TCC founder and board chair Christian Beckwith has developed a new podcast about the 10th Mountain Division and the dawn of outdoor recreation in America. Entitled Ninety-Pound Rucksack, the podcast recounts the true story of the US Army’s legendary unit of mountain troops as told from the perspective of John McCown, a young man who learned to climb in the Tetons and went on to become one of the 10th’s greatest unsung heroes.
Beckwith, a climbing historian who served as the Editor of The American Alpine Journal and the Founding Editor of Alpinist Magazine, was working on a history of climbing in the Tetons when his research brought him to the war years of 1941-1945. Climbing in the Tetons had ground to a halt during that period, so Beckwith began examining how Teton climbers influenced the evolution of the 10th, and how the veterans of the 10th influenced Teton climbing after the war.
He figured out a way to tell the entire story except for the unit’s signature action: the February 1945 night-time ascent of Riva Ridge in Italy’s Apennine Mountains, an assault that broke Hitler’s Gothic Line and helped end Germany’s occupation of Italy.
Beckwith was cross-referencing Paul Horton’s Teton summit register entries with the military histories of the unit when he came upon a reference to “1st Lt. JOHN MCCOWN, a veteran mountain climber whose rambling bow-legged gait and contempt for army red tape had made him a well-known figure to almost every man in the regiment.”
Soon, Beckwith’s Teton climbing history had taken a pivot as he began to tell the story of McCown instead.
With the help of an advisory board of the Division’s foremost experts, Ninety-Pound Rucksack examines the stories that made the unit famous as well as those history has forgotten. Equal parts real-time research, intimate conversation and revelatory journalism, Ninety-Pound Rucksack explores not only the conventional wisdom about the 10th, but the transformative power of the mountains to forge a collective identity among the mountain troops—and to ignite a passion for the outdoors that reshaped American society in the process.
Podcast episodes are available on Beckwith’s website and on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.