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.
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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.