Illuminating a pivotal moment in both military and outdoor recreation history, this groundbreaking episode reveals the collaborative efforts of America’s leading mountaineers to equip the 10th Mountain Division for war. Featuring extensive original research and exclusive interviews, the episode examines the audacious climbs and expeditions used to test the mountain troops’ gear—and that revolutionized the American outdoor recreation industry in the process.

The episode includes interviews with Ninety-Pound Rucksack Advisory Board Members:

• Lance R. Blyth: Command Historian of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM); Adjunct Professor of History at the United States Air Force Academy.
• David Little: “living historian” for the Tenth Mountain Division Foundation.
• Sepp Scanlin: military historian and museum professional; served as the 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum Museum’s Museum Director.

Military/Civilian Collaboration:

• The episode examines the unprecedented collaboration between the American Alpine Club, the Army’s Mountain and Winter Warfare Boards and the Office of the Quartermaster General

The American Alpine Club’s National Defense Committee:

• The episode unveils the inception and significance of the committee, which was formed in early 1941 to assist in “the determination and procurement of the special equip­ment and the clothing required for the Army’s mountain troops, and to aid in the obtaining of information concerning acceptable candidates for the 1st Battalion (Reinforced) 87th Infantry Mountain Regiment”

Key Figures:

• Bob Bates: Climbing background and role in the Research and Development Branch at the Office of the Quartermaster General
• Walter Wood: geographer; Vice President of The American Alpine Club, and Chair of its National Defense committee; expeditionary mountaineer
• Captain Albert Jackman: Chief Test Officer, Army’s Winter Warfare Board and Mountain and Winter Warfare Board
• Bill House: Climbing background and role in the Research and Development Branch at the Office of the Quartermaster General
• Bestor Robinson: attorney, Sierra Club board member; pioneering bigwall climber and ski mountaineer; Chair of the National Ski Association’s Advisory Committee on Equipment; member, American Alpine Club National Defence Commitee; member, Research and Development Branch at the Office of the Quartermaster General
• Dick Leonard: attorney, Sierra Club board member; pioneering bigwall climber and ski mountaineer; Chair of the National Ski Association’s Advisory Committee on Equipment; member, American Alpine Club National Defence Commitee; member, Research and Development Branch at the Office of the Quartermaster General

Mountaineering Expeditions:

• Detailed accounts of three historically significant expeditions mounted by American mountaineers to test equipment for the Army: the 1941 Wood Yukon Expedition; the 1941 Mt. Rainier Expedition; and the 1942 Alaskan Test Expedition to Mt. McKinley, as Denali was then called.

Acknowledgments and Support:

• The episode is made possible by our dedicated community of patrons
• Sponsors: CiloGear and The 10th Mountain Whiskey & Spirit Company
• Partners: 10th Mountain Division Foundation, Denver Public Library, The American Alpine Club, and the 10th Mountain Division Descendants
• Advisory Board:  Lance Blythe, McKay Jenkins, Chris Juergens, Jeff Leich, David Little, Sepp Scanlin, Keli Schmid and Doug Schmidt

Gear Heads, Part 2: Episode 09

Welcome back to Ninety-Pound Rucksack. I’m your host, Christian Beckwith, and today we’re diving into the second part of our examination of the gear, clothing and food developed, at great expense, for the mountain troops, as well as the repercussions said development would have on outdoor recreation after the war.  

This winter, I had three experiences that helped inform this episode. On February 18, 2024, we held the very first Ninety-Pound Rucksack Challenge, our tribute to the 10th Mountain Division’s signature action, the taking of Riva Ridge. More than 60 people joined us in three locations around the country: Whiteface Mountain, NY, where early incarnations of the mountain troops learned to ski; Ski Cooper, Colorado, outside Camp Hale, where the Division used to train; and on Mt. Glory here in the Tetons. The 10th Mountain Division’s motto was, and is, “Climb to Glory.”  I carried 80 pounds as part of my tribute, and my appreciation for the troops and their equipment, as well as their training, deepened with every step I took up the bootpack.

We’ll be marking the 80th anniversary of the Division’s ascent of Riva Ridge with next year’s Challenge, so if you’re a skier or climber and want to experience a little of what the soldiers underwent, or you’re a ski area with historic ties to the 10th and would like to host the Challenge on your slopes, go to  Christianbeckwith.com and learn how you can participate.  

Three days later, I took part in the “first annual” Hale to Vail Traverse, a historic recreation of a training exercise mounted during the 10th’s infamous 1944 D-Series (which we will cover in a future episode). On February 21, some twenty 10th Mountain Division soldiers, National Ski Patrol members and I covered 24 miles in a 16-hour effort that honored the Division’s past while shining a light on its future. The traverse wound its way through the mountains where the original Division used to train. Even better, it ended in the tasting room of one of our sponsors, the 10th Mountain Whiskey & Spirit Co., where the troops were mobbed by fans. 

I can honestly say there is no better way to end a day in the mountains than with a round of award-winning bourbon or rye whiskey from the 10th Mountain Whiskey & Spirit Company, because they’re absolutely delicious, and the next time you finish a great day in the mountains, I honestly hope it’s with a sophisticated glass of one of their spirits. If you go to their website, 10thWhiskey.com, right now and use the code Rucksack, you’ll get 10% off and free shipping on orders over $150. Remember, you must be of legal drinking age to consume alcoholic beverages or to purchase them.  Please drink responsibly. 

Finally, on February 23rd, on the slopes of Ski Cooper, I was able to try out a pair of the Division’s signature rubber-soled boots, seven-foot wooden skis and cable-throw bindings. These items were, as we’ll learn on today’s show, state of the art in 1943, and props to Ninety-Pound Rucksack Advisory Board member David Little and friends for keeping them in circulation. While I’m fairly confident there’s not a single person listening right now who would want to load up a ninety-pound rucksack and head into the mountains around the Pando Valley on such equipment, I’m so glad the troops had it, because its development set the stage for all the iterations that led to the lighter, stronger, far superior gear we use on our modern-day adventures—and this, too, is part of today’s story. 

Ninety-Pound Rucksack is made possible by the support of the 10th Mountain Division Foundation, the American Alpine Club, the Denver Public Library, and the 10th Mountain Division Descendants, as well as by our sponsors, the 10th Mountain Whiskey and Spirits Company and CiloGear. 

Any great mountain adventure requires a great pack, and if you’re in the market for the lightest, most durable, best-fitting alpine backpack that money can buy, CiloGear has you covered. My personal experience with the CiloGear Worksack has been nothing short of amazing. It’s comfortable, the materials are bombproof, it never gets in the way of my climbing, it does everything I need it to do when I need it—and the rest of the time, I never notice it’s there. 

CiloGear is 100% owned & operated in the US , and if you go right now to their website at cilogear.com and enter the discount code “rucksack,” you’ll get 5% off and they’ll make a matching  donation to the American Alpine Club.

The American Alpine Club has been supporting climbers and preserving climbing history for more than 120 years. AAC members receive rescue insurance and medical expense coverage, providing peace of mind on committing objectives. They also get copies of the AAC’s world-renowned publications, The American Alpine Journal and Accidents in North American Climbing, and can explore climbing history by diving into the AAC’s Mountaineering Library. Learn more about the Cub and benefits of membership at americanalpineclub.org, and get a taste of the best of AAC content by listening to the bi-monthly American Alpine Club podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or Soundcloud.

Most of all, I’d like to thank our community of patrons for helping us keep the lights on. Chances are you’re listening to this episode for free, which is great, but the countless hours of research that went into this and every episode would not have been possible without our patrons’ support. As our way of saying thanks, we publish exclusive, patron-only interviews and behind-the-scenes content that complement everything you’ll hear on today’s show. Whether you want to get access to it, or you just want to  help keep this project alive, please go to christianbeckwith.com and click the bright orange Patreon button. For as little as $5 a month you’ll become more than just a listener; you’ll become a crucial part of our storytelling journey. 

In our last episode, I promised that our analysis of gear would be a two-part effort. As a result, this episode is two and a half hours long, so I’ve built in  breaks to give you a chance to shake out. When you hear me whistle like this (and apologies, I don’t actually know how to whistle) 

—you’ll know it’s a natural pause in our story, and you can go freshen up your glass of 10th Mountain Whiskey before beginning again. 

And now let’s join the hero of our story as he prepares to step into the next chapter of his climbing career.

—

John McCown emerged from the cacophonous din of Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, turned onto East 46th Street and set out like an elk being chased from the forest by wolves. God, he hated cities. The relentless honking and revving and braking jangled his nerves so badly he walked right past the brown-brick, twelve-story headquarters of the American Alpine Club—a club to which he now belonged. 

It was Saturday, November 30, 1940, a cool, cloudy day in New York City. John had been planning this visit since his induction into the Club the month before. Per his arrangement with Ms. Helen Buck, the AAC’s librarian, he’d planned to arrive at 10 a.m. sharp, but it took him a few minutes to realize he’d overshot the Clubhouse’s recessed entrance, and he’d doubled back with a curse, quickening his bow-legged stride to make up for lost time.

John’s first year of law school had left little room for a social life, let alone climbing, so when he’d received the gilded invitation to the Club’s November gathering, he’d immediately made plans to attend. He’d taken the train to the city the night before, and now, as he approached the building’s doors, he found himself caught up in a wash of emotions.  

John knew full well that his induction had been more of a nod to his potential than an acknowledgement of any accomplishments. He’d only been climbing for two seasons, both of them in the Tetons, and if he hadn’t met Bob Bates in the Jenny Lake Campground the previous summer, he almost certainly wouldn’t have got in. But, thanks to Bates, he had got in, and now that he was part of mountaineering’s inner sanctum, he was determined to make a real climber of himself, and that meant expeditions.

The street noise faded as he entered the building. A sign on the wall announced the Clubhouse was on the seventh floor. Forgoing the elevator, John took the stairs two at a time, his breathing accelerating with a mix of exertion and anticipation. It felt good to move. 

At the sixth floor, he slowed his pace so he’d look less like a mouth-breathing maniac when he reached the AAC’s offices. When John had met him, Bates had been in the Tetons to show his film of K2, the 8600-meter Karakoram giant he’d attempted with Charlie Houston, Bill House and Paul Petzoldt the summer before. When the film ended, John had joined the small group of fans waiting to buy a copy of Bates’ newly released book, Five Miles High, and meet its sinewy author. He’d introduced himself shyly as an “aspirant climber,” and referred to Bates as “Sir.” 

“Pah–please don’t call me that,” Bates had laughed, his smile pushing up into his cheeks to reveal a row of corn-kernel teeth. “You’ll make me feel old. Unless I’m mistaken, I can’t be half a dozen years older than you. Call me Bob.”

Bates had signed a final autograph, then invited John back to his campsite. As the light deepened among the lodgepole pines, he had started a quick fire, poured a finger of whiskey in a tin cup, handed it to his younger guest, then settled onto a log with a contented sigh. John had a litany of questions–How had Bates prepared for such a monstrous peak? What had it been like to trek 350 miles to base camp, all the way from India to Pakistan, and then back? How big were the Karakoram mountains? What was it like to climb above 20,000 feet?—but his bemused host kept turning the conversation back to him. Where had John grown up, he wanted to know, and how had he gotten interested in climbing? When they discovered they shared an alma mater in the William Penn Charter School, Bates’ delight had blossomed, and he’d invited John to continue their conversation via post.

The correspondence that ensued had affected John deeply. Like Bates, John had grown up in comfortable circumstances, and ever since he’d been a child, his father had impressed upon him the importance of service. “You are fortunate to lead a privileged life, John,” his father had intoned countless times. “With great privilege comes great responsibility. Never forget that.” John hadn’t.

Bates’ expeditions to Alaska and the Yukon had been more than simple climbs. They’d also served to advance the fields of geographic and scientific research, and as Bates recounted how they’d unfolded in the Cambridge living room of Henry Hall, founder of the Harvard Mountaineering Club, John found his father’s counsel converging with Bates’ self-effacing charm. Bates ascribed the success of his climbs to Hall’s mentorship and his friendships with Houston, H. Adams Carter, Bradford Washburn, and Terry Moore, and their membership in the Club, he’d written to Joh, had been an extension of the service preached by Hall. As John read his letters, he’d resolved to find a way to climb for something bigger than himself as well.  

John had decidedly less material to work with when composing his letters. He told Bates of his early experiences with falcons, noted a few pertinent details about his studies and shared far more information about his summer’s climbs. While the new-ish route he and his partners had established on Nez Perce had caused the greatest stir, it was his forays into the wilder, northern reaches of the range that had sparked something primal in him, and he devoted his full faculties to describing them. The results must have made an impression on Bates as well, for he had nominated John for membership in the fall; but he’d also suggested that there remained terra incognita worthy of John’s ambitions outside the Tetons, and that the place to learn more about them would be the AAC’s archives. 

After John’s breathing had returned to normal, he pushed through the doors into the clubhouse.  There was, he knew, a board meeting that afternoon, and he wanted to complete his research before it began. He was greeted by Ms. Buck, a cheerful woman of indeterminate age. Ms. Buck’s initial surprise at the solidly constructed six-footer in her lobby quickly gave way to a warm welcome as she offered him a tour. It was surprisingly brief. In addition to the lobby, which contained her desk, there were only three rooms.

The meeting room, where the Board had voted to elect him, contained four ladder-backed chairs; a wall table; a pair of leather-bound armchairs surrounding a coffee table; and a glass case filled with Alpine memorabilia. Paintings—the Jungfrau, Mönch, and Eiger bathed in alpenglow, and  Edward Whymper’s tragedy on the Matterhorn–as well as black and white photos of K2 and the Yukon’s Mt. Logan hung on the walls. John had been gratified to see a photo of the west face of the Grand Teton featured as well. It was the only peak among the collection that he’d actually climbed.

There were two library rooms. One held maps. A tall, rectangular window illuminated the other, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanked the walls. Pens, a sheaf of Club stationary and an ashtray sat atop a table in the center, surrounded by two more ladder-backed chairs. 

Ms. Buck seemed eager to chat, but John assured her he had everything he needed, and began running his fingers along the leather-bound spines on the shelves. He’d already read Bates’ book, which Bates had co written with Charlie Houston, and he’d devoured the accounts of Bradford Washburn and the globe-trotting geographer Walter Wood about their scientific expeditions in Alaska and the Yukon. These were the giants of American mountaineering, and their remarkably bold  ascents had announced the arrival of the country’s climbers on the world stage. John wanted nothing more than to join them—but where to begin? There had been so many books and maps in the library’s 3,000-volume archives, in French and German and Italian and Spanish as well as English, on every conceivable Alpine objective from South America to the Himalaya, that he’d soon felt like a child staring up at a cloud-swept mountain, keenly wanting to be amongst its gabled heights but without a clue of how or where to begin. 

He’d finally decided to start with a history of the Club itself, and settled at the table with an essay by the Club’s first president, Charles Fay. As he perused the article, one passage in particular jumped out at him.

“Its contempt of hardships,” Fay wrote of mountaineering’s attraction, “its acceptance of a certain element of personal danger to be averted by judgment and coolness, its alluring invitation to conquest in which the heart need not harden as it exultantly strengthens in tenacity of purpose, render it not only the kind of sport for strenuous men, but the one theoretically best adapted to develop fearless leaders.”

John had copied the passage line for line on the Club’s stationary. This was what he’d been seeking: not climbing for conquest’s sake, but a physical undertaking with close friends who shared a similar moral as well as psychological outlook. As smitten as John was with deciphering a climb’s complexities, his father’s words ran through his mind. He could carry a hundred pound pack all day long; but could he carry the hardships of others as well?

The light was growing long outside the library window when he bid the animated Ms. Buck good afternoon and walked back to his hotel to change. The evening’s event was at the apartment of Mr and Mrs Joel Fisher at 1020 Fifth Avenue. John  could tell from the invitation it would be a sophisticated affair—Fisher, a successful businessman, was the Club’s past president and current treasurer as well as a patron of many of its expeditions—and he’d brought his tuxedo; but he also had assumed it would be small. The club, after all, had fewer than 300 members, and while they represented a who’s who of American climbing, he doubted many of them would be able to put their lives aside for an evening in the city. 

John made his way to the Fishers’ home by foot. Even from the street he could tell the apartment, located, as it was, across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was going to be palatial, and as he rode the elevator to the fifth floor and proceeded through the antechamber and into the expansive salon, he was amazed to find what must have been close to a hundred men and women in their finest attire, engaged in lively discourse. Waiters circulated with trays of hors d’oeuvres and fluted glasses while notes from a Haydn string quartet filled the air. The room buzzed with languages and accents. Though his tuxedo was tailored, it made him feel buttoned up, and as he stood below the chandelier lights, his dark hair neatly combed, looking out over a sea of chattering heads as he scanned the room for someone—anyone—he recognized, he felt like an emperor penguin in a roomful of adélies.

For the briefest of moments John wondered if he’d wandered into the wrong building—but then he saw the walls. Photographs and paintings of mountains, each majestic in its composition and expertly framed, hung beside original maps of famed expeditions, offering a tangible connection to the storied ascents John had, until now, only read about.

A black and white photo across the room caught his attention. Its subject was quintessentially pyramidal, its beauty magnified by the interplay of light and shadow. Now that, John thought as he walked toward it, was a mountain. If only he could find a peak like that to climb, high above the surrounding valleys in some remote and wild land—then he’d have an objective worthy of Bates’ faith in him.

“Beautiful, don’t you think?” said a voice behind him.

John turned.

“Bob!” he exclaimed, genuinely pleased. He swallowed Bates’ hand in his own, pumping it up and down so hard he shook the smaller man. “It’s good to see you again.”

Bates welcomed John with a warmth that lit up his entire face. It had been more than a year since they’d shared their campfire, and Bates wanted to know everything that had transpired since. John was amazed at how much Bates remembered from their conversation, as well as how much the mountaineering legend seemed to be interested, once again, in him.

At a natural break in their discussion, John looked back at the photo. “That has to be one of the most beautiful mountains in the world,” he said in wonder.

“That’s Mount Sir Donald,” Bates replied. “And that’s the Northwest Arête.” He pointed to a steep, perfectly symmetrical ridge. “Ellis made its first ascent.” It took a moment for John to realize Bates was referring to Joel Fisher, the evening’s host.

“You don’t say,” John murmured, his eyes finding Fisher as he moved among his guests with genial ease. He returned his gaze to the photo. “Are there any mountains like that left to climb?” 

“Plenty, if you know where to look,” Bates chuckled. 

“Well, If you’d ever like to point me in the general direction, I’d be happy to strike out,” John laughed. It was easy to get caught up in Bates’ infectious charm.

“I’d be happy to. Have you met Henry?” And with that, Bates darted sideways to grab the tuxedoed shoulder of a man passing by with a glass in his hand.

“Henry, I’d like you to meet John McCown. He’s the young climber from Philadelphia I told you about. John, this is Henry Hall.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Hall said, extending a weather-worn hand. He was nearly as tall as John, though leaner, and a particularly large gap between  his top two teeth made for a funny juxtaposition with his tuxedo. “Bob has said a lot of great things about you.” 

“John’s looking for a mountain to climb,” Bates continued. “I thought you might have a suggestion.”

“A mountain to climb, eh?” Hall asked. He was in his mid-forties, with a shock of fine hair gone white around the edges and crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes. “Perhaps one like that?” He gestured at the photo of Sir Donald.

“I don’t think there’s a person in this room who would say no to a mountain like that,” John replied. 

“Have you heard of the Coast Range mountains?” Hall continued. “You could do worse than stay close to home for the time being, what with the war going on.”

“The Coast Range—do you mean Mt. Waddington?” John asked. “Why, sure—that’s the most famous mountain in North America these days.”

“Bill, hear that?” Bates snorted, catching the attention of an earnest-looking man walking past. “You’re famous!”

“What did I do this time?” the man asked.

“John, I’d like to introduce you to Bill House,” Bates said. “He has some familiarity with the coast range.”

House offered John a firm handshake. He was in his late twenties, and John liked him instantly—a slight crick in his nose made him look honest—but he also felt a shiver  run down his spine. House’s ascent of Mt. Waddington, with Fritz Wiessner, had been a testament to the sort of tenacity and vision John longed for for himself.  Amongst all the climbers gathered in the Fishers’ majestic apartment, John figured he was probably the least accomplished.

Bates was the natural heart of any gathering, and more climbing luminaries soon circled in. Ad Carter, Bates’ dear friend, arrived in a rumpled tuxedo.

An intelligent-looking man in his mid-thirties soon joined them as well. It was Walter Wood, Jr., the Club’s vice president. John found himself fascinated by his mustache, which was thick as a hedgerow and the same ginger color as his wirebrush hair. 

It had been more than a year since Germany had invaded Poland, and the subject soon shifted from climbing to the morning’s headlines. As it did, the tenor of the conversation became serious. The onset of winter had turned the Italian invasion of Greece into an icy bloodbath, and reports of Greek troops pushing past mountainsides of Italians dead and dying from the cold filled the news. In the East, Japan was advancing on occupied China, while the Battle of Britain that had begun that summer had turned into the blitzkrieg, with Germany bombing English cities in incessant raids that were killing tens of thousands of civilians and leveling hundreds of thousands of homes in the process. “Would the heart of England hold out?” one of the morning’s headlines had asked. No one in the room could answer. 

Bates turned to John. “John, we’re pushing the Club to consider the role it might play in national defense,” he said. “It’s your club now too. Do you think we should lend a hand?”

John was stunned at Bates’ confidence, as well as by his question. A flash of blood shot into his olive-colored cheeks.  

“Of course we need to help,” Hall said, coming to John’s rescue. “The only thing standing between Hitler and his vision of the world is Churchill, the Royal Armed Forces and the hope that Roosevelt gets reelected. The US needs to jettison this isolationist nonsense and come to the aid of our European friends now, before it’s too late.”

The men nodded. The Club, all agreed, should contribute the specialized knowledge of its members to the War Department… but precisely how to do so remained unclear. 

“The letter from Secretary Stimson to President Rogers was encouraging,” Bates said, unfolding a mimeographed paper from his tuxedo pocket. Henry Stimson had been appointed by President Roosevelt as Secretary of War that summer, and James Grafton Rogers, John knew, was the AAC’s president, but what Bates said next surprised him. “Stimson’s a climber, you know, and a former member of the Club. Mr. Rogers knows him—he wrote him last month about the need for mountain troops.”

“For this coming winter,” Bates read from the letter, “the primary objective of training must be the basic training of units and individuals in our greatly expanded army. The training for operations in snow is a secondary mission and will be conducted to the extent found practicable by all units having snow at the Divisional Posts and Camps.” 

He paused to gauge the group’s reaction.

“While it will be impracticable, as you foresee,” Stimson’s letter continued, “to conduct any extensive mountain or alpine training during the coming winter, this highly specialized form of training is under study by the General Staff. It is possible that during the winter of 1941-42 the training of some units as ‘Alpine Troops’ may be undertaken. In such case, the assistance of the American Alpine Club will be of great value to the War Department, and we shall feel free to call upon that organization.”

“Bob and I saw first-hand what was going on in Europe last summer,” Carter offered, tilting his round head as he spoke. “Waiting for the War Department to call upon us is time the country doesn’t have.” 

“I’m sure you’ve all seen Ad’s suggestions about mountain troops,” Wood said, his gravelly voice tinged with urgency. “He’s drawn up a plan to stand up a unit, and it’s exceedingly sound.”

House raised an eyebrow. “If we’re to have mountain troops,” he began, “we’ll need mountain equipment. Almost all our clothing and gear is from Europe, and of late, Sporthaus Schuster hasn’t been returning my letters.”

“Well, Walter is planning another expedition to the Yukon next summer, and I’ve agreed to go,” Bates replied. “Perhaps we could offer our services to the War Department. They might be interested in the opportunity to test cold-weather clothing and equipment.”

At this suggestion, Wood perked up. “Major General Woodruff, a senior army officer, asked me to set up an exhibition of up-to-date mountain equipment next week. Bob, will you help me get it ready?”

“I’d be glad to,” Bates replied. “Whatever we can do to help the nation.”

John listened intently. As the discussions unfolded, he found himself absorbed in the gravity of the moment. The mention of specialized mountain knowledge seemed to galvanize the group’s resolve. Here was a niche where their passion for climbing intersected with a national calling. Though he’d just met these men, he felt a connection to them, not just as fellow climbers but as comrades in a larger battle. 

It was nearly midnight when John left the Fishers’ apartment and began to make his way back to his hotel. The temperature had dropped, but he didn’t flag a taxi. He wanted to walk. There was so much to think about. 

The unity and purpose in the room, John reflected, had felt palpable. His induction into the club, which had left him scattered at the beginning of the day, now felt like a bond, one rooted in shared values and a love for wild places. The group’s conviction to lend their expertise to the War Department had underscored the unique role climbers could play in the conflict, and it reminded John of the humanity at the heart of their endeavors. Any remaining indecision he might have felt about his father’s challenge evaporated like the warmth escaping his jacket into the cool night air.

There was no way John could have known that four years, two months and eighteen days later, he would be leading the country’s newly formed mountain division on a climb that would break Hitler’s hold on Europe—or that Bates and his friends would have devoted themselves entirely to ensuring he had everything he needed to get himself and his men to the top.

—

I cannot prove that John McCown was at the Fisher’s soiree that evening; there was no guest list, and the AAC records state merely that, following the November 30 board meeting, “Mr. and Mrs. Fisher very kindly entertained about ninety members and guests at their apartment,” which just so happened to be located in one among the most prestigious residential buildings in New York City.

I can, however, prove that the event marked a pivotal moment in our story, because, by the time the party wound down, a unique convergence of civilian expertise and military need had begun to occur. As we detailed in our last episode, one day earlier, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the National Ski Association had formed its Winter Equipment Committee to advise the Army on how to train and equip a unit on skis, and appointed the brilliant Sierran mountaineer Bestor Robinson to lead it. 

During the board meeting that preceded Fisher’s party, The American Alpine Club—thanks to the initiative of Bates, Carter, House, Wood and Charlie Houston— began to explore ways it could assist as well. “Nearly an hour was consumed in an informal discussion as to how the Club might contribute to the plans for National Defense through the specialized mountain knowledge of its members,” read the minutes from the day’s meeting. “Practically all took part, and the sentiment of the meeting was unanimous that the Club should offer its services.” 

Shortly thereafter, Wood, with Bates’ help, set up the exhibit of mountain equipment for General Woodruff. As Bates noted in his autobiography, The Love of Mountains is Best, the display, and the discussion that followed, “obviously made an impression”—for, on December 20, 1940, Colonel Harry L. Twaddle, the acting assistant chief of staff of the U.S. Army, wrote to President Rogers and requested, as Bates put it, “information on essential items of mountaineering equipment that could be of use to the army.”

Colonel Twaddle, you’ll recall from past episodes, was the Ohio native charged by the Army’s Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, with war mobilization planning, and his letter prompted the AAC to organize a National Defense Committee of its own. As its chair, it appointed Wood, and its members included Houston, Terry Moore, and Ken Henderson, whom we last met as he was putting together the Handbook of American Mountaineering, the ground-breaking instructional manual the Army would use to help train its troops.

And this is where today’s story gets interesting, for the AAC appointed Bestor Robinson and fellow bigwall climbing pioneer Richard Leonard to its committee as well. With the Sierra Club mountaineers on the AAC’s committee, and Wood on the National Ski Association’s committee, and with Robinson and Leonard’s climbing partner David Brower working on the Manual of Ski Mountaineering, the counterpart to Henderson’s Handbook, the country’s foremost climbers and skiers were, by early spring, 1941, working simultaneously and in close communication to develop everything the mountain troops would need for war.  

Much of that effort, it should be said, took place behind office walls. But items developed in a laboratory need to be tested in the field before they’re ready for deployment, and the American mountaineering community was eager to assist with this as well.

“In March 1941,” wrote Bates, “Walter Wood phoned me to say that he had had an urgent request from Brigadier General Twaddle”—recently promoted—“to come to Norfolk, Virginia, to discuss important mountaineering matters. I was asked to come with him.”

General Twaddle had caught wind of the expedition to the Saint Elias Range that Bates and Wood had been planning for that summer. Twaddle brought Lieutenant Colonels Walker and Hurdis with him, and the officers began probing for details: where were the climbers going, and what were they planning to do. 

“Before we departed,” Bates wrote, “we were offered and accepted the services of two B-18 bombers to carry out experiments during our expedition.”

If you’re Bob Bates and Walter Wood Jr. in 1941, planning an expedition into one of the least known, least accessible expanses of heavily glaciated mountain terrain in the world, and the Army offers you two B-18 bombers that you can use to airdrop supplies that you’d otherwise have to schlep on your back to base camp, you say yes. 

Remember in Episode 7 when we detailed how Bates had explored the range with Washburn and Carter in the winter of 1935? They’d used airplanes to transport loads that otherwise would have been nearly impossible to bring along, so Bates knew a good deal when he heard one. 

Though Washburn and Carter had pioneered the use of air support for a mountaineering expedition with their 1932 first ascent of Mt. Crillon, the use of planes for expeditionary mountaineering was hardly a done thing. The proposition was a win-win: the Army would get seasoned mountain veterans to test not only the gear, clothing and food that would prove essential to its nascent unit of mountain troops, but also the logistical support those same troops might need in case of insertion into mountainous terrain, particularly behind enemy lines. And Bates, like Carter—who at this point was well into the encyclopedic research on international military mountaineering he’d begun for the Army—was keen to answer the call of duty. Though Pearl Harbor had yet to happen, America was headed for war, and he knew it. 

Which brings us to the Army and the boards it had set up.

As we’ve detailed, the Army had put together a series of experimental ski patrols over the winter of 1939-1940 to test the concept of cold-weather training. The most ambitious and most concentrated of those patrols had taken place at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. Because of its importance, the Army had set up a Winter Warfare Training Board to study and test the clothing and equipment used by the troops, and appointed the straight-shooting Princeton man, Captain Albert Jackman, as its director.

At Princeton, Jackman had joined the Army’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) and become a member of the pistol and rifle teams. By the time of his 1931 graduation, he’d been commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Reserve Corps’ Field Artillery. 

After graduating, he’d moved to DC, where he’d worked as an insurance salesman by day, but his heart was in the mountains, and he’d joined the Potomac Appalachian Club, where he’d become one of the pioneers of the organization’s work on the Appalachian Trail. His easy going disposition won over local residents of the nearby Shenandoah forest, with whom he hunted raccoons and possums, drinking their homemade corn whiskey in the evenings while swapping city slicker stories and store bought booze. He also learned to ski and snowshoe, and translated his experiences into trips he led for the Club as he helped to establish it as one of the area’s foremost outdoor organizations.

He’d also maintained his Reserve Commission, and in December 1940, now a Captain, he’d been assigned to the 5th Division’s ski patrols in Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. 

Jackman was keenly observant, resourceful, and highly organized—just the sort of officer the Army needed to get a mountain unit on its feet. His detailed report, tucked neatly between two heavy stock pale blue covers, included photos and notes on the various boots and shirts and sweaters and skis and sleds and snow shoes and socks and tents and stoves and everything else the patrols had used at Camp McCoy, including Fritz Weissner’s WonderWax. The report in turn would inform the Army’s efforts when it set up its test force at Ft. Lewis, Washington, in November 1941. 

When it came to cold weather warfare, Jackman was the best the Army had. Accordingly, they assigned him to the Yukon expedition as well.

“Soon after our return from General Twaddle’s headquarters,” Bates continued in his autobiography, “Captain Jackman, who was to be the army observer on our expedition, wrote to us and I arranged to take him climbing in the White Mountains. I liked him at once, found he had done some backpacking, and hustled him off to Ad Carter’s house in Jefferson, New Hampshire. The weather was not good, but after we managed to do a little rock climbing, both Ad and I concluded he would be a useful member of the expedition.”

Putting together an expedition is an exercise in controlled chaos, and adding in the Army and its considerations lent a whole new layer of bureaucratic madness to the proceedings. While Bestor Robinson and his fellow ski mountaineers were testing equipment on behalf of the National Ski Association during  a five-day trip into the Sierra Nevada, Bates and Walter Wood were figuring out the logistics of how to parachute boxes of equipment and food from B-18 bombers safely and securely onto heavily crevassed glaciers in an area the size of Switzerland for a two-month expedition. Jackman, meanwhile, was wrangling everything from food to clothing to equipment from the Office of the Quartermaster General, which had perked up at the chance to test the materiel it suddenly found itself developing for cold weather and mountainous conditions.

The Saint Elias range, which rises from the Gulf of Alaska along the northwestern periphery of the Alaska/Canada border and extends deep into the Canadian Yukon, is 300 miles long, 90 miles wide and contains at least half a dozen summits higher than Mont Blanc. In Episode 7, we detailed just how inaccessible its mountains are. “This region, of which Mount Logan is the predominating feature,” wrote one of the mountain’s first ascensionists, “presents what is probably the most intensely glaciated district of the globe, and in its awful silence, its absence of any forms of life, vegetation, or running water, one sees a picture of the utter desolation which once existed during the great Glacial periods of the earth’s history.” The Army couldn’t have asked for a better place to test its new toys.

The seven-person expedition would retrace parts of Bates and Woods’ shared itineraries from their respective ascents of Mt. Steele. It included Foresta, Wood’s partner in both marriage and exploration. It would be the pair’s fourth season of field research for the American Geographic Society, and they brought along two glacier-sniffing, weather-chasing field scientists to assist with the groundwork. A cook was on hand to provide sustenance as well as comedic relief. To Bates and Jackman fell the role of testing the military’s food, gear and clothing.

One of the central considerations the Army had for the mountain troops was how, and what, to feed them. The development of rations for mountain endeavors had been underway since its exploratory ski patrols, but, like everything else mountain related, it had yet to be refined to a science.

Here’s Ninety-Pound Rucksack advisory board member David Little.

[David Little]

“An army travels on its stomach. Feeding your soldiers is probably the single most important thing that an army has to do in fighting a war. You don’t feed your soldiers, nothing else is gonna happen.

“The army had basically four levels of rations at the start of the World War II period, two of which were primarily used in camp, but occasionally out in the field. And that is A rations, which is fresh food—that’s fresh vegetables, fresh meats, the sort of thing that you buy at the grocery store today. Backing that up would be B rations, which were the canned or prepared foods that you again would buy in the grocery store, canned green beans, the things that are available to you to back up the fresh foods when it’s off season for fresh vegetables. So A and B rations were used here in the states in the camps, and to a limited extent out in the field, depending on availability.

“The next level of ration was the C ration. And the C ration would be the combat ration that was issued to the individual soldier. That was designed to be something that a soldier could carry in his pack and prepare on an individual or small group basis to feed himself.“

But for a mobile unit of mountain soldiers, there was a problem with the C Ration.

[David Little]

“C rations were two soup-sized cans, roughly 12 ounces in size, one holding your meat and protein and the other can held crackers, a powdered beverage drink, coffee, sugar, things like that. But these two 12 ounce cans are somewhat heavy. Each meal took two cans, so a day’s supply was six of these soup cans that were carried in your backpack, and it was a metal can, and these metal cans carry extra weight.“

And there was another consideration as well.

[David Little]

“Caloric intake was key. A typical soldier would consume somewhere around 3000 calories a day in the mountains. 4,500 to 6,000 calories a day are necessary just to maintain your body mass and to keep your body heat going.“

We’ve talked at length about the provisions American climbers had been taking with them on their expeditions. 

At the very moment Wood and Bates were embarking on their Yukon trip, John McCown, with Henry Hall’s guidance, was putting together his expedition to the Coast Range with Ed McNeill.  For that adventure they brought flour, rice, beans, soup, bouillon cubes, salt, pepper, tea, coffee, sugar, candy,  chocolate bars and dried milk, as well as a mix of vegetables—beets,  potatoes, squash, onions, cabbage—and dried fruit: cranberries, prunes, apricots, pears, raisins. Because they intended to hunt for food along the way, they also brought a high-powered rifle and 50 shells. 

Though the mountain troops would have plenty of firepower with them, they wouldn’t be using it to hunt game. And, like a lot of other things in their packs, their rations would be subject to considerations that climbers had been wrestling with for years, including how to cook their meals in the field, the proper caloric requirements for strenuous days and how to compress said calories into as lightweight a system of packaging as possible.

The Army was not alone in grappling with these problems; the navy, too, was trying to figure out survival rations for its pilots. Thus, in addition to testing boots, air mattresses, sleeping bags, a packboard-sled combination, folding skis and Bestor Robinson’s tents, Bates and Jackman served double duty as military ration guinea pigs. 

The Yukon expedition began, patriotically, on the 4th of July as the team began tossing  loads of equipment and provisions from the B-18 bombers above strategic points of their planned itinerary. Seventeen of the loads enjoyed the comforts of parachutes; another two dozen were tossed unceremoniously into the air in the hopes they would remain relatively intact when the expedition members recovered them a month later. The team then began their journey into the heart of the icecap, studying and testing along the way.   

One of the field scientists brought Robinson’s tent with him on a geology side trip, only to return a few days later with pronounced opinions on its various flaws. Bates and Jackman soon found that they shared his perspective. “[A]s directed,” Bates wrote, “we pitched it as a one-man, two-m an, three-man, and four-man tent. We did not like any of them, especially … in areas of high wind and snow.”

As important as their testing duties were, they also had to get along. When living on top of someone for two months  in a tent, idiosyncrasies that might seem endearing in town can induce homicidal thoughts. Paul Petzoldt would later come up with a term for it: he called it “Expedition behavior,” which he explained as “an awareness and attention to all relationships that influence an outdoor experience.” 

One of Bates’ greatest assets was his seemingly infinite geniality. “He is the warmest most outgoing person I know,” Charlie Houston would later recall, “endlessly enthusiastic and cheerful…. When the weather has soured, the tent has burned, the food bags are empty, [he] can still sing one of his many ballads, and get others to join.” 

In Jackman, Bates seemed to have met his match, for the Army officer possessed a similar disposition, and the two went about their responsibilities with jolly exuberance, their affection for one another growing with every expeditionary mishap they encountered. When Jackman, who Bates quickly came to refer to as Jack, fell into a rushing glacial stream, Bates plucked him out with his ice axe. When Jackman fell into a crevasse, Bates arrested his fall with the attentive reaction of a seasoned mountaineer. Far more experienced than Jackman would ever be, Bates could have viewed his new partner as the liability he surely was, but instead he took on the role of mentor, and in the process the two became friends.

Friends, that is, with a serious job to do. As the pair made their way up Mount Walsh, a massive, sprawling, 15,000-foot mountain, non-technical from a modern mountaineering perspective but nonetheless so far from civilization that the smallest mishap could yield catastrophic results, they kept their eyes peeled for the Army test boxes they’d parachuted onto the slopes a month before. Their ascent coincided with a three-day survival test of the military rations, which consisted primarily of pemmican, the calorie-rich predecessor to today’s energy bars. “The army Pemmican … looked like a cake of compressed, oatmeal cookies, but seemed to be made mostly of ground peanuts, whole oats, and fat,” Bates recalled. “The navy Pemmican looked more like the Danish Pemmican I knew so well [from past expeditions], but was very sweet, with a sickly smell of vanilla….”  

If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, that doesn’t sound like the sort of food you’d want for an ascent of an unclimbed mountain, particularly one as Yukon-sized as Mt. Walsh. And indeed, it wasn’t. “We began to have trouble distinguishing heights and distances,” Bates reported, “but we finished our pemmican, took some dextrose tablets,” and carried on. By the time they’d had their last pemmican meal, “we felt strangely tired, whether from our diet or the hard work, we could not tell.” Successfully locating an Army box, they quickly opened it. “When I looked to see what was there, right away, I noticed a bottle of ketchup,” Bates wrote. “  We looked at each other, quickly seized the bottle, poured out ketchup, added some snow, and drank it all. I have never cared much for ketchup, nor has Jackman, but the army survival diet must’ve lacked something. Our pemmican test … had given us sufficient energy for very hard work, but we were ready for real food again.”

The climbers enjoyed the best weather the range had seen in twenty-five years. In addition to Mt. Walsh, they made the first ascent of Canada’s third-highest peak, Mt. Wood, which, after Bates and Washburn climbed Lucania in 1937, had become the continent’s new highest unclimbed mountain. 

By late August, they’d also successfully completed all their tests, including the air drops. “Fortune,” Wood noted, had “permitted us to drop, with and without the benefit of parachute, 2.5 tons of equipment and supplies at seven widely separated points with a loss of not more than 6% of the total.” 

 It must have been surreal for Bates to make his way past mounts Lucania and Steele, the scene of his previous epic, retrieving the contents of the airdropped loads along the way. It must have been stranger still to do so in his new role as military mannequin. As Jackman jotted down observations in his notebook on everything from climbing knickers and pants to ice axes and crampons to boots, the hobnails used on the boot soles, the insoles used inside the boots, ropes, snow goggles, backpacks, sleeping bags, air mattresses, and of course Robinson’s notorious tents, he took photos of Bates and the other team members modeling the gear. As was to be expected, much of the climbing equipment had been purchased from European manufacturers. 

Once back in civilization, Jackman employed the same detailed note-taking he’d used to compile the Army’s Winter Warfare Board report to put together an even more detailed record of the clothing and equipment used in the Yukon. By now, the Army’s preparations to launch a cold weather test force at Ft. Lewis, Washington, were kicking into high gear, and each note included a photo of the product, its manufacturer, its cost, weight, and dimensions, as well as any other details that might be of use to the Army in developing similar items for the new unit. 

Three months later, when the 1^st Battalion, 87^th Mountain Infantry, was formed at Ft. Lewis, the Army would activate another board similar to the one Jackman had overseen the previous winter at Camp McCoy, add the word “Mountain” to its name, use Jackman’s Yukon report to inform its start, and make him its Chief Test Officer.  

Post-expedition, Bates returned to his duties as an English teacher at Exeter. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from the Quartermaster General’s office asking him to meet to discuss problems of mountain and winter warfare. 

I’ve come to think of the efforts to develop the gear and clothing for the mountain troops as a three-legged stool. The civilian committees set up by the National Ski Association and the American Alpine Club were one leg. The Army’s winter warfare boards were another. The third leg of the stool was the office of the Quartermaster General. And as Bates traveled to Boston to meet with the Quartermaster General’s representative, the stool’s final leg was about to be put  into place. 

The office of the Quartermaster General oversees the Quartermaster Corps—the branch of the US Army responsible for outfitting its soldiers with everything they need to wage and win a war.  The Quartermaster Corps is so sprawling, and its responsibilities so vast, it can be difficult to comprehend the importance of its role in our story. Here’s how David Little explains it.

[DL]

“In many ways, it’s the quality control for the entire Army’s procurement process. If the army wants to buy an item, the Quartermaster Corps first specifies what that item should look like and how it should perform. They locate manufacturers capable of meeting that specification and then as the product comes back in, their job is to check it, to make sure it meets the spec and then to get it in the hands of the soldiers who are actually gonna use this product.“

David just mentioned something that’s critical to your understanding of today’s episode: specifications. For more insight on that, we turn to our advisory board member Lance Blyth.

[LB]

“Specifications lay out how to make the thing. It lays out what materials you’re expected to use, how long something is supposed to run without a problem, and those are critical ’cause those they begin to allow you to determine how much materials you’re gonna need. Because we’re moving into wartime here, you’re gonna have wartime restrictions on materials. There might be higher demands for them, higher priorities elsewhere. Nylon, for example, which we know later they wanted for tents but they couldn’t get it ’cause parachutes had a higher call on nylon.

“So they looked at we need X number of parachutes, it’s gonna take all our nylon and nobody else gets to use nylon. Ski poles were metal because they were concerned that bamboo may not be able get enough bamboo for ski poles. So those are the types of things that specifications lets you do.

“Then it allows industry to figure out, okay, how much is it gonna take? How much will it take to make? It allows for quality control. You can say, oh no, you didn’t do it quite right. We told you the specification was this. So many stitches per inch, if you will. And it also allows you to go back and make changes without having to reach the whole specification. If you wanted 14 stitches per inch and you determine no 12 will work, you can just change line 37 B one from 14 to 12 specifications, put everyone on the same sheet of music all across the enterprise.

“And so the army could go out to a number of different companies with specifications for say a field jacket and be confident that the companies that bid on that contract would all be producing the exact same item to the exact same.“

Specifications. Got it. Now here’s David Little again on how the National Ski Association and the American Alpine Club committees, the Army’s Winter and Warfare Boards, the Quartermaster General’s office and specifications all converged.

[DL]

“The American Alpine Club, the National Ski Association: These were the people that were using the gear day in and day out and they created advisory boards to make recommendations to the Army. And the Army then had advisory boards that would take the recommendations, start creating a military specification from ’em, and then testing those specifications in many cases with small production lots or prototypes produced by the US Army to what they think is the spec that’s going to work.

[Christian Beckwith]: “And then once those boards—and these are the Army’s Winter Warfare Board and then later the Mountain and Winter Warfare Board—once they tested these items, what happened?”

“Well, the process of testing involves first producing something to a spec that we think is going to work, and then we would go to various locations to actually try it out in the field to see if, oh gee, does this ice axe indeed hold up with the rigors of amateur mountaineers who are professional soldiers using this stuff?

“Once we’ve determined what worked, then it goes out of civilian hands into our quartermaster corps, and that’s where those final military specifications are put together. What weight of fabric is going to be used? What thickness of metal is going to be used? How does it have to be tempered? How does it have to be treated? Does it have to be painted or parkerized or some kind of rust preventative finish applied, or is that not needed in this case? And each of those specifications become the standard for production.

“Once the standards are set, we know what we want this finished product to look like. We then could go back to a civilian board, what in World War II was called the War Production Board that knew the various manufacturers and what they were capable of doing. They could release a specification to the manufacturers and say, can you make this? Can you do this? And then the manufacturer has all the details that they need: it needs an open shaft at least 32 inches long, and a steel head on this ice ax that is produced by a high carbon steel heat treated to a hardness of 64 or whatever the specification might be. And the ideal goal is that multiple manufacturers will be able to produce the product and whoever produced it, be it somebody on the East Coast or the West Coast or in the middle of the United States, will be able to produce a standard acceptable product for soldiers use.”

In case your head isn’t yet spinning, consider this: every single item the Army had to develop as it went from 8 divisions and 200,000 soldiers in 1940 to 215 divisions and 8.5 million soldiers by 1943 was being subjected to the same rigorous process of testing and specification. It wasn’t just skis, ice axes, and crampons that had to go through the ringer. From tanks to machine guns, shoe laces to helmets, bullets to jackets, it all got developed the same way—and it all passed through the Quartermaster General’s office. 

In Boston, Bates met with the representative from the Quartermaster General’s office, Lieutenant Colonel L. O. Grice, a “square-built, balding, tough-looking man,” as Bates described him, “with a no-nonsense approach.” The colonel questioned Bates about his experience  in cold weather areas and the clothing and equipment he’d used to operate within them. “He was frank in his statement that the army needed help in getting better equipment,” Bates continued. “Alaska was already a concern of his, for reports had come in requesting better clothing. Grice also referred to the European war and the need for preparations if the US became involved.” 

Bates answered the Colonel’s questions to the best of his ability. A few days later Exeter Academy received a letter asking it to grant Bates a leave of absence so that he could join the Quartermaster General’s office to “work on mountain and winter warfare problems and equipment.”

The thirty-year-old climber  required no arm twisting. “I was eager to go,” he wrote. “During the summer I had become very interested in the army’s problems and realized that in matters of cold weather and mountain clothing and equipment, our army was way behind the times.” 

Accordingly, Bates reported to the Quartermaster General’s office in DC in October. His arrival marked him as the first winter and mountain specialist to join the organization. He would be followed shortly thereafter by Bestor Robinson—and, as soon as the opportunity arose, Bates made sure that Bill House became part of the team as well.  

So now you know the circle. Bates, Robinson, House, Carter, Jackman, Wood, to say nothing of a dozen other leading mountaineers who would soon become involved—they all knew each other. They had climbed together, skied together, broken bread together, and in some cases grown up together—and as the drumbeats of war grew louder, they began working in concert and, when necessary, in the gray areas at the margins of military bureaucracy to make sure John McCown and his fellow soldiers had everything they needed to take on Hitler and the Nazis.  

Bates quickly discovered that the situation was more dire than he’d imagined.

 “The Quartermaster Corps, and in fact the whole army, needed creative ideas,” Bates wrote. “It was full of affable, well intentioned people who, partly from lack of funds and voter lack of interest, had not kept the army up-to-date. Equipment for the standard infantryman in 1940 was not much better than it had been in World War I. There was a saying that the army was ready to fight in Maine in the summer and in Florida in the winter, but not the other way around.”

Military research, and development in particular, had languished during the interwar period. “After nearly two decades of relative neglect,” Bates noted, “we knew we were going to have to play catch-up at the outset.”

World War II was the largest crisis in global history. Bates and his mountaineering brethren were remarkably smart, connected, and committed overachievers who were willing to sacrifice almost everything (except maybe time in the mountains) to get the job done. But even a group as incredibly talented as they were needed a ringleader to orchestrate a mission as complex as theirs. Fortunately, the Quartermaster General’s office had two.

One was the quartermaster general himself. Edmond Gregory (or “Pope Gregory,” as he came to be known) was a sixty-something Iowan with degrees from West Point and the Army War College and an MBA from Harvard who had served in various postings around the world before working his way up the Office to its head role. He’d been appointed Quartermaster General in 1940, and by the time Bates and company joined him in DC, Pope Gregory was overseeing the development, specification, procurement and distribution of billions of dollars worth of equipment and supplies.  He was also supervising the training of thousands of Quartermaster Corps soldiers and riding herd over nearly a million civilian personnel who worked for the companies contracted by the Army to produce everything it needed for war.

The other was Georges Doriot, who would come to be known as the father of venture capital—and so colorful a character was he that the following is essentially an insult to his contributions to the military, academia and the business world.

Twenty years Pope Gregory’s junior, Doriot had been born in Paris, the son of a flamboyant automotive pioneer, then served with the French Army before emigrating to America in the 1920s to earn an MBA. He was extremely smart, and a bidding war of sorts broke out between MIT and Harvard to have the honor of his enrollment in their respective business management programs. He chose the latter, left for Wall Street after one year, and was persuaded to return to become assistant dean at the Harvard Business School, where he would serve for the next four decades as a professor of industrial management, mentoring some of the more famous entrepreneurs to walk its halls. When war broke out, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen and joined the Army.

Crisis opens serendipity’s door, and Doriot stepped through it, becoming chief of the military planning division in Pope Gregory’s office. 

To master any element of a business, Doriot believed one needed to master every element of the industry of which it was a part, and when he brought this rather unconventional perspective to his new job, disruption ensued. 

Doriot quickly understood that the Army’s conventional approach, which involved the linear development of specifications for a product, following by the product’s testing, followed in turn by the revision of specifications, followed by retesting and so on and so forth, was far too time intensive to deliver the soldier the clothing, food and equipment he would need. 

So Doriot threw away the old way of doing things and came up with something new. He not only nurtured an environment of innovation anathema to the Army before war broke out; he employed two very different types of individuals to lead the charge.

The first were the Survivalists: men like Bates who had lived amidst and operated under some of the most difficult conditions on the planet. This group included mountaineers as well as their arctic, desert and jungle counterparts, explorers who were equally adept in the climactic mediums of their adventures. 

The second was composed of individuals with technical and industrial experience, many of whom had been students of Doriot’s at Harvard. This group could look at an item the Survivalists said they needed—be it a mountain boot or a climbing rope or a type of food —and determine the feasibility of its production, identify which American companies might be able to make it, develop its specifications and lay out the complicated series of steps necessary to bring it to market. 

Doriot’s superpower was his ability to inspire those around him to achieve the impossible. He was, according to Bates, “perhaps the most intelligent man I have ever known well. [He] worked at least six days a week, often seven, at the office, and probably most evenings at home. As chief of the military planning division, he set a splendid example.”

By late 1941, shortly after they’d arrived in DC, Bates and House began to realize the extent of the mountain they were being asked to climb. At the same time, under the supervision of leaders like Doriot, Colonel Grice, and Pope Gregory, they began to make headway.

For example, they soon learned that shearling, the trade name for sheepskin used for clothing, was in tight supply. Alaskan units wanted sheepskin lined coats, but there wasn’t enough of it to go around, so Bates and House came up with a test. Familiar as they were with pile, a synthetic fabric that was much lighter than shearling, dried more quickly when wet, and enjoyed an abundance that shearling did not, they commandeered a fan and a cold chamber, borrowed some soldiers and a specialist from the bureau of standards to read their skin temperatures and stuck them in the cold chamber for half an hour at a time wearing coats made of the two different materials. Warmth, they determined, was a function not of the material, but of its thickness. 

When Bates attended a war production board meeting a few days later, a fight broke out between military units over the limited supply of shearling. Bates stopped the argument in its tracks by announcing the other units could have all the shearling they wanted. The army, he announced, wanted pile. 

“There was sudden, shocked silence,” he wrote. “‘You mean the army doesn’t want any shearling?’ I answered that it did not, and stated that our test had shown that for army purposes, pile fabric was superior. That practically broke up the meeting.”

It also heralded the arrival of pile clothing, a product post-war outdoor recreationists would come to take for granted.  

Bates and House also began to examine the elephant in the room: the distinct lack of the Army’s historical understanding of cold weather and mountain warfare. Jackman, who was still a number of weeks out from his assignment to the Army’s Mountain and Winter Warfare Board at Ft. Lewis, was working at Army ground forces headquarters, practically next door. 

“Through Jackman,” Bates wrote, “we had Adams Carter hired to translate German documents on the bitter fighting in Austria in World War I.” They studied the Finns, who had famously held  off the invading Russians on snowshoes and skis the winter before, and they also had a look at the German mountain troops’ success in the Norwegian port town of Narvik. 

As we detailed in Episode 4, to commandeer the iron ore market, Germany had steamed into Narvik, which lies above the Arctic circle, with 2,000 mountain troops and 2,500 sailors aboard ten German destroyers, only to have an Allied counterattack sink the destroyers and push the German Gebirgsjager and their seafaring comrades into the surrounding hills, where they proceeded to hold off an Allied coalition five times their size for two months.

The German success was believed to have been a function of the superior training of their mountain troops, but upon closer examination it emerged that equipment failure on the part of the counter attacking British units was equally responsible. The Brits had mismatched boots and skis. “The skis did not fit men wearing mountain boots,” Bates recalled, “and those wearing ski boots, [which had stiff soles], could not walk while wearing them.”

When Jackman showed him the Army report on the boot problem, “we decided to do something about it,” Bates continued. The pair drew up a specification for a boot that could be used to climb, walk and ski. “It was to be suitable at temperatures of 30 below zero,” Bates wrote, “to have a high toe permitting use of insoles, and have a large opening for easy drying and insertion of the feet in cold weather.” As it so happened, and as you’ll remember from Episode 7, Bates and Carter had stumbled upon the perfect boot’s secret ingredient: a rubber sole, developed by the Italian climber Vitale Bramani, that Carter had borrowed from his friend Killian Oggi during his climbing trip to the Swiss Alps with Bates in the summer of 1939. After an extensive search, Carter wrestled a pair of Bramani-soled boots from an unsuspecting climber below Mt. Washington and sent it to Bates and Jackman to reverse engineer. The mountain troops got their signature boot, and American mountaineers were introduced to the Vibram sole. 

On and on it went, item by item, as the Survivalists pored over what the mountain troops would need and began to work with the Industrialists to ensure they got it. 

Seven days a week of office work is hard on anyone, though, and it must have been particularly hard on climbers like Bates. On the first Sunday in December, 1941, he convinced Jackman that a day of field testing was in order. They traveled to a scruffy, nondescript rock outcropping in nearby Bull Run, Virginia, where they spent the day climbing.   

As they drove back into DC, they were surprised by an inexplicable tangle of traffic. After passing a large crowd surrounding the Japanese embassy, they arrived at Jackman’s home. 

“His wife hailed him from upstairs,” Bates wrote. “‘You’ve got to put your uniform on now, Jack,’” she called.

Jack looked disgusted. Army officers in Washington had not been wearing uniforms, probably in order to conceal how their numbers had grown.

“Doggone it,” he said, “now why did they have to do that?”

She came to the head of the stairs. “Haven’t you heard? The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.”  

“Pearl Harbor changed everything,” Bates noted. For one, America’s isolationist movement, which had agitated against involvement in Europe’s war, was silenced.  For another, President Franklin Roosevelt quickly signed a series of acts that converted America’s civilian manufacturing base into the arsenal of democracy.

[Lane Blyth]

“The beginning of this was really January of 1942 that President Roosevelt establishes a war production board. This war production board has the mission to convert civilian production into war production. And they do it by controlling materials. You get the stuff you need to make something if that something is for the war effort. So it is in every company’s best interest to get into the war effort to some extent, or else they’re gonna have to shut down ’cause they’re not gonna get any materials to make anything. This is why there’s rationing during the war. If you wanted to be in business during the 1940s, you had to be in the war business.”

And here’s how the war production board’s laws, the mountaineers’ testing and the specifications they produced come together.

[LB]

“You were involved in war production, you were first on the list for materials. So if you were making tires and you wanted to keep your company running through the war, you would look to make the pads for tank treads, for example. And that’s what all the testing was for, was to get a very clear set of specifications of what kind of material, in what manner, and what form and how much so that you could turn it over to pretty much anyone who might make something similar.

“That’s why all this work done by the American Alpine Club, the National Ski Association, the testing done by the Winter and Warfare Board, all the testing done at the office of the Quartermaster General was so critical, ’cause then you could turn over specifications for a thing that a company may have never made before, but they could read the specification and if they made it, they could get materials ’cause it was war production and they could stay in business.”

The War Production Board changed every facet of American society. Not only did it yank the United States out of the Great Depression; it reshaped the country’s manufacturing base, including the embryonic outdoor industry. Here’s David Little.

[DL]

“Everybody got involved in one form or another. Almost any sporting goods manufacturer that provided material in the US did so. Ones that come to mind, the stoves of Aladdin. Aladdin started producing gasoline stoves for the US Army, took a standardized design that the Army approved and turned it into a military model and just turned their production line right over into that product line.

“Now, it also applied to other people like General Motors that did anything from tanks and trucks to general Motors made machine guns. But in the climbing industry, again, we didn’t have a whole lot of folks here, so we had to get creative and get outside the industry. Eddie Bauer did provide sleeping bags. They were producing a down bag in 1937 and with very few modifications became the mountain bag in 1942. Those kinds of things were necessary. Shoe companies went from producing shoes to wear on Wall Street to producing boots that could be worn on Fourth Street at Camp Hale, and that involved changing some production habits, but trying to stay close to what they had been doing before.”

With the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the importance of the work Bates and his colleagues were conducting in the Office of the Quartermaster Generalwent from critical to absolute.

As Bill House would note in the 1946 American Alpine Journal, executing their responsibilities was not without its challenges.

First, they had to figure out where a product would be used—which meant they had to determine where combat might take place. 

“Would American troops be involved in the mountains of Greenland or Iceland,” House asked, “Alaska, the Pyrenees, Norway, the Alps, the Caucasus, even the Himalayas?”

Second, there was, as House put it, an “overwhelming need for a minimum number of types of equipment.” 

“Even well before the war,” he continued, “it was recognized that the inevitable world-wide war would make supply a complex and difficult problem. Lines of supply were sure to be long, relatively inflexible, and subject to interruption…. The result was that in design as well as in choice of materials every single item had to be capable of serving adequately as wide as possible a field of use.”

Third, House noted that “soldiers were traditionally hard on equipment. Whereas they might treat their own civilian clothing with reasonable care, the fact that military clothing was issued by the government removed the necessity for caring for it.”

Fourth, any development had to take into consideration material shortages.  “Quartermaster requirements were low on the list of priorities,” he wrote, “ especially in the fields of lightweight fabrics and metals. No less important were shortages of productive capacity or of available machines. In many cases compromises in usefulness and durability had to be made because of higher priorities awarded other Army materiel.”

The fifth challenge was one House had first-hand experience with. As we mentioned, he was one of the few climbers in America who had made his own pitons for his climbs, in part because he knew exactly what he wanted, and in part because there wasn’t a Sporthause Schuster he could order from in the States. 

As he put it, “the numerical requirements were too small to interest those equipped for large scale production of mechanical items, while still being too large to permit the individual craftsmanship that had been adequate for civilian demand.” Also,    he continued, the sort of equipment the mountain troops would need was foreign to Quartermaster procurement officers and inspectors alike, making quality control difficult.  

And finally, House concluded, there was the matter of time. “Over and above everything was the terrible urgency,” he wrote, “to have the proper equipment in the hands of troops early enough in 1942 and 1943 to enable them to train properly, and if necessary to fight before their training period was up. Little time could be spared for testing, and many pieces of equipment went directly from a few crude prototypes into specifications, and thence up for bid.”

And this is where America’s mountaineers achieved their finest hour—not in the thin air of the Himalaya or the glaciated vastness of the Yukon, but behind desks, with a concerted effort born from the fellowship of the rope. 

 Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Jackman was sent to Ft. Lewis to oversee the Army’s Mountain and Winter Warfare Board as its Chief Test Officer. Bates, Robinson and House were soon joined at the Office of the Quartermaster General  by a who’s who of American mountaineering that included Carter as well as Brad Washburn and Terry Moore, their Harvard Five friends. Dick Leonard, Robinson’s Sierra Club climbing partner, joined the office as well. And all of these men were but a degree of separation away from their climbing and skiing partners, with whom they had put together logistically complicated expeditions that had executed some of the most audacious adventures the country had ever seen. As the Japanese attacked from the east and Hitler advanced across Europe, these mountain experts now put their heads together to help America in general and the mountain troops in particular win the war.

They did so by writing. Dashing off handwritten letters with informal familiarity or pounding out their points with typewriters on War Department stationary, they exchanged the names of people they knew who could produce packboards and rucksacks; they reached out to fence companies to see if their expertise with metal links could be converted to the manufacture of carabiners. They contacted companies who made farm implements such as hoes with the specifications for an ice axe. They shared ideas on how to improve a formula for dehydrated milk, and discussed the importance of felt versus wool insoles in keeping a soldier’s feet both warm and dry.

Bates wrote to Wood. Wood wrote to Jackman. Jackman wrote to Carter. Carter wrote to Robinson. Robinson wrote to Hall. Round and round the letters flew as they discussed developments at Ft. Lewis, swapped insights about training and shared notes on equipment they’d tested in the field. These were intelligent, creative, resourceful  men, deeply steeped in the mountain experience and unwaveringly committed to translating it into what would become the 10th, and they wrote at a pace that should have been unsustainable but in reality simply matched the fevered tempo of war. 

In going over their letters, I’m struck as much by their camaraderie and mutual respect as I am their shared sense of duty. 

“Dear Ad,” Bates wrote to Carter on January 18, 1942. “Thanks for the Bramani news. You are our number one field man. Let me know what you think of having tests with a squad of men…  on … Mount Washington. ”

“Dear Jack,” Carter wrote to Jackman four days later. “I have just met a certain Professor Hauser, who… was in charge of the ski troops on the Austrian side of the Col di Lana in World War I. You no doubt have heard about that very famous and bloody part of the Tyrolean front…. When you read about the fighting, it seems almost unbelievable, but when you hear about it from someone who was there personally, it seems as if the Duke of Wellington has come to tea to tell you about the battle of Waterloo….”

“Dear Bob,” Walter Wood wrote to Bates a week after that. “I was asked to look over the winter clothing equipment …. The first thing that met my eye was the ski boots. The toes of these boots were far too low. In fact they provided absolutely no room for insoles, large numbers of which had been issued with the boots. The result is that the men have barely enough  room for two pairs of socks, without insoles. There are going to be some frozen feet if those boots continue to be used. In fact, one company commander told me that no less than 23 cases of frostbitten toes resulted from a field maneuver in the moderately cool weather of early December, and this is his company alone…”

They wrote at dawn, amidst midday meals, and into the night. They wrote with an intensity that should have rendered their points incoherent but that seems to have sharpened their thinking instead. These men had mapped the kashmir and tibetan borders and pioneered 300-mile ski routes in the sierra nevada and endured weeks of twenty and thirty below temps amidst the largest glacial icecap outside Greenland and the poles. They had thrutched their way up four-hour leads on the second highest mountain on earth, and explored the greatest blank on the map of North America by ski and dogsled and made the first ascents of Himalayan giants and Canadian testpieces and Alaskan milestones alike. They had pioneered a systematic approach to rock climbing that evaluated the dynamics of belays and rappelling as well as the relative strengths of the natural-fiber ropes of the day to determine what a climber could and could not survive in the event of a fall. They’d forged their own climbing gear for Shiprock and Devils Tower and then used it to push the boundaries of athletic and psychological possibility. They had surveyed the Grand Canyon and  captained the Harvard and US ski teams and subsisted on ketchup-flavored snow in service to their country. They had spent the formative years of their lives exploring areas that had never been explored and climbing mountains that had never been climbed and developing equipment that allowed them to undertake objectives no one else had ever considered possible. And now, they wrote the partners who had held their ropes and shared the trailbreaking for help solving problems they couldn’t figure out on their own. And in this manner, they began to put together all the things John McCown and the soldiers of the 10th would need to break Hitler’s Gothic Line. 

[line break]

While Bates and company were busy in DC, Jackman had his hands full with the Army’s Mountain and Winter Warfare Board on the other side of the country. He, too,  was up against it from the start. 

The Army, which expected a lot of its officers, had placed  Lt. Col. Onslow Rolfe in charge of the 1st Battalion, 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment at Ft. Lewis in late 1941. It had put him in charge of the Mountain and Winter Warfare Board too. Jackman, as we mentioned, was the Board’s Chief Test Officer, and a note taker was assigned to assist him. Lieutenant John  Jay was the Board’s meteorologist and photographer, and a representative of the quartermaster general’s office was charged with procuring the soldiers’ gear and clothing. 

Rolfe soon had his hands full trying to figure out exactly how to begin a mountain unit within a military system with no mountain warfare experience Lieutenant Jay quickly found himself juggling his photographic obligations along with his thrice-daily weather observations. The Quartermaster General’s rep spent his time shuttling around the country in search of equipment. All of this left Jackman and the note taker working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week,  conducting tests and recording the results.

We last met Wisconsin ski jumper and cross-country skier Corporal Charles Bradley in Episode 6 as he was joining the Battalion at Ft. Lewis. As Bradley recounted in his book, Aleutian Echoes, “The president of the Board was our regimental commander, Colonel Rolfe, but the actual coordination of this brain-breaking assignment was Captain … Jackman, a lean artillery man, temporarily derailed from the big guns, because of his hobby of climbing mountains.” 

“One of the first things I noticed about Captain Jackman,” Bradley observed, ”was his eternal habit of pulling out a small notebook and writing something into it.” With Jay serving as the photographer,   Jackman detailed everything from, as Jay put it, “ski wax, climbers, innersoles, radios, over-snow motor toboggans, incendiary candles, and similar items which various small manufacturers sent in to them to test in the hopes of landing a contract… as well as the clothing the mountain trooper wore and the equipment that he carried on his back.” 

It would have been one thing if Jackman’s responsibilities had been limited to his duties as Test Officer, but like every other character in this episode, he was working at a pace civilians in peacetime cannot fathom, and that meant multi-tasking. As the maritime winter continued to grace the flats of Ft. Lewis with rain, for example, Jackman was already thinking two steps ahead, to the training the troops would require once winter was over.

“Dear Ad,” Jackman wrote to Carter on February 12, 1942. “The mountain and winter warfare board moves to Mount Rainier Friday and starts a five week training course in military skiing Monday morning…. I am sending you the chapters of the mimeographed military ski manual that the board has been writing. I would be glad to have your criticisms… , but … pay particular attention to chapter 5, part five, “military ski tests”. Please start thinking about similar tests to be known as ‘Military Mountaineering Tests.’ …As soon as the ski season is over, … we will have to have a [similar] plan of mountaineering training….”

Carter dutifully complied, working with Joel Fisher, the AAC treasurer and host of the party at the start of this episode, to develop a program that could be used to teach the troops to climb.

Jackman remained busier than a one-armed ice climber throughout the winter. As Bates and company sent him materiel to test from DC, he would feverishly compile his notes. 

He was everything the Army could have asked for from its Chief Test Officer: enthusiastically upbeat, creatively industrious, meticulous in his documentation. His evolution as the go-to guy for all things military mountaineering had ramped up in direct proportion to its efforts to get the test force off the ground, but as hard as he worked, the number of things that had yet to be tested remained longer than the items he had checked off his list. 

As we detailed in Episode 6, the 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Mountain Regiment wound down its ski training in Paradise on the flanks of Mt Rainier at the end of April 1942. Jackman had been testing as fast as he could, but  everything was a mess:  “Because of the insufficiently trained personnel allotted to the Board itself,” Jay wrote, “Captain Jackman was forced to “farm out” many of the experiments to units of the … Battalion and rely on their verbal and written reports for conclusions…. Lack of dark-room facilities on Mt. Rainier or even at Ft. Lewis made it necessary for films to be sent to Washington, D.C., for development, a process which required four to six weeks for the finished pictures to be returned. As a result, the reports were either late or unaccompanied by the necessary photographs, or both. Partly because of this slow transmission of test reports, and partly because of the skepticism with which the reports were viewed when they did arrive in Washington, the Board’s progress was discouragingly slow.”

In early April 1942, as the Army’s lease on the Paradise and Tatoosh lodges was coming to an end, Army Ground Forces sent a representative to Rainier to assess the situation. The results were not encouraging. As the representative reported back, numerous items crucial to a successful mountain unit, including skis, poles, snowshoes, sleeping bags, tents, stoves, and evacuation equipment, had yet to be tested.

The Quartermaster General’s office needed to place its orders with manufacturers, but it couldn’t spend millions of dollars on things that might or might not work. Accordingly, it began ramping up delivery of test items to the Board—and, just in case Jackman’s 18-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week schedule wasn’t hectic enough, the Army directed him to test items in the field—or more specifically, on Mt. Rainier’s 14,408-foot summit.

The expedition’s objectives were three-fold: 

First, they were to test food and equipment under more severe conditions of climate and altitude than was possible with a party based at  Paradise Lodge. They were also to train men to live under these conditions for long periods of time without reducing their efficiency through improper or insufficient equipment or mal-nutrition. And finally, they were to teach men the technique of travel on mountainous terrain and on glaciers in winter

The eight-man team included Jay in his standard role as Meteorologist and Photographer. Colonel Bradley was placed in charge of operating the radio and heading up the food. Jackman was nominally the commanding officer, but while his organizational skills were superlative, he remained a relative alpine neophyte, which left him in no position to lead a party of soldiers to the summit of Rainier in winter conditions. 

Fortunately, the Battalion had someone who was: Corporal Peter Gabriel, the Swiss-born mountain guide and ski instructor we’ve met in previous episodes. 

 Gabriel had been recommended for the mountain troops by both the American Alpine Club and the National Ski Association. Since his emigration to the US in 1937, he had guided summertime climbing parties in the Tetons and the Canadian Rockies and run Franconia New Hampshire’s ski school during the winters. He’d accompanied Bradford Washburn on an expedition to Alaska’s Chugach Range that had made the first ascent of its highest peak. While training the 87th earlier  that winter at Paradise, his feedback, along with that of fellow Swiss emigre and coach of the Dartmouth ski team Walter Prager, had resulted in the form of skiing we enjoy today by quieting the Arlberg techique’s upper body rotation in order to accommodate the heavy loads the soldiers had to carry. 

Gabriel’s real expertise, though, had been developed before he’d moved to the US. In his eleven-year career as a Swiss mountain guide, he’d led numerous ascents of the Alps’ greatest mountains without an accident. He’d also served as a Swiss army    instructor and guide with an experimental high mountain and winter warfare group. If anyone could get a bunch of soldiers to the top of Rainer, it was him. 

The expedition began a week after most of the 87th made their way back to Ft. Lewis, but the calendar had little bearing on the conditions. As Bradley observed, “The merry month of May sounds like spring, and to some extent spring was in the air at Paradise, but our binoculars told us that up on the mountain, winter was still in command.” 

The 87th had seldom gone higher on Rainier than Camp Muir at 10,000 feet. For soldiers like Bradley, proximity with the mountain’s upper reaches proved awesome. “On May 8, as we started up the slope,” he wrote, “I caught a glimpse of the summit through a hole in the clouds. I had never been in such a place. It seemed almost straight overhead, a detached mass of ice, rock and swirling snow, floating in the sky, inaccessible, threatening, beckoning.”

Jackman and company shouldered 85-pound loads. They had so much to test—dehydrated foods, winter clothing, experimental sleeping bags, stoves, footwear, tents—that fifty soldiers were assigned as porters to help them carry their equipment to Camp Muir. Under Gabriel’s direction, the team then spent five days reconnoitering routes to the summit before shuttling loads to an even higher camp at 13,000 feet. From there, they launched their summit bid, and soon found themselves embroiled in a good old fashioned mountain adventure. They threaded their way across, over and around hidden crevasses. They fretted about avalanches. Altitude sapped their energy and morale. When they tried to cook in their tents, their stoves sputtered, giving off noxious fumes that nearly caused them to pass out. They got caught in a blizzard. Furious winds blew away the willow wands they’d used to mark their line of ascent. But Gabriel’s skills carried the day, and he brought the team to the summit and back without an incident.

 The two-week expedition illuminated a number of points that mountaineers today take for granted, but that were unknown to the Army at the time: people need additional calories at altitude. Air mattresses are critical to retaining body warmth when camping on snow. Melting snow for water requires more fuel, which in turn adds to the weight one needs to carry.  

Jackman noted it all in his  report, which showed a masterful evolution of his arcane expertise. 

Take Plate 28, for example. Below Jay’s black and white photo of a mummy sleeping bag—occupied by a soldier whose aquiline nose protrudes from the opening—Jackman’s notes read, “This picture illustrates the shortcomings of the] model. The face opening is too high on the forehead …. The top of the head forces the cloth tight, showing that the bag is too short. The lateral through seams show where the bag will become cold.”

These were the sort of details Bates and his colleagues needed to know in order to dial in their specifications and place their orders, and Jackman’s report contained similar notes on rucksacks, packboards, boots, hobnails, snow goggles, and so on and so forth—but there’s the right way to do things, and there’s the Army way. Once again, the lack of photographic facilities delayed Jackman’s report, but the greatest impediment to the implementation of important changes was the War Department itself—or, more specifically, the skeptics within the War Department who continued to harbor grave reservations about the need for a specialized unit of mountain troops in the first place.

“As was the case with many of the reports of the Mountain and Winter Warfare Board,” Jay noted, “Captain Jackman’s report became sidetracked in Washington, and only a very few of his carefully considered recommendations were used.”

As Jay noted in his history of the unit, if Jackman’s  “report advocated that a certain item be dropped as unsatisfactory or that another item be approved as standard without changes very often the exact opposite action would be taken in Washington. For example, the Board conducted extensive tests of three types of skis during the Rainier … Expedition…. The Northland ski was found to be excellent and was recommended for standard issue. Yet the following winter the new Northland ski model had been so changed by specifications … that it was practically useless, and even dangerous, so stiff and heavy was its manufacture.” 

Another item Jackman and his team tested was Robinson’s tent. Once again, they found it to be, as Jay noted, “ unsatisfactory on many counts. It was too small, its zippers failed to function properly in cold weather, it was too heavy, and it frosted up badly inside. Yet 40,000 of these tents were manufactured before the production was finally stopped late in the spring of 1942, after other unfavorable reports besides the Board’s had begun to pour into Washington.”

Poor Bestor. When it came to his tents, he couldn’t even catch a break from the man who’d helped appoint him to the National Ski Association’s equipment committee, Minnie Dole.

“Dear Johnnie,” Dole wrote to Colonel Nelson Walker as the Rainier expedition was winding down. “I wish to write you confidentially on a subject, which is not easy for me, because of the necessity for criticism. As you know, I have only one desire, and that is the best for the 87th and there is absolutely nothing personal behind it. In the course of conversation with Walter Wood, … it developed that he had suggested to Major Bestor Robbinson a different, and in his opinion, superior type of tent to be used in High Mountain altitudes. Bestor had definitely put himself on record as being in favor of the tent, which he himself had designed, and therefore refused to sign priority orders to produce zippers that could’ve been used on tents in… forthcoming experimental expeditions….

“Major Robinson is an individual,” Dole continued, “who so expresses himself that it leaves no room for argument when he is dealing with the uninitiated in the particular field which he is discussing. This does not mean that he is always right. In this case, I feel that the kindest description of his action could be stubbornness, but in my personal opinion, it’s a definite deterrent to the best interest of combat troops whose lives may be at stake. I do not feel that a man indicating these characteristics should be in a position of making final decisions.”

Yikes.

Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, not to mention War Department resistance and the occasional bit of internal squabbling, America’s mountaineers continued to make progress.

Bates had entered the Quartermaster Corps as a civilian. By the spring of 1942, the Army, recognizing his value to the war effort, had made him a captain, and he continued to oversee research and development. By then, he noted, “We had many prototypes of mountain, cold weather, and emergency equipment that had been adapted from civilian models for Army use. The supply division of the OQMG was eager to begin procuring cold weather clothing and equipment items for the winter of 1942-43, but buying our untested items and spending millions of dollars would result in serious errors, we were sure, and the quartermaster general backed us up. Procurement must await test results.”

One of the key factors that remained unexamined was how items fared in bitter cold. “With large scale procurement imminent,” Bates wrote, “it was felt essential that such tests be performed if a suitable locality could be found.… [f]or as the value of northern operations increased, so did the importance of clothing and emergency equipment … in the frigid areas.”    When Colonel Grice from the Quartermaster General’s Office approached the American Alpine Club during its spring council meeting and asked for their assistance, Bates was only too happy to help. 

As it so happened, Bates was familiar with a number of localities suitable for field tests in arctic cold. So was Bradford Washburn, who by now was assisting the Air Forces with the development of clothing for its pilots. The pair could think of no finer cold-weather test than North America’s highest peak: Mt. McKinley, as Denali was then called.

Incredibly remote, debilitatingly cold, with an altitude higher than 20,000 feet and subject to the continent’s fiercest weather, the mountain had only been summitted twice before. In 1913, an expedition of Alaskan locals had reached the mountain’s highest point. Nineteen years would pass before it was climbed again. 

It’s hard to overstate the audacity of the 1942 expedition. Even today, with well-established itineraries, modern gear and instantaneous weather reports, any attempt on Denali promises to provide an exercise in suffering. While they might have had the support of the American military behind them, the 1942 team was proposing to make a historic climb with items that had never withstood the rigors of high altitude or arctic cold just to test equipment. Climbing Denali was an enigma. It would not only stretch their mental and physical capabilities; in the event of an accident, there would be nobody who could come to their rescue.

The so-called Alaskan Test expedition included a blend of American Alpine Club, US and Canadian Army and Air Force, Medical Corps, Signal Corps and Quartermaster Corps personnel. Hardly had Jackman and Gabriel returned from the Rainier Test Expedition than they were assigned to join the Alaska party. Walter Wood was also part of the team. So was Terry Moore, Bates and Washburn’s Harvard Five companion. With the Quartermaster General’s support, the adventure quickly came together.

“Two months to the day after Colonel Grice’s meeting with The American Alpine Club,” Bates wrote, “all personnel were in Alaska….” Their directive was to test… well, to test everything one would need to climb a mountain like Denali. In all, they had some 30 items ready for close examination, mostly, according to Bates, “clothing and equipment, but also a mountain ration, cold weather soap, and such experimental medical issues as Chapstick and paper underwear.”

Paper underwear?

[Lance Blyth]

“Look, the military has a saying: if it’s a stupid idea, but it works, it’s not stupid. My favorite story on that is Bob Bates and the paper underwear on Denali. It seems stupid, but the idea was this:

“Okay, we’re gonna have these guys up in the mountains fighting. They’re wearing all this wool, and when your base layers get full of … get dirty, if you don’t replace them, you start getting skin diseases. They lose insulation value, and so on and so forth. So you have to change out, especially anything next to the skin underwear on a regular basis. So you have to move fresh clothing forward. You have to move the soil clothing back, you have to launder it and then do that again. That’s involved. That’s gonna take some supply effort. What if we could just give them disposable underwear and all we have to do is move new underwear forward?

“If it had worked, it wouldn’t have been a stupid idea but didn’t work. So it was stupid, but that’s the level they’re trying to get to. Literally how do we save the two mule loads a day that we’ll need to take fresh underwear up that we could otherwise use for ammunition? And how do we not have to have a field laundry in the middle of winter trying to get enough water and heat to wash clothes?”

So paper underwear it was. 

The expedition began, rations, chapstick, paper underwear and all, amidst a background of heightened urgency. On June 6, the Japanese had bombed Alaska’s Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, and soon thereafter continued their offensive by invading American soil—specifically, Kiska and Attu Islands in the Western Aleutians. On Kiska, they detained a small Naval crew, while on Attu, they captured an entire village, almost half of whom would die from malnutrition and starvation when they were  shipped  back to Japan as prisoners of war, where. Almost half of  the villagers would die from malnutrition and starvation. And as we’ll explore in a future episode, Kiska would come to play an important and profoundly tragic role in the story of the 10th Mountain Division.

The Japanese aggressions had disrupted the air support the team had planned for the trip, but they eventually managed to commandeer some bombers, and, in the middle of June, Wood and Washburn began parachuting loads onto the Muldrow Glacier, the 40-mile-long ribbon of ice that originates high on the mountain’s northeastern slope. The expedition then began in earnest, with the seventeen-member party departing Wonder Lake, a stunning body of water overshadowed, on rare clear days, by the massive, sprawling, perpetually glaciated mountain itself. 

The vertical rise from Jackson’s Hole to the summit of the Grand Teton is around 7,000 feet. From the base of Mt. Everest to its summit is 12,000 feet. Denali rises 18,000 feet from Wonder Lake to its top, and as the team began their thirty-mile approach by fording braided glacial streams and marching across swampy tundra toward their objective, they were forced to adjust their perspective to accommodate the mountain’s enormous scale. 

They also adjusted their attitudes. This was no normal climbing expedition. It was a field test, one that could have bearing on the outcome of the war. Seen through such a lens, the rigors of the approach took on a new light.  “This section of mosquito infested muskeg, marked only by small ponds and caribou trails, provided excellent ground for testing equipment designed for summer use in marshy northern areas,” Bates wrote.

“Rain, hail, and snow, as well as wind, provided sufficient variety to satisfy all of us,” he continued “Men let themselves be soaked to the skin to prove the value of water repellent materials, and at other times shivered to learn the minimum temperatures at which climbing boots, sleeping bags, and other items could be used.”

The mountain troops would have appreciated the climbers’ enthusiasm for their mission. “At one  point two of us, to our great disgust, were unable to walk for five days, so energetically had we tested some special boots,” Bates recalled. “But the skinned feet definitely served their purpose, for information was relayed to Washington by radio that changed the design of the boots and saved many men … from equally painful feet.”

After five arduous days, they reached  the Muldrow glacier itself. “Moving loads up the Muldrow taught us a lot about our sleds, snowshoes, ropes,  ice axes, stoves, and other gear,” Bates wrote, but the extreme conditions necessary to test items like the tents and sleeping bags and cold-weather clothing would have to wait for higher altitudes.

At 10,000 feet, the team split up for testing purposes. Nine men remained in a support capacity lower on the mountain, while the remaining eight continued to climb. The higher they went, the colder it got. By the time they reached 14,000 feet, they found Arctic winter in early July. “Daytime air temperatures were usually zero or below,” Bates would later write, “dropping at night to about 23° below Fahrenheit, while the snow an inch below the surface kept to a constant -17°.”

Most people who attempt Denali are content to focus on the climbing. For Bates and his colleagues, though, the climbing took a backseat to the larger mission. As they made their way up the mountain, different team members tested different foot gear . Bates wore mukluks. Others wore shoe packs or leather boots. They all wore crampons. And the higher they went, the more they learned, and the fuller their notebooks became with their observations. 

The testing extended to their food. At least one of the team members was not a fan.

Ad Carter had been helping to develop a mountain ration the troops could use in the field, and the climbers were using it on Denali. To minimize the weight the troops would need to carry, Bates noted that “water had been eliminated from the ration, even to the point of including dehydrated ice cream. The ration was a balanced one, but only if all parts of it were eaten. For instance, there was plenty of candy, which could be used on the trail, but little pure sugar.”

Captain Rex Gibson represented the Royal Canadian Army on the expedition, and he spoke “disparagingly,” as Bates recounted, “of the experimental Mountain Ration and the lack of what he called real food.”  

One of Bates’ great attributes was his empathy, and he made the grumbling Canadian his tentmate to keep an eye on him. A storm pinned the pair in their tent. Gibson continued his complaints, refusing his share of candy, and tossing and turning throughout the night.

The next morning, Bates awoke to Gibson’s unintelligible mumbling. When he roused himself from his bag to see what the fuss was about, he encountered a disturbing sight: Gibson, his breathing tortured, was unconscious, his eyes rolled back in his ashen, furrowed head, in the midst of what appeared to be a seizure.

“I was afraid,” Bates wrote, that “he was dying….”

Tearing open the tent door, Bates flung himself into the snow, shouting that Gibson was having convulsions. Soon, he and his teammates were plying the Canadian with heavily sugared tea, and over the course of the next four days, he gradually regained strength. When at last the storm abated, they began to move Gibson, who remained in obvious pain, down the mountain, cutting two dozen steps in steep ice to facilitate the descent.

“With 4000 feet dropping off below him,” Bates wrote, Gibson “moved with the instinct of a born climber. What agony that descent cost him we could only guess. Only a very courageous man and a great mountaineer could’ve put up with that suffering, for as we learned later he had fractured four vertebrae during the spasms and shortened his back by nearly 2 inches.”

The cause of Gibson’s convulsions turned out to be the mountain ration—or more specifically the candy, which contained the ration’s sugar and which Gibson had refused to eat. His spasms had been precipitated by a mix of high exertion and hypoglycemia—another lesson, learned the hard way, that would come to benefit the mountain troops. 

With Gibson safely returned to a lower altitude, the team continued their ascent, and, five weeks after embarking, Bates, Washburn and Moore, together with Bates’ partner from the Quartermaster General’s office, the famed Arctic explorer Einnar Nilsson, started their summit push. Higher and higher they climbed, through wind and bitter cold and thinning air, breaking trail through the tedious snows toward the top, all wearing different items of clothing and footwear as part of their unprecedented alpine experiment. At last, they reached a point where the mountain fell away on all sides, and they could go no higher. 

“Emotions,” Bates would later recall, “are mixed at such a time, of course. We admired the vastness of the area below us that showed through dappled clouds…  but most of all our thoughts were patriotic.  We were at the highest point in our country, a country at war. The flag proudly flown from an ice-axe seemed to be a symbol that the wilderness around us and the whole continent full of people beyond were united in the struggle for victory. … I felt our responsibility to do everything we could to help it.” 

Jackman joined two others on the summit the next day. More than just a historic event in the annals of American mountaineering, the ascent marked yet one more step in the vast, national effort to prepare the mountain troops for war. “We had given our clothing and equipment the most thorough arctic and mountain testing it could find in North America,” Bates wrote, “and when we all gathered at Basecamp, some days later, every man wrote his own evaluation of every item of equipment he had used. We had tested and photographed every item sent to us, including the paper underwear.” 

In all, the team tested more than 100 items. Some, like the paper underwear, didn’t make the cut. Others were deemed acceptable. Still others required additional tinkering. And by the time the team began their journey back to the Lower 48, Jackman was already hard at work compiling his report. 

“The tests were conducted at eleven points over a distance of approximately 50 miles in the Mt. McKinley area,” he wrote, “under conditions as follows.

Temperature: + 100 degrees to – 23 degrees.

Terrain: Woods, tundra, muskog, rocks, ridges, mountains, glacier ice cliffs, silted and clear water rivers

Weather: Snow (all kinds), rain, hailstorms, sultry heat, intense sunlight, and blizzards with winds of 50 mph.

“It is strongly recommended,” Jackman noted in his conclusions, “that advantage be taken of every opportunity to further develop, test, and improve arctic, mountain, and emergency clothing, equipment and food with the view of improving the utility and lessening the weight of such items, thereby increasing the mobility and improving the morale and the efficiency of the soldier.”

This time, the Army listened. “On our return,” Bates wrote, “all requested changes and items were incorporated as recommended and the ensuing specifications were approved.” 

The end of the expedition marked the beginning of the end of the testing, if not the testers’ relentless pace. 

Expeditions are a lot of things. An efficient way to test and develop gear in the midst of a war is not one of them. to avoid having to put another expedition together, Bates and his colleagues got creative.  They rented the cold chamber of the Eskimo Pie company, where the temperature was a constant 20° and could be lowered even further with the flick of a switch. 

Amidst rows of popsicles, chocolate-covered ice cream, and [other] frozen delights, they tested wool underwear, mittens, and survival suits, but even after they’d lowered the temperature to zero, it still took too long to get cold. 

“To speed up our cooling,” Bates would later write, “we would usually eat some confections off the shelves. ” He recalled watching his colleague, famed Arctic explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, “with his distinguished van Dyke beard, standing in long underwear, chewing a popsicle to increase his cooling and looking disdainfully at the rows of frozen desserts.”

The Eskimo Pie Company was an anomaly: a decidedly civilian facility adopted for testing out of  wartime expediency.  The majority of the testing, though, for the mountain materiel as for everything else in the Quartermaster’s purview, was conducted in one of seventeen facilities better suited for the job.

 [David Little]

“They had laboratories scattered all around the country to test various performances of anything from boots and boot wear to warmth of clothing or heat loss lost through your head. So it was the performance of a hat as a heat retaining article of clothing. Everything was tested and performance tested to an extreme that we really seldom do today.”

[Christian Beckwith]: “That really impressed me when I was looking over this and I’ve talked to some friends within the industry about the levels of scientific rigor that were being applied to the development of this material, and I don’t think that it has been equaled since World War II.”

“I’m not aware of any manufacturer that puts an individual in a refrigerated storage room at 40 below zero and has them stay there for 12 hours and measures their body temperature. We don’t do those kinds of tests anymore, but in 1941 and 42, we were testing mountaineering gear that way, sleeping bags, blankets so that we could provide the best to our soldiers.”

As Lance Blyth points out, the Army was not only incentivized to get it right–it had to get it right quickly, and at a scale that is almost unimaginable

[LB] 

“The time they’re doing this, the plan was for upwards of about eight to 10 complete mountain divisions. So they’re thinking and outfitting, you know, a hundred thousand personnel possibly they don’t know, but they have to go to the worst case scenario

“And mountain equipment wasn’t the only thing on the Army’s to-do list. From rucksacks to portable radios, carabiners to combat helmets, it all had to be developed, and it all had to pass the test. The difference with the mountain equipment, though, was that much of it had never been produced in this country, let alone by the Army.”

And mountain equipment wasn’t the only thing on the Army’s to-do list. From rucksacks to portable radios, carabiners to combat helmets, it all had to be developed, and it all had to pass the test. The difference with the mountain equipment, though, was that much of it had never been produced in this country, let alone by the Army.

Against such odds, and in the midst of the clearest battle between good and evil the world had ever known, Bates and his colleagues continued to work indefatigably on their mission. 

At times, their efforts met with mixed results. The initial designs for an ice axe, for example, included weld lines directly across rivet holes, which yielded, as Bill House later noted, “many breakages and heartfelt curses from the soldiers” not to mention an unfortunate pick angle that made the axe bounce when cutting steps. The ten-point crampons developed by the Office were so flimsy the points bent under a climber’s weight. And then there were Bestor Robinson’s tents—which, as a museum director, Sepp Scanlin knows all too well. 

[Sepp Scanlin]

“I think the one notable failure is probably the mountain tent, which is funny from a museum perspective. That’s probably the object that we all get offered the most is mountain tents and they’re all in really good shape, and I’m a hundred percent convinced they all survived because they hated them. All the good stuff they love, like mountain jackets are really hard to come by, but like you can get a mountain tent, no problem. It’s because nobody wanted one, so they just got rid of it.”

Robinson’s kept the moisture in as well as out. (“Had this tent been put up for civilian consumption,” observed Bates, “the complaints about it would have put the manufacturer out of business.”)

But the German-made, soft steel pitons Robinson had purchased from  Sporthaus Schuster for his climbs in the thirties were soon replaced by American-made models, including the first ring-angle pitons the world had ever known. Oval-shaped, French-made steel “snaplinks”  that had been fashionable among American climbers before the war were abandoned for lighter, stronger aluminum carabiners proudly made in the USA. 

Companies both large and small were in on the effort. They had to be: the War Production Board’s edicts concerning rationed materials made wartime contracts one of the few ways a company could survive. Remember Fritz Weissner, Bill House’s partner on the first ascents of Mt. Waddington and Devils Tower? The Army purchased 68,000 pounds of Wiessner’s WonderWax to go along with the 43,000 pairs of skis it ordered from Northland Skis. Producing such items was not only patriotic; it was good business. From October 1941 to June 1943, Northland’s sales to the Army totaled nearly half a million dollars—nearly $18 million today.

The conversion of civilian manufacturing to wartime production touched every aspect of American industry. You’ll recall from our last episode how John McCown, while preparing for his February 18 1945 ascent of Riva Ridge, deliberated how many pitons to bring on the climb. You’ll also recall that the pitons had been stamped with the words “US Ames” on their sides. That’s because they’d been made for the Army by the Ames Company, which had been making shovels since 1774. 

Ames also provided the Army with 11 million entrenching tools along with armor tank plating and shell casings. The company had never been in the business of making any of these things, but the specs were within their manufacturing wheelhouse. They bid, won the contracts and John McCown got his pitons.

Similarly, the American Fork and Hoe Company had been making farm implements since 1902. Once war broke out, they began providing the Army with everything from bayonets to shovels and machetes to piton hammers. While they might not have known anything about piton hammers before the war, they knew how to affix wooden handles to metal heads, and so the contract was theirs.

By far the single greatest contribution to mountaineering made in wartime was the nylon rope. 

Much to the relief of Paul Petzoldt’s partner Ralph Herron, who had fallen during the pair’s 1925 attempt on the Grand Teton’s still-unclimbed East Ridge, the lariat ropes in use in the Tetons in the 1920s could hold a fall, but they were plenty suspect and stiff by design: to successfully lasso a steer, the noose had to stay open. The transition to plant-based materials such as manila, sisal and hemp in the early 1930s was an improvement, but natural-fiber ropes were still cumbersome, heavy, susceptible to rotting from within, and, with minimal stretch to dissipate force, subject to breaking under load. They were also a rope-management nightmare: because they were spiral-braided, the ropes twisted upon themselves by default.

The DuPont Chemical Company had begun researching synthetic alternatives to natural fibers in 1927, and in 1935 it hit the jackpot when Wallace Hume Carothers successfully synthesized the first example of nylon. By 1938, the material had made its way into the bristles of toothbrushes and, far more profitably, women’s stockings (64 million pairs were sold during their first year on the market), but with the country’s entry into war, nearly all production of nylon was diverted for military use. 

As we’ve discussed, Bestor Robinson’s Yosemite climbing partner Dick Leonard had been studying the dynamics of ropes and belays since the 1930s. Now, as he worked alongside Robinson, Bates and House in the Research and Development Branch of the Quartermaster General’s Office, Leonard began to develop a rope the mountain troops could use for their climbs.

Japan’s invasion of the Philippines, which began the day after it bombed Pearl Harbor, halted the import of manila. Under Leonard’s direction, the Quartermaster General’s office had been testing the properties of alternative natural fibers when it received a new kind of rope from the largest rope manufacturing company in the world: the Plymouth Cordage Company out of Massachusetts. Plymouth had begun developing large-diameter nylon ropes for sawmills, and, with Leonard’s guidance they produced a smaller-diameter rope for climbing.

To help test it, Leonard reached out to the American Alpine Club’s Henry Hall, who quickly roped climbers into the affair.  

“In addition to the laboratory tests made on this rope by the Massachusetts Institute of technology,” the September 1942 report from Hall’s “New England Committee Appointed by the Quartermaster General for the Study of Winter and Mountaineering Equipment” read, “this committee, with the assistance of a group of climbers of the Harvard mountaineering club conducted field trials to determine the suitability of the rope under actual climbing conditions. Although the climbing was done in dry weather, the rope was also … used in a moist condition to simulate use in storm and on snow.”

Hall’s report noted that the rope was extremely strong and lighter than hemp or manila. It was soft and pliable, had generous stretch, and importantly did not absorb moisture when wet.

The lay of the rope, on the other hand, was uneven: “tight in places, medium in others, and extremely loose in still others.“ “The variation in lay was so great,” Hall noted, “that in places the rope was untwisted entirely, permitting the individual strands to kink.” It also frayed much more readily than a natural-fiber rope.

As a result, the report concluded, “The uneven structure of the rope and its poor wearing qualities make it unsuitable for climbing ropes. While a tightly laid nylon rope might overcome the first of these difficulties…, the second criticism, its poor wearing qualities, make it unsatisfactory as a climbing rope.”  The committee therefore recommended the abandonment of nylon for climbing ropes. 

Thank you, Sweet Jesus and all the angels in heaven above, for whatever you did to cause Leonard to disregard the Harvard boys’ skepticism—for disregard them he did.  

The results were spectacular. 

Stronger, lighter, and more abrasion resistant than natural fiber ropes, Leonard’s rope also absorbed less moisture and handled better. “With no exceptions the final choice of medium-lay bright nylon was found to be superior to the highest grades of Manila,” wrote House, who contributed to the design. As Chris Jones would later write in Climbing in North America, “When the combat troops … put nylon ropes to the test, they found them a genuine advance…. Manila rope failed after some dozen test falls. Nylon rope held more than 150 falls.” 

Bates was at work in DC when a sample arrived in the office. “Let’s try it,” someone said, so Bates tied off a desk as an anchor and prepared to rappel out of the second-floor window. “What none of us realized,” he would later recall in his autobiography, “was [how much it would] stretch…. As I went over the windowsill, my weight came on the rope and it [dropped] me well over a foot as [it] lengthened.” He quickly found himself suspended with his legs dangling outside the window of the office below. 

“Immediately there was a loud scream,” he continued, “that almost made me let go of the rope. The secretary at the window below thought she was witnessing a suicide. All the surrounding windows filled with faces as I rappeled to the ground.”

As Bates returned to his desk and began discussing the optimal amount of stretch with his office mates, Colonel Doriot and Pope Gregory arrived, looking, as Bates put it, “as expectant as boys on the first day of fishing season.”  

‘Bub, Bub,” Colonel Doriot commanded, “show the general your little trick.” Bates dutifully tied off the desk and did it again.

Climbers have been using nylon ropes ever since.

To Sepp Scanlin, the episode provides a number of insights.

[SS]

“Bob Bates’ testing of the rope outside the Pentagon. Having served in the Pentagon, I have an immense appreciation for wanting to jump out the windows at the Pentagon. To me that so typifies the mountaineering mentality, but also the mentality of how they’re solving these problems. Like what are we waiting for? Let’s get after this problem. I’m gonna see if this rope works. Right now.”

The military, climbers and private industry working in concert to develop the nylon rope is but one example of advancements in outdoor recreation made possible by the war effort.

Would Leonard’s rope have been developed during peacetime? Eventually, yes. But its genesis was the direct result of circumstances peacetime could never produce, and we the public remain the beneficiaries to this day. 

The conversion of industrial manufacturing into the arsenal of democracy would ripple forward into other sectors of society as well. Take, for example, the stoves Bates and company tested on their various expeditions. As David Witte notes in his forthcoming study, Equipping the 10th Mountain Division in World War II, “The ski patrols during the winter of 1940-1941 helped the Army realize that centralized messing facilities were not always available to soldiers.” For an infantryman who had to carry his material on his back, the Army needed a small, portable stove the soldier could use to cook his meals in the field. Problematically, the leading example of such stoves was the Primus, which was manufactured in Sweden.

W.C. Coleman had invented the first portable, gas-powered lantern in 1901 in his hometown of Wichita, Kansas. In 1905, his company took off when Coleman lamps were used to illuminate the first night football game west of the Mississippi. (For those of you dying to know, the Fairmount Shockers beat the Cooper Barrelmakers that night, 24 to 0.)

The Quartermaster Corps reached out to Coleman to develop an American version of the Primus. The result was the so-called “cold-climate stove,” which Witte notes “was rugged, easy to light at low temperatures without priming, and burned just about any type of liquid fuel including leaded for around two hours on a full tank. It weighed a mere 38 ounces.’”

“What truly made the stove famous,” Witte continued, “was war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s 15 news articles that he wrote about it. He called the stove one of two of the most important pieces of non-combat equipment in World War II, with the other being the Jeep. Sometime just before September 1944, the Coleman Company sent Pyle a handmade [stove], engraved with his name and chromium-plated. Pyle of course wrote about this stove and the American people ate it up as a truly amazing invention.”

As Sepp  points out, the stove not only expanded Coleman’s manufacturing horizons. It also created a new product line that would be perfectly aligned with a new customer base once the war was over. 

[Sepp Scanlin]

“The other good thing about the mountain stove is it absolutely puts Coleman camp company on the map. They’re the ones that patented and get it out there, and they’re Johnny on the spot because you can find like men’s magazines in 1945 selling, as they called it, the GI pocket stove, and I think Coleman would not be the company that they’re today had it not been for the large scale adoption of that stove. Like everyone had those stoves after the war. They all loved them. They had testimonials from GI after GI and magazines in 45, 46, and 47 about the stove. Everybody wanted one.”

Testing, refining, evolving, and producing everything a soldier would need for mountain warfare in the middle of the war itself had  subjected clothing and equipment to design pressures that are simply absent during times of peace. By the fall of 1942, as the mountain troops were getting ready to occupy their new base at Camp Hale high in the Colorado Rockies, the stove, rope and much of the rest of the equipment they’d need for their training were nearing completion. Though it would take another year for all the major items developed by the Quartermaster’s office to get approved—and even longer for the items to make it to the soldiers overseas—the furious efforts of Bates and his companions to outfit the mountain troops had, by this point, largely come to fruition.

It had been nothing short of a monumental endeavor. 

“What came of all this effort?” Bates asked. “Certainly not perfect clothing, equipment, and rations but, for the most part, greatly improved items, which became available to the fighting  men much sooner than had a conventional research and development program been followed.” 

The testing process expedited by Doriot and the Quartermaster General’s office yielded products and ideas that are still in vogue today. They mainstreamed the concept of layering systems to keep the soldiers warm and dry. They developed snow goggles specifically designed to cut out ultra-violet rays at high altitudes. They perfected dehydrated rations of powdered soups, cheese, vegetables, and concentrated meats, and dialed in the caloric intake soldiers would need in the mountains.

Bates’ personal pet peeve–that the v-necked sweaters he used on expeditions left his neck cold in alpine conditions–led to the development of the button-neck sweater, which could be opened for ventilation or buttoned closed. He and his teammates fought to have big pockets included on their Denali jackets; these same jackets, with minor modifications, became the Army-issue field jacket still in use today. In fact, the repercussions of their testing and development continue to echo within the Army.

[Lance blyth]

“They get the initial tronche of ski equipment and they develop a mountain jacket and mountain pants, and then the quartermaster says we’re building too many different sets of clothing here. We need to concentrate. So they develop a thing called a field uniform. It’s basically cargo pants and a jacket to go over the basic uniform and a cap and leather boots. That field uniform is, to this day, the basic uniform of all the military services: cargo pants, a jacket of some sort, leather boots and a cap—and that comes out of the work done for the 10th Mountain Division.”

Bates helped develop the first instance of body armor to protect the troops from mortar and artillery fire. He also helped develop a one-piece plastic suit for use in the Aleutian islands—the predecessor to today’s wetsuit.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of their accomplishments. 

[Sepp scanlin]

“There was no higher level of equipment ever developed during the Second World War than it was for the mountain troops. I mean, that is the quote in their final report.

It says, ‘Kit included a full set of ski equipment, snowshoes, climbing gear, special packs, special cooking apparatus, and various other items, which were not general issue. The total array and bulk of this equipment was a little staggering, but the equipment of the mountain soldier was the largest and most highly specialized group of items prepared for any combat unit in the army. The burden of training of mountain troops was correspondingly great in the preparation of the equipment for issue in advance of this training offered many problems.’

“So again, they summarized all of what they faced, but they saw it of such value that they went through this crazy task and did it.”

Were we to content ourselves with crediting American mountaineers for  the contributions they made during wartime, we could end our story here. But today’s story doesn’t end here, for the entire process of developing the material for the 10th Mountain Division would continue to affect America long after the soldiers had put down their arms.

 [Sepp Scanlin]

“Everything they did in combat is phenomenal, but the largest single contribution they’ve given to the nation is the development of equipment. Yes, they did profound things on the battlefield, but the fact that we have mountaineering equipment, we have mountain stoves, we have mummy down sleeping bags that we do, layered clothing system for cold weather, all of that comes out of these experiments from the 10th Mountain Division in World War II. And it is something that transcends the Army.”

Precisely how, you might ask, did the development of equipment for the mountain troops transcend the Army? Let us count the ways.

One. It allowed the military to prepare a new generation of Americans to operate with relative comfort in the outdoors. 

[David little]

“Because we had trained 30,000 guys up at Camp Hale, we had a whole new breed of mountain climbers and skiers and outdoor enthusiasts, and we had trained 8 million soldiers on how to camp outdoors and maybe not make it fun, but make it survivable and somewhat enjoyable.”

Two. It introduced companies that that had previously never made outdoor equipment to new manufacturing opportunities. 

[Lance blyth]

“All these little companies suddenly get involved in production of this equipment. It keeps many of these outdoor companies going through the war, and I think it shows many of them, Hey, there might be a market here.”

Three. Post war, many of the items developed for the mountain troops became Army surplus.

[Lance blyth]

“They produce all this skiing and mountaineering equipment that mind you, most of it never goes overseas, and I’ve seen numbers as high as a hundred thousand, 150,000 sets of skis and ski park is and so forth. After the war, it stays in the states so it becomes surplus.”

Four. In the economic boom that followed the war, soldiers were able to purchase the equipment they’d trained on for pennies on the dollars.

[David little]

“You could buy a mountain tent for a dollar and a half. You could buy a pair of skis, poles, and boots for $5. In 1940, that was a $45 purchase. Now you could buy it for $5. In 1940, the average income in the United States was around $29 a month. 1946, we were at $313 a month as the average income in the US. So, we had more money and these surplus items at least were significantly cheaper.”

Five. The country’s economic prosperity coupled with the affordability of the Army surplus clothing and equipment allowed the veterans to bring their families skiing and camping and hiking and climbing, which in turn introduced future generations to the outdoors.

[David little]

“There’s a whole generation my age that learned to camp in the Boy Scouts, sleeping in old Army surplus tents. It was what we used. It was affordable.”

Six. The Army surplus equipment begat a new wave of outdoor industry innovation.

[Lance Blyth]

“John Middendorf, the climbing historian, has pointed out that the technique follows technology, that you gotta have the technology to move the technique forward, and so this is the initial technology dump into the outdoor industry. After 1945, you get the crude army pitons that you go, wait a minute. These could be much thinner and smaller and much more usable, but you don’t know that unless you have that piece of technology to begin with easily available. You don’t take that step.”

[David Little]

“The guy said, gee, we can do this better, and that opened up an industry for improvements. Ames made a good ice ax, but there’s other folks that could make a better one that were better for different applications. For example, Gerry Outdoor Gear. Gerry Cunningham was a 10th mountain soldier who in 1946 came back to Boulder, Colorado and he started modifying US army backpacks to be more comfortable because he remembered where that backpack rubbed on his back and his hips, so he said, I can do this better.”

Bill Bowerman was a 10th Mountain Division veteran who became the head track coach at the University of Oregon after the war. In 1964, he co-founded a company that would come to be known as Nike. As a veteran of the 10th, he had extensive experience with the rubber sole Ad Carter, Albert Jackman and Bob Bates had developed.

[Sepp Scanlin]

“With Bill Bowerman being the inventor of the waffle sole running shoe, how much did he participate in the fielding of the mountain boot and begin to look at treads and see the significance they played in that environment so that when he’s dealing with it at Oregon as a track coach, he says, you know, we can do something about this and then begins to try to make his own running sole. There’s so many of those elements that I think we can’t even begin to understand the world without that influence point that comes out of this development of the division in World War II.”

[David Little]

“There are a number of companies all across this country that took skills they learned during World War II and turned them into products and industries that they could enjoy and develop in the fifties and sixties and seventies, and it opened up our world for recreation outdoors. I think we can blame the 10th Mountain Division for the growth in the climbing industry, the ski industry, general outdoor recreation, and just the love of the mountains. I think that’s what comes back to for them.“

Bob Bates, Bestor Robinson, Bill House, Dick Leonard, and the handful of other mountaineers who labored so diligently on behalf of the mountain troops weren’t in it for the credit. As a result, their contributions have largely been overlooked in the story of the 10th.  And yet my ability to go outdoors and do the things I love is made possible, in no small part, by them.

[Dave Little]

“If you’re a skier, if you’re a snowboarder, if you like to summer camp or winter camp, especially winter camp, if you’re a climber or even just a recreational hiker, the fathers or grandfathers of your recreational sport were these US Army soldiers. They touch almost everything you use, but they’re invisible on the surface. You have to look beneath. You have to look at the story behind why we have traction soles on our climbing shoes, and sure enough, 10th Mountain’s there. Why we use a nylon climbing rope. Sure enough, 10th Mountain’s there. Why? Black Diamond puts a sharp point on the backside of their climbing axe. Sure enough, 10th Mountain’s there. It’s all these aspects of outdoor sport and recreation that we take for granted, but 80 years ago, it was high tech, well developed and unknown to the rest of the world.”

And so I say to these grandfathers of the mountains, these titans of all I hold dear: thank you. Thank you for your service and your tireless work. Thank you for your humility, your collaboration, your creativity, your genius, your passion, your sweat and your tears. Thank you for helping to win the war and the peace that followed. Everything  I treasure outdoors–the friendships and the solace, the fitness and the mental clarity, the transcendence, the wonder, the joy and the awe—owes a debt of gratitude to you. 

May this benediction find you on a celestial ridgeline, running it out handjam after perfect handjam or bounding down slopes of endless powder on your seven-foot skis, the day approaching sunset, the light golden, illuminating all you have wrought.

—

And that concludes our examination of the equipment developed for the mountain troops. Thank you, dear listener, for tuning in. Thanks as well go out to the 10th Mountain Division Descendants for inviting me to speak in Leadville, Colorado, and to the Friends of the Sawtooth Avalanche Center for having me speak in Sun Valley. If you’d like to book a presentation, go to my website, christianbeckwtih.com and click on the Presentations tab. I love sharing the story of the 10th, and for nonprofits, it makes a great fundraiser. 

A round of applause goes out to those intrepid folks who joined us for the first annual Ninety-Pound Rucksack Challenge, as well as to Lieutenant Colonel Marc Cleveland, Master Sergeant Dan Fields, and the soldiers of the 10th who let me tag along on the Hale to Vail Traverse: Major Sam Colby, Lieutenant Colonel Greg Eldridge, Major Colin Grant, Captains Ian Brams, Sam Klausner and Max Burbidge, First lieutenants Sayer Zimmerman and Kameron Lunde, Staff Sergeant Cameron Daniels, Specialist Sam Shomento, nd private first class Rylan Parsons. To them I say, Hooah! And see you next year. 

We are indebted as always to our community of patrons. A warm welcome goes out to our newest members, Jeff Moss, Craig Rial, Brian Florence, Chris Bunting, James Lane, Day Gigliotti, Louise and Trent Strumph, Abigail Karin, Laura Godlewski, Christopher Whitecotton, Dave Mention, Max Fisher, Mark Maier, Justin Angleman, Clifford Mallory, Michael Coss, Albert Colaianni, Melissa McCendon, Ed Pak, Lauren Fitzpatrick, Stefan Bergill, Elliot Becker, Willie Lafferty, Kate Kuzminski, Ryan Schmid, Tom Hart, ronald Stradiotto, Luc Renault, Scott Hendrick, Kevin Higgin, Michael McKelmic, and Tim Orr. These folks helped underwrite all the research that went into this episode. If you’d like to help support the show, please go to christianbeckwith.com, click the bring orange patreon button, and become an active part of our story. 

Thanks to our sponsors, CiloGear and the 10th Mountain Whiskey and Spirits Company; our partners, The 10th Mountain Division Foundation, the Denver Public Library, the American Alpine Club and the 10th Mountain Division Descendants; and our advisory board members, Lance Blythe, McKay Jenkins, Chris Juergens, Jeff Leich, David Little, Sepp Scanlin, Keli Schmid and Doug Schmidt. 

Until next time, thanks again for joining, and I hope you get outside and do something wild today. Remember, climbing and ski mountaineering are dangerous—but without risk, there is no adventure. Have fun, stay safe, and stay in touch.