facet of our backyard that I found absolutely delightful.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, a wonderful stuff.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, Christian, let's talk a little bit about the project that you've been doing, your podcast on the 10th Mountain Division and you call it 90 pound rucksack.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: What is that a reference to?
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the US Army's 10th Mountain Division was a unit of climbers and skiers that developed beginning in 1941 to take on Hitler in the Axis Powers in cold weather and mountainous conditions.
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And along the way,
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: They trained, and as part of their training, they were accustomed to carrying 90 pounds on their backs.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: They called back in the military, a backpack is a rucksack, and so they actually had a song called 90 pounds of rucksack that was, it's super fun, and it became the inspiration for my title.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So tell our listeners what your podcast is about.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we traced the evolution of the 10th Mountain Division.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I kind of fell into this backward.
• 12:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd been researching a book on the history of climbing in the T-Tons.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I hit the war years and loan behold, climbing in the T-Tons came to a screeching halt.
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'd figure out what happened.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, what happened was most of the climbers and skiers in America.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: If they could, went into this newfangled unit, which was really a test force at the beginning.
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it came to be known as the 10th Mountain Division.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I kind of fell down the rabbit hole, the 10th and found that that was the story I wanted to tell.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can save the story of climbing in the T-Tons for a later date.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I've been following it in a sort of episodic fashion.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm currently, I don't even know, I think I'm 15 episodes in.
• 13:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: The work today has gotten me all the way to Campail and I'm currently working on an episode that's post to take me through July 15th, 1943.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: The 10th of course, their story continues all the way through 1945 when they deployed to Italy and they helped precipitate the Germans surrender of Italy and in turn helped end the war in Europe.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the real lasting impact of the unit came after the war.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: when the veterans came back to the United States and began to fan back out into the mountains that they'd come to love when they were trading.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: First, I'm the flanks amount rainy air in the cascades and then later in the Pando Valley in the Colorado Rockies.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when they came back, they, our famous for having started around 62 ski areas.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: They either started, or managed, or directed, or acted as ski instructors in these areas.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Places you've heard like Vail, and Aspen, and Sun Valley, and Sugar Bush.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the real, the element that I find so fascinating is the aspect of the story that has been overlooked by history and what we're seeing as we go deeper into our story.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is that that impact extended out far beyond skiing to affect just about everything that we take for granted in the outdoors today and that includes the sort of gear that we use it extends to everything from freeze dried foods to
• 14:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: the nylon climbing rope and crampons and ice axes, and so it really became the basis for outer recreation in America, and the angle I've been so fascinated about.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: is that the tenth mountain division really opened the doors to the mountains, to a swath of America that did not have access to them beforehand.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm mostly a identify as a climber.
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I actually do a lot more skiing than I do climbing these days.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But climbing and skiing before the war were the province of the elite.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you think of the 1930s, you think of the Great Depression.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you think of the Great Depression, you're thinking of the fact that folks didn't have a lot of money, and they had to work their asses off just to make ends meet.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so who was able to go to, for example, Europe for a summer and learn how to climb under the two-litch of guides, and that was the wealthy.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of these folks had great privilege, but with that privilege came great responsibility.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: and what they understood was they had to give back as well.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so when we got caught up in the war, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, December 7th, 1941, a lot of these folks did what a lot of young men throughout the country did, which was sign up for the war.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if they could, and they were climbers and skiers, they tried to make their way into the mountain troops, which was this brand new unit that had zero precedent in American military history.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were joining a test force that had to start everything from scratch.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's not only the sort of training the military expertise necessary to fight in the mountains,
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: but it was the clothing and the equipment and the rations as well.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you look at the state of American outdoor recreation before the war, you find that most of the equipment and the clothing that we were using was coming from Europe.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And particularly regarding climbing, it was coming from countries like Germany and Austria and Italy.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And once we became involved in the war, those countries weren't exactly beating down our doors to sell us.
• 17:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: This sort of equipment we would use to fight them in the mountains.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we had to develop it all on our own.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wow, so many industries were triggered by this effort.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's also a link to Finland in here somewhere.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Um, it's sort of how it began.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was, I think there was a, there is a military division in Finland and the US people said, Oh, that's a good idea.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so I developed something else.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: What do you know about that?
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the, the popular story, the, the common narrative around the 10th mountain division revolves around a fellow named Charles Minet Dole.
• 17:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he was a New England blue blood and he was an aristocrat.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: He'd gone to Yale and Philips Exeter and then, you know, Boy Scout and he was an insurance salesman in Greenwich, Connecticut.
• 18:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he was also the co-founder of the National Ski Patrol system.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And skiing before the war had exploded in popularity, starting in 1934 with the introduction of the first rope toe in the United, in North America.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And actually was in Quebec.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the second one was in Woodstock for Mont, the convenience of being able to take a lift to the top of a hill instead of hiking to the top of a hill made it much more accessible to people and much more appealing to people.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then,
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: That phenomenon was complemented by three other things.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of them was the introduction of a technique of skiing called the Arbor technique.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's still the basis of the sort of skiing that we do today.
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we also had the ski trains, which were developed to help stay above bankruptcy among the railroads.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they began bringing Boston office workers up to the hills of New Hampshire to ski for the first time.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: downhill and alpine ski races were also part of this because it gave us a way to capture the allure of speed.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And all these things came together to create this phenomenon where suddenly Americans had access to an enjoyable pursuit in the mountains.
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in the winter before that, the only things you could really do were go tobogganing and ice skating and then sit
• 19:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so many dole in February of 1940 was sitting around with Roger Langley with whom he started the national ski patrol system in response to the surge of popularity and of course the accidents that came with that and also Alex Bright and Robert Livermore and they were members of the 1936 U.S. Olympic ski team.
• 20:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they found themselves talking about what everybody in the world was talking about at that time, which was the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: In this occurred in November of 1939.
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, the Soviet Union was 180 million people.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Finland was 300.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: 50,000 people.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Soviet Army had 1.8 million soldiers.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Finns had 350,000 soldiers.
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the Finns had nothing.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they had like 20, I think it was 20 aircraft and 100 tanks and they were all from World War One.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Soviet Army was the greatest mechanized force in World History.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so when Stalin invaded Little-Tiny Finland, it occurred just after Germany, of course, had invaded Poland, September 3, 1939.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Stalin expected that he would roll right over the tiny little fins with zero resistance.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he had a brass band going along with the invading force so that they could celebrate his birthday once they reach Helsinki in December.
• 21:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what they had in bargain for was the fins love of outdoor recreation and the fins love to be outside in the summer.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they also love to be outside in the winter.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: and they knew they're terrain intimately and in the winter they would simply put on cross-country skis and go skiing through the heavily-witted country side that the Soviet Union had just invaded and so when they did invade they came in in these long lumbering lines of tanks on these these narrow roads that had no turnouts.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: and the fins don't camouflage and they put on their skis and they began to sneak through the forests like ghosts and they would break up these long lumbering lines of tanks into smaller and smaller pieces they would build these roadblocks and so the tanks would have to stop and then they would sneak up and they would begin to take them out bit by bit they call these
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: This played out before the entire world, because the entire world had been fixated on the German invasion of Poland, sent all the journalists over there, and then winner it, and all the journalists were sitting around.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the Blitz Creek that turned into the Sith's Creek, and then when Soviet Union had invaded Finland, they all went up to cover that.
• 22:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they were reporting back to the US in these newsreels that would play before the cinema that was an American obsession at that
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so everybody was watching the Finns kick the Soviets butts and they became fascinated by it and what many dolls and Roger Langley and Alex Brighton Robert Livermore were talking about.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Was what would happen if Germany ever decided to invade North America?
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what would happen if Germany decided to invade the way that America, the North America has historically been invaded, which was through the Champlain Valley.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: coming down in between Vermont and New York.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what would happen if this invasion took place during the middle of winter?
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: How would we defend ourselves?
• 23:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the fact of the matter is we wouldn't, because our military had zero experience in any sort of cold weather fighting.
• 23:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had no doctrine, the only manuals we had
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: On Cold Weather Fighting had been written in 1914, we had no equipment, we had no clothing, we had no clue how to defend our northern borders.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the common story is that minidol and Roger Langley left in the action and began the furious lobbying campaign, advocating for a defensive force similar to the fins that could defend the northern borders in winter.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that opened the door to the creation of America's very first test force and cold weather and not in fighting, which took place beginning in November of 1941, into Koma Washington at a base called Fort Lewis.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the common story.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: What that story leads out is a role of American climbers in their lobbying efforts, and in their furious efforts to develop the gear and the clothing and the food that was necessary for this force to become successful.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I took over the American Alpine Journal in 1996.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: My predecessor was a fellow named H. Adams Carter.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he had edited the AHA for 36 years.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in 1939, he had been in Switzerland with his friend Bob Bates and they had been climbing in the Alps, and they had had observed the maneuvers of the Swiss mountain troops, and the entirety of Europe was on edge, because Hitler was rattling his sabers and was right before he invaded Poland.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they looked at each other and they said, well, to the America need to have a mountain force of our own.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if we get caught up in this war and we end up in the Alps?
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they came home and because American climbers at the time were this tiny little bunch of people, I've counted the number of climbers in the war, in the country before the war, and there were approximately 12,000 members of the various.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: mountaineering organizations of those around 500 had the technical skillsets necessary to climb something like the Grand Teton and they were all highly educated.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: They all came from means so they could go over to Europe before the war and learn to climb under the two lids of guides.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: They came home and began their own hobby in campaign.
• 25:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: and it led all the way to Howard Stimson, who was about to become the Secretary of War at the time, and who had been a member of the American Alpine Club before the war, and H. Adams Carter, and Bob Bates were also members of the American Alpine Club.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so when the campaign to begin this test force of mountain troops really gained momentum, it was coming from both angles, from both the skiers and the climbers, the skiers and the climbers.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what the skiers and the national ski patrol system was able to do,
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: was recruited a lot of the collegiate athletes and they created a vetting system that allowed them to select for the best in the country from these groups.
• 26:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what the climbers were able to do was contribute, contribute the mountaineering expertise that was mission critical for the objective of creating a force that could actually operate effectively and efficiently in all conditions and
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: and the climbers were also capable of developing all the gear and the clothing that here two four had been designed and developed and produced exclusively in places like Germany and Austria and Italy and Switzerland and France, which were no longer selling has the equipment.
• 26:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so from this effort, eventually we ended up with
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: campaign here called in Colorado near Tennessee pass.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's where the 10th mountain division trained.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've been by Camp Hill several times and stopped and read the placards and said, oh, wow, there's not much left, but there's a lot of history here.
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: What is the history of Camp Hill?
• 27:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm boy, I'm four episodes in and I've only gotten I haven't finished the first year yet.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the history is quite
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, once the army just realized that we needed an actual division, that was capable of fighting in these sort of conditions, they realized we needed a specific encampment.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so after a nationwide search, they landed on the Pandow Valley, and so this is mid-way between Leville and Minternet, 9200 feet,
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: and they began this incredible construction effort that resulted in what came to me known as camp hail and it took seven months and $30 million and it was one of the biggest and most ambitious construction projects in the country at that point.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: and into this began to come some of the best climbers and skiers the country had ever known and it included a lot of American collegiate students but it also included a lot of Europeans who escaped the rise of Hitler in the Third Reich and when they escaped they brought with them mountaineering expertise that simply wasn't it didn't exist here because we didn't really have a mountaineering tradition we don't have mountains the way
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: that Europe has mountains and we don't have a tradition that extends back to the 1700s of climbing in them.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it became this melting pot of expertise and extreme intelligence.
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: These guys were really smart.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were very athletic.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it, it also involved a unity of purpose that this country has never known since.
• 28:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this, the entirety of the focus of the, of the folks that were at Camp Hill became on, became developing a unit that could fight in mountains anywhere in the world.
• 29:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: and so they trained from November of 1942 all the way through June of 1944.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were never the 10th Mountain Division, while really a campail.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: They got close, they became the 10th Alpine Light Division.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that was in July of 1943.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: They didn't become what we call the 10th until they'd actually been disbanded and sent off to Capswift, Texas and converted to a standard to flatland industry, no, which is when they became what we call the 10th Mountain Division.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But all this training and all the equipment that was developed for them succeeded in creating
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: some remarkable young men who were dedicated to this nearly impossible mission of starting a military mountaineering operation in the country that had zero history and legacy of military mountaineering at all.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Barely had any mountaineering legacy to speak of within the civilian population.
• 30:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's the only time in the American military's history that they relied on the input of civilian organizations, namely the National Ski Patrol System and the American Alpine Club, to help develop a unit that could actually fight in the sort of in specific and specialized conditions.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And all this training came to the four in late 1944 when the 10th finally got,
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: number one their designation as a 10th mountain division.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then they also got a leader in general George P. Hayes who recognized their expertise in their skill sets.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: and they got their mission which was to deploy to Italy in the happening mountains.
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: To break something called Hitler's Gothic line and this was a line of fortified summits and ridges that Hitler had used to hold up Allied forces for around 500 days and those forces could have been deployed elsewhere in the European theater to hasten the end of the war.
• 31:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: and instead Hitler was able to use the the gothic line to ensure that they stayed mired in this conflict in Italy.
• 31:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the 10th Mountain Divisions mission became deployed to Italy, break the gothic line, and hasten the end of the war.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what they did beginning in early 1945.
• 31:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it really culminated on February 18, 1945 with an assent of something called Reaver Ridge, which was this apartment around 7 miles long that looked right at this other feature called Mount Belvedere.
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mount Belvedere was kind of the, that was the lynch pin of the Gothic line and it had been taken around three times before by all it forces, but they could never hold it because the Reaver Ridge's apartment
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: overlooked Mount Belvedere and provided a perfect line of observation and the Germans on top were able to repulse the Allied attacks by just firing on them.
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: So February 18, 1945 around the thousand tenth mountain division soldiers, beginning at 7 p.m. began in a sent via four different lines, uprever ridge which the Germans did not guard because they considered it essentially
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they climbed throughout the night.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: They climbed without headlamps.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: They climbed with no ammunition in their rifles for fear of discharge, it could have revealed their positions.
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as the dawn began to dissipate on the eastern horizon, they crested the ridge in these four different places.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Germans who had been bivied on the western flag, which was the gentler aspect of the escarment.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Rub their eyes, got out of their foxholes, and began walking toward the rich top proper, and they saw soldiers on top, and they waived to them, because they assumed that they were their own, because everybody knew the eastern side of the river ridge was essentially unclammable.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the Americans on top waived, and waited for them to approach, and as they got closer, they opened fire, and they were able to take river ridge without a single American casually.
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in the taking of River Ridge, they opened the way the next day for the 10th mountain division to take Mount Belvedere.
• 33:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And from there, they began to roll over the Germans like a tsunami, and they pushed them all the way into the Pol River Valley, all the way up to Lager de Garda, and on April 28, 1045, they precipitated that the German surrender of Italy and that, of course, was followed by the
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: German capitulation in Europe, on victory in Europe day, on May.
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, fascinating.
• 34:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was just thinking about all of the things in our modern world that actually have their roots in this.
• 34:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not just climbing, it's not just skiing, it's not just ski resorts.
• 34:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, there are all sorts of motivations because of World War II or the threat of World
• 34:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I think one thing that's really relevant today is our public lands, you know, the Wilderness Act celebrated these incredible places that we have in this country that had become an American birthright, and they're currently under assault.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when I think about these places that are so special to all of us who love to be outdoors, and I think back to these guys who committed themselves entirely,
• 34:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: to their lands and to the protection of these places, I gained a little bit of fortitude in my own resolve to continue this fight that was begun by them.
• 35:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, the impact of the
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's in all that gear and all that clothing and all that food that was developed specifically so these guys could fight in the mountains because after the war this all became army surplus.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the tens of thousands of people who learned to climb and ski at campail on the finds them out renear.
• 35:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: and also very importantly in West Virginia and Virginia where I'm headed in a couple of weeks to Seneca Rocks where 10th Mountain Division soldiers trained up divisions of Americans for the Allied invasion of Sicily.
• 35:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: They taught them how to climb on a place that was really just a thin of rock and that was some of the first
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: training that American G.I.s.
• 35:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: in general had gotten in climbing.
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: After the war, all these folks who had learned to climb in ski were able to buy this equipment through army surplus that they had learned to climb in ski on and camp.
• 36:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: and then they were able to take their families out.
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so this is the first time that the American populist writ large had that skill set necessary to go into these places and go camping for the first time.
• 36:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course in the economic
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: boom, the prosperity that followed the war, they had the latitude to go out on weekends.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they had, because of the army's surplus, the equipment they could get at the army's surplus stores, they were able to buy this equipment for pennies on the dollar.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that really created this broad base for what today is a $1 trillion a year in history.
• 36:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And all this equipment became what everybody learned out of climate, skiing, and camp on.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: The cook stoves, and the lanterns, and the robes, and the tents that all came out of the 10th Mountain Division.
• 36:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then you look at, for example, Paul Petso, who was a started American guiding here in the T-Tons.
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he started an organization with fellow 10th Mountain Division tap-taply called Nulls, a National Outdoor Leadership School.
• 37:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another tenth mountain division soldier was named Bill Bauerman.
• 37:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: He started a little company called Nike.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Somebody named David Brower was an absolutely instrumental in the evolution of the 10th Mountain Division.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: He became one of the most important leaders of the Sierra Club after the war and one of the most important environmental champions, America has ever known.
• 37:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: All these guys flow directly out of the 10th Mountain Division, and into this legacy that is simply part of the American identity, and it would not have occurred without them.
• 37:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: fascinating, so this is a maybe a sidebar.
• 37:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: But if you are at Tennessee Pass, and you look to the West, then you see Mount Massive, and if you go south from there, you get to Mount Albert, and then you go a little bit further south, and you start hitting mountains like Columbia, Harvard, Yale, all of these kind of Ivy League named collegiate peaks.
• 38:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you know if the collegates who ended up at Camp Hill had anything to do with
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't, but I don't think they did.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of these things had been named before these guys were showing up.
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of them came out of the gold rush and silver rush of the 1870s and 1890s.
• 38:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I do know that a lot of the features had already been named by the time they got there.
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: but they were probably the first ones to be putting a lot of those graduates on top of these mountains.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, because they trained not only in winter, but in summer as well, and in summer, they were running around doing these extended maneuvers in the mountains because one thing that they learned and they had to learn all of this stuff from scratch.
• 38:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: They simply, the American military just didn't know how to operate in these conditions before the war.
• 38:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: what they learned was you're not going to learn anything by taking a ski lift to the top of a summit and seeing you back down.
• 39:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to figure out how to do it under your own power.
• 39:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so really what the 10th did was establish the what we considered to be backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering today because they were doing these extended missions in in winners as well as summer and in winner it was on skis and resulted in the first is a sense of things like mounted the holy cross and Mount Massive and Mount Albert.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that was a function of all the expertise that had flowed into the 10th Mountain Division through both Americans and Europeans, the one thing about America before the war.
• 39:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: They just weren't any climbers.
• 39:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they had to learn this skill set together as this giant group.
• 39:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they had to learn on the fly.
• 39:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's where I'm currently focused on.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's why I'm going out to.
• 39:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Virginia and West Virginia is to get her deeper dive into those, the development of those skill sets.
• 40:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because that became mission critical when they deployed, their signature offensive was not had nothing to do with skiing.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was in the sand.
• 40:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: The nighttime is sand under the cover of darkness in the middle of winter.
• 40:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, the training ground around camp hail was where
• 40:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: They developed that fitness that I like to think of as the fitness of the mountain athlete, which was critical to their success once they slowly didly.
• 40:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But more importantly, they developed something that in climbing, we know is the fellowship of the rope.
• 40:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is the utter dependence on one or another for one's well-being.
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when you are climbing and you have a partner and that partner is up on lead and you're belaying, you literally hold his or her life in your hands.
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that dependence on one another is absolute.
• 40:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I believe that it became a cornerstone of their success once they eventually deployed.
• 40:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it was a trust relationship, camaraderie, those sorts of things are what made the unit so powerful.
• 41:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the Esprit de Corps.
• 41:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think also just that they really did have
• 41:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't, there's no parallel in America today to that sort of unity of purpose.
• 41:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it really became, I think, the engine of their efforts.
• 41:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: They had to work in concert to develop this fighting force and bring it up to a level that was proficient enough to take on the Hitler and the Axis powers.
• 41:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the Germans before the war had three full mountain divisions.
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And by that time the war was over, they had 16.
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had one, and it was a 10th mountain division.
• 41:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they were so proficient and so, so just capable that that one was enough to help us win the war.
• 42:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well another beautiful thing that you had pointed out was how these gentlemen came back and started ski resorts and worked at ski resorts and made them popular.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: that opened up everything for a whole culture of skiing and family fun and mountaineering and all of these sorts of things.
• 42:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: What can you tell us about some of the early history of these ski resorts?
• 42:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think you have to look at the state of skiing before the war, and as I pointed out, it had exploded in popularity in those five or six years right before we went to war.
• 42:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as one historian pointed out, all the infrastructure was in place for the boom in skiing that eventually took place after the war.
• 42:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because of the depression, we had these efforts like the CCC that carved out all these trails on national four service lands that we now just look at it as our ski areas.
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So a lot of that stuff was already in place.
• 43:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so when I look at the skiing and I look at the, you know, the common narrative that the 10th Mountain Division really started American skiing as we know it, I think that does a great disservice to their contributions because skiing was poised to explode before the war, or Dority had occupied this incredible place in the American popular imagination.
• 43:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was sexy as hell.
• 43:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: It gave people something to do other than warm their asses, besides the radiator,
• 43:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right, you know, places like Sun Valley had been developed in the late in the mid to late 1930s, and that became the gathering spot for, you know, the Glitterati of Hollywood.
• 43:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it had already been iteratory occupied a position in the the firmament of the popular imagination.
• 43:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: What I like to look at is things like the folks that came back to where I live in Jackson Wyoming.
• 44:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was a fellow with the best name, a mountain droopers ever had in history.
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: His name was John Delemontania and he eventually, he eventually just changed it to John Montaine.
• 44:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he was drawn here by another fellow from Jackson who seemed to have a disproportionate impact on the folks from the 10th.
• 44:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: You brought a lot of them here.
• 44:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And John Montaine began to work for Grand Teton National Park and because of the training with the 10th Mountain Division and they had to figure out how to evacuate people from the mountains in the event of casualties.
• 44:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so John Montaine began something called the Grand Teton Mountain Rescue Team and this eventually became known as today, the Jenny Lake Rangers.
• 44:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then Jenny like Rangers are one of the countries if not the leading Alpine rescue teams and that all traces its way back to these guys who had to figure out how the hell to get their buddies out of the mountains if they got wounded and other people like Dick Amerson.
• 45:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: came out of the 10th came year, became part of that team and Dick went on to be part of the first American expedition to Mashabrum.
• 45:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was good friends with Tom Hornbein, the Hornbein, Lauren Mount Everest, people will recognize his name from that.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Other folks like Fred Becky, who is the greatest one of the most prolific first ascensionist of the American climbing history.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: came out of the tent, Tom Hornbind told me a funny story about Fred, who didn't necessarily like authority.
• 45:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was more of a, let's see, in a kind of classic sort of fellow.
• 45:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so Tom told me that Fred managed to get out of the tent by, um,
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the basis of his purported homosexuality, which would come as a great surprise to the 75 years worth of women that encountered Fred Becky after the war.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fred was rather forward in that department.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the number of people that flowed out of this, the number of characters who had the seismic impact on everything from out to a recreation to avalanche science to wilderness rescue, it's so much bigger than skiing.
• 46:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it is the outdoor recreation ethos that we take for granted today, the democratization of the outdoors began because of these guys and that's what I'm trying to do is to shine a little bit of light on our past because our past I feel can shine a little bit of light.
• 46:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: on the path ahead and the path ahead is going to take a lot of fighting and it's fighting for the sort of values these guys lived for and that many of them died for.
• 46:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were 13,128 tenths mountain division soldiers that deployed didly of those 400-194 were wounded in action in 1969
• 46:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we didn't have a term for PTSD when they came back from the war, but these guys were fired in my French, and they were what we call shell-shocked, and at the time the only way to treat shell-shock was basically drinking.
• 47:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: but I feel like what we know about being outside was something that they knew it intuitively and that is that you feel better when you're outside.
• 47:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 47:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So when they came home and they went back out into these wild places of America,
• 47:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel that on a very deep level, they understood that this is how they heal.
• 47:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: To be back in nature's embrace, to be back in those soothing environments that just help to bring all that red in your head down to the blues and greens, where we can breathe and appreciate our place in this remarkable creation that is the outdoors that is Mother Nature.
• 48:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: they knew this intuitively that's why we go out today that's why they were going out when they got back from the war because they needed it
• 48:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, Christian over the last 10 years of the adventurous sports podcast, we've we've been honored to interview a lot of people who describe the healing of nature.
• 48:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: And what a difference of made in their own lives.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's really become one of the main focuses of our podcast is that it makes a difference for people.
• 48:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: It can really help people not just with fitness, that's a, you know, that's a big part of it, but also.
• 48:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: just with that connection, you know, that connection with nature that I'm going to bring this to the
• 48:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: modern history briefly.
• 48:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm just curious what your thoughts are.
• 48:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: You spoke about after the war, there is a military surplus and we had an economic boom and people started going into the outdoors with military surplus gear.
• 48:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the ski industry exploded, the whole outdoor industry started growing, you know, at that time.
• 49:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Several years ago, the ski industry
• 49:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it made a lot of business sense, because the choice was, and I'm speaking beyond my knowledge.
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is just the way it looks from here.
• 49:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, you could raise prices until you didn't have as many skier days on the mountain, and then you didn't need to build the new lift, the new lodge.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: None of that.
• 49:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you actually made the same or more money.
• 49:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: by limiting the number of people on the mountain you reduce liability for the ski areas.
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the D democratization of skiing kind of became a reality, I think.
• 49:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: It started to move back toward this is something that people that can afford it can do, not that everyone can do.
• 49:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: And,
• 49:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not criticizing the industry.
• 49:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm just observing that I've seen that.
• 50:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I've heard anecdotal accounts of people to say, well, yeah, we used to sell a lot more skis, but now they're fewer skiers.
• 50:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: We used to sell a lot more ski jackets and mittens, and, you know,
• 50:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: The industry is still growing, like you said, the outdoor industry is a trillion-dollar year industry.
• 50:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's amazing.
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: But do you have any insights or thoughts on where we stand in today's historical moment when it comes to this?
• 50:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's, you know, I think the inflection point was COVID.
• 50:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And here in Jackson, we had this incredible surge because you had people that suddenly couldn't go to bars and concerts.
• 50:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they heard that out the outdoors is all right, too.
• 50:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so they were coming into the places where they could enjoy themselves without fear of getting, you know, particularly at the beginning.
• 50:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: We thought that we were going to die if you came into contact with it, which, you know, million people did.
• 51:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Since then, the number of people that we're seeing here in Grand Teton National Park remains at historic levels, skiing, I think, is so interesting because the prices at some of these prominent skierias, you know, Vail and Aspen and Jackson, it's become just inaccessible to the majority
• 51:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the backcountry for the price of a single pass is accessible via your own power.
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the human powered outdoor recreation community is one that harkens back to the 10th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-
• 51:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I derive a hell of a lot more satisfaction to getting up in the morning and going out and putting on my skins and climbing up a mountain and skiing back down and not seeing another person and not crossing a single track that I ever would taking a lift.
• 52:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like this is where nature is really to be appreciated the best.
• 52:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a more of a quiet experience, it's more of a contemplative experience.
• 52:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not competing with the bustle and the buzz of what I find when I'm at a ski area, which is just so busy and loud.
• 52:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when I think about these guys, I do think that that healing that they needed after the war was to be found first and foremost,
• 52:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: in those quieter, more contemplative moments where they were able to appreciate some of those qualities of Mother Nature that really help us to gain those spiritual and mental and emotional benefits that are part and parcel of being, you know, we are Mother's children and she loves this unconditionally and she forgives us the same way that her mother forgives
• 53:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, the recalcined recalcined trialed.
• 53:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've got a 14-year-old girl right now, so we're going through all the trials and tribulations of those years and we love our child.
• 53:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I know that mother Earth loves us in the same way.
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's what these folks were able to find when they were outdoors, without all those modern interference
• 53:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when I look at the path ahead, I think it's those, those primal connections with everything around us that will be critical to our survival and our flourishing on this planet.
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Only out of a deep sense of respect for all sentient beings around us and beings that we don't consider to be sentient, will we actually have the sort of respect that a family deserves.
• 54:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to respect all the members of your family.
• 54:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if we respect all the members of our larger family in the natural world, then we've got a vested stake in their outcome too.
• 54:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And without that, we will blip out and then we'll take a lot of species with us.
• 54:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But with that, we have an opportunity to deepen our understanding of our relationship to these species, to the world itself and to ourselves.
• 54:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what I focus on.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's excellent.
• 54:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, we're running out of time and that's such a beautiful summary statement.
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: You have to, there's something about loving nature to care for nature.
• 54:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: And until you know nature, it's hard to love nature.
• 54:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm with you.
• 54:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: I really want to encourage people to get out there, connect, experience, understand, become familiar with,
• 55:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: That side of your family, that home that you also have access to and we're so blessed in the United States to have so much public land available to us for these amazing experiences.
• 55:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we need to make sure we take advantage of it and take care of it.
• 55:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because I think you're right, Christian.
• 55:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: As we move forward, we need to make better decisions.
• 55:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the way we do that is by being informed.
• 55:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 55:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we also have to fight to ensure that those public lands remain in public hands.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
• 55:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
• 55:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, thank you very much for your time today.
• 55:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll you share again the name of your podcast and your upcoming book.
• 55:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's 90 pound rucksack and you can find out all about it wherever you get your podcasts.
• 55:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can also go to christianbeckwith.com to learn more.
• 55:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, you also have a great event called the 90 pound rucksack.
• 56:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Uh, what do you call it?
• 56:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know,
• 56:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's meant to commemorate that historic a set of river ridge, which began at 7pm on River Ridge in Italy's Aboneen Mountains, February 18, 1945.
• 56:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so on February 18, 2026, it's key areas, like Sundale and steamboat and
• 56:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Killington and around the country and River Ridge in Italy, we will begin climbing an honor of these folks that gave so much, including their lives, to ensure that we have that remarkable privilege to do something similar.
• 56:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: today on our terms and that it's our way of saying thank you to them and there's more information about that also on christianbeckwith.com all right well thank you christian for your time today fantastic I learned so much and I love what you shared with us thank you so much for having me on really honor absolutely you bad and for all you listeners out there as always get out there and have some fun it's worth it we'll talk to you more later