Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  Did the 10th Mountain Division create exceptional men, or was it the other way around? Certainly, exceptional people were drawn to the mountain troops in the first place. And Minnie Dole’s insistence on a selective process (at least in the beginning) guaranteed that the 10th would not be like other Army divisions. Friedl Pfeifer and Paul Petzoldt, for example, were consummate mountain men before the Army and no doubt would have continued their careers after the war, whether or not they’d joined the mountain troops. Others, perhaps, were more directly shaped by their mountain training—the thousands of nonskiers, for example, who learned from the experts and came to love the snow and cold, and the feel of warm rock under their hands. An extraordinary number of them came out of the service, despite the horrors they’d seen, with a preternatural optimism. However difficult the task, they seemed to have the attitude, “This can’t be so hard; we can get this done.”

  Many of these men seem now to have been endowed with the best qualities in the American character: individualism and cooperation, independence and entrepreneurship, inventiveness and a need for freedom—in this case the freedom of the hills. The “romance” of war did not infect them. Very few stayed in the military after the war. Their loyalties were to the mountains, to their comrades, and to what Fritz Benedict described as “the life you were going to lead, that was the important thing.”

  Participation in World War II did not, by and large, pose a moral dilemma for most of these men. Not the way that war today inspires ambivalence. The stakes were clear: Either the democracies rallied to defeat fascism, or they faced the possibility of a world in which moral choices were not allowed a man of conscience. After helping to ensure the outcome in Italy, David Brower was free to follow his sense of duty in the aid of a ravaged natural world. While still overseas, he wrote what he called a “lament” and sent it to the Sierra Club Bulletin in Berkeley. It began:

  Death isn’t a pleasant thing to see, but you can get used to it. You may get so that you can just count the bodies; or you may study them academically, to see just how death occurred. The waste of human future is too appalling to ponder upon. Besides, you know that the death of a man is irrevocable. However tragic it may be that he was young and died unnecessarily on a battlefield, you can, because of that irrevocability, learn to accept it.

  The death Brower refers to was meant to be both literal and metaphorical. He goes on:

  This is not the only death I have seen. In such parts of the mountains of Italy, Austria, Switzerland and Yugoslavia as I have been able to observe are the shattered remains of what must have been beautiful wildernesses. These wild places had their one-time inaccessibility to defend them—their precipices, mountain torrents, their glaciers and forests. But they lost their immunity; they felt the ravages of a conqueror. And now they’re dead. Their death isn’t irrevocable, as is that of [a] man; but still, in time, you become callused to it and merely wonder, academically, what caused the demise.

  The Bulletin published Brower’s essay under the title “How to Kill a Wilderness.” David Brower’s fifty-five-year run as point man and conscience of the conservation movement had begun.

  Brower had witnessed first-hand the scars of two world wars on the once-pristine Alps. But even more devastating to true wilderness, he concluded, were the degradations inflicted by the well-intentioned but heedless “improving” of God’s handiwork: the ubiquitous trails and roads; the dams and flumes and penstocks leading to powerhouses and power lines webbing the landscape; the houses and huts and even hotels built right up on the highest ridge-lines; the mining excavation and debris; and the myriad fortifications of war.

  As a young man, Brower had spent five whole summers, and parts of many others, in the Sierra high country. He led his blind mother on long walks through tall-grass meadows, describing everything he saw. He made seventy first ascents on Sierra rock. He and his friends could walk for days, living on beans and onions, without seeing another soul. He knew the “Range of Light” as John Muir, the Sierra Club’s first president (1892–1914), knew it. Dave Brower believed in the club’s motto: “To explore, enjoy, and render accessible the Sierra Nevada and other scenic resources of the United States.”

  Compared with the Alps, the Sierra remained relatively unspoiled. But even then, Brower worried about “the apparently democratic notion that you must produce the greatest good for the greatest number.” Where wildness was concerned, greater numbers—of trails, roads, vehicles, people—inevitably meant greater damage, and the shrinking of a finite resource. “Render accessible” therefore became problematic, and Brower, a board member since 1941, successfully lobbied to change the wording to “enjoy and preserve.”

  After the war, in the midst of the unprecedented explosion in outdoor recreation, Brower helped refocus the club’s mission to one of preservation—of air, water, soil, and particularly, of wilderness. Once opened up (to logging, mining, and commercial skiing, for example), he realized, wilderness was effectively gone—dead. In the decades to come he would transform his beloved Sierra Club from a regional hiking club with two thousand members to the world’s most powerful environmental organization with a roster today of over seven hundred thousand members. He led the fight to create the Wilderness Act, which passed Congress in 1964 and has to date set aside over one hundred million acres of wild land in Alaska and the Lower 48. He succeeded in stopping the building of dams in Dinosaur National Monument and in the Grand Canyon. (Although in saving the Grand, to his eternal regret, he believed he had bargained away the equally spectacular Glen Canyon of the Colorado.) He steered the club into publishing politically powerful books of photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and others, books that spotlighted the beauties of the American continent and the dangers facing them. He traveled and spoke ceaselessly, right up until his death in 2000 at the age of eighty-eight. The postwar life and work would not make you think right away of the soldier. He spoke softly, ironically, often with a self-deprecating humor. But he was a soldier, a warrior for a few years in the service of democracy, and then for the rest of his life, a warrior for wilderness.

  One of the first projects Brower tackled on coming home from Italy was the designation of Southern California’s highest mountain, the 11,502-foot San Gorgonio Mountain, as off-limits to development. Conservationists hailed the 1947 decision to protect the big peak northwest of Palm Springs. Others, including Harry Poschman, hated it. Harry had spent countless hours as a young man skiing and winter camping on Gorgonio’s bald dome. He’d always hoped that some day ski lifts would make his ascents easier.

  Controversy found the outspoken Brower ever after. In 1952, he was named the Sierra Club’s first executive director by then-president Dick Leonard, the same Dick Leonard who contributed so much to the 10th’s development and testing of the nylon climbing rope. But by 1969, in a battle over a nuclear power plant on California’s central coast, Leonard refused to support his old climbing partner, and the board voted to fire Brower. Undaunted, Brower started Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute, which together help foster environmental activism in other countries and broaden the perspective of Americans on how their actions affect the world ecosystem. Dave Brower was too modest to admit it, but he became his heroes, became the John Muir, the Henry David Thoreau of the second half of the twentieth century. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn’t win it, but he succeeded, perhaps as much as the first photographs of Earth from space had, in changing the way earthlings see their world.

  Brower found himself on the opposite side of the fence from some of the 10th alumni who were carving new ski areas out of the forest lands. But he kept skiing himself, the way he always had, in the backcountry with skins and a rucksack and an explorer’s eye. Similarly, he witnessed an invasion of sport climbers—brought on in part by the nylon rope—to the crags, and most particularly to his sacred Yosemite Valley. There was nothing he could do to stop them. Nor would he have wanted to, so long as these new converts t
o the mountains tread lightly and left no scars. He believed in “a new renaissance”: “The old one found a way to exploit. The new one has discovered the earth’s limits. Knowing them, we may learn anew what compassion and beauty are, and pause to listen to the earth’s music.”

  In 1994, Paul Petzoldt set out with friends on what he hoped would be a seventieth anniversary climb of his beloved Grand Teton, a 13,770-foot-high shark’s fin soaring above Jackson Hole. The sixtieth anniversary ascent ten years earlier had gone swimmingly: up to the glacier the first afternoon, then on summit day, roped together and working deliberately up the knife-edge Petzoldt Ridge to the top, and down again on the route he had pioneered in 1924. This time around, things did not go as well. Petzoldt’s glaucoma had progressed so that his climbing, even with the help of friends, slowed to a snail’s pace. The group had to turn back at 11,000 feet. The decision was Paul’s. He took the setback with typical grace, commenting, “There are old climbers, and there are bold climbers. But there are no old, bold climbers.”

  It was a smart, safe decision, the kind of judgment call that, along with boldness and great strength, characterized Petzoldt’s career as a guide and teacher. After the war Paul returned to his guiding business in Wyoming. People from around the world wanted to climb the sharp spires in the Tetons group, and Petzoldt made a decent living guiding them. He further enhanced his reputation for innovative rescue work (a reputation burnished in the 10th) on a couple of high-profile rescues in the 1950s. One involved a risky winter climb deep inside Grand Teton National Park to the spot where a DC-3 passenger plane had crashed on the snowy flank of Mount Moran. The rescuers found no one left alive. The other one, on Devils Tower in northeastern Wyoming, dragged on for days and was attended by television cameras, search lights, and a national media horde. A stunt artist had parachuted onto the summit of the sheer-sided Tower but didn’t know how to get down from there. Navy guns were brought in to shoot ropes up 1,000 vertical feet to the man, but when that didn’t work, Petzoldt and a hotshot rescue crew had to climb up to get him. By this time, the media frenzy was in full swing. Searchlights blinded the climbers and their hapless charge on the painstaking rappel down. Petzoldt remembers thinking he wanted to roll rocks down on the insensitive cameramen. “We got a lot of loot out of that one, though,” Petzoldt said, with a twinkle, of the food and whiskey and Chesterfield cigarettes that had been dropped by local pilots to sustain the man during his ordeal.

  Even more than guiding, Petzoldt believed in teaching. In the early 1960s, he helped bring the Outward Bound School from its birthplace in England to the United States. His was the perfect personality—magnetic, forceful, and extremely able—to implement the school’s twenty-six-day wilderness courses, and in 1962 the Colorado Outward Bound School was born. For chief instructor, Petzoldt hired Tap Tapley, the Sun Valley ski patroller and fellow 10th vet famous for his survival skills (and for a few legends, including the shooting down of low-flying aircraft with bow and arrow). Together they designed the school’s recipe for life-affirming adventure. The courses thrust people together in physically demanding settings, winter or summer. Climbing, skiing, and extended backpacking trips led—now and then through a personal heart of darkness—to new awareness of one’s capabilities and new appreciation for the natural world. The results were not entirely dissimilar to the way recruits bonded at Camp Hale. They even had a motto—“No whining”—that could have come from the 10th’s rigorous time at Hale. Coincidentally, the Outward Bound School’s main Colorado base camp was for years located in Leadville, just south of Tennessee Pass and the 10th’s abandoned camp.

  With the passage of the Wilderness Act, Petzoldt felt an additional responsibility to teach a backcountry ethic that would later be called “leave no trace.” His inspiration came from the wording of the act itself, where wilderness is defined as a place “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” This meant, according to Petzoldt, that “the time-honored practices of legendary outdoorsmen and mountain guides [and, one might add, World War II mountain soldiers] were no longer acceptable: no longer break off pine boughs for beds, dig trenches around tents, build bonfires in a circle of rocks, pollute streams and lakes with cooking grease and soap or litter campsites with glass, tin and foil.”

  There was no bible for such a code, so Petzoldt wrote The Wilderness Handbook. And in 1965 he broke away from Outward Bound and formed his own school, the National Outdoor Leadership School, or NOLS, to train new generations of guides and teachers. Typically generous, Petzoldt turned almost no one away, instead scribbling “pay back when able” scholarships for students with no money. Petzoldt based NOLS in Lander, Wyoming, hard by the east escarpment of the Wind River Range, a fiercely wild and largely uninhabited mountain range protected by three Wilderness Areas. NOLS graduates went forth to man the proliferation of postwar institutions devoted to outdoor education, experiential education, adventure travel, and ecotourism. With Tapley’s help, NOLS developed programs in Alaska and the Yukon, in Mexico, Patagonia, India, Africa, and Australia.

  In 1977, as David Brower had been from the Sierra Club, Paul Petzoldt was ousted from NOLS by his very own board of directors. Nevermind. Petzoldt, like Brower, simply started anew, creating the Wilderness Education Association, which provides courses through colleges and universities for future outdoor professionals in the fields of recreation, forestry, and conservation.

  Like a lot of climbers, Paul Petzoldt had a mind for organization. The activist David Brower dreamed of a society that knew the value of its wild heart. Petzoldt organized an army to live Brower’s dream. Bill Bowerman (G/86) had a genius for innovation. After the war, he returned to his alma mater, the University of Oregon, to coach the track and field team there, winning NCAA championships in 1962, 1964, 1965, and 1970. He trained thirty-three Olympians and sixty-eight all-Americans, and coached the 1972 U.S. Olympic track team.

  The fiery Bowerman was not just a great coach who attracted great athletes to his program; he was a crusader for physical fitness, a value that was cemented by the 10th’s training and its impact in Italy. In the 1960s he started jogging and racing programs throughout Oregon that bloomed into a national running craze, a movement that led directly to the boom in marathoning, to triathlons, and to ultramarathons nonstop across whole mountain ranges. Bowerman became a kind of pied piper of the running movement, having an impact parallel to that of James Fixx and his seminal 1977 bestseller, The Complete Book of Running.

  But even that influence, huge as it was, pales compared with the revolution Bowerman sparked in the design and marketing of athletic shoes, indeed in the shaping of contemporary consumer culture. The story is legend now, apparently true, and is told in reverential tones in boardrooms and on basketball courts and track infields around the world. It happened in 1972. Bowerman and a former athlete of his named Phil Knight had set up a small business importing running shoes from the Japanese company Onitsuki Tiger. Bowerman’s athletes liked the shoes, but everyone agreed there were no models anywhere that gave good traction on Eugene’s famously muddy running trails. Knight and Bowerman settled into the latter’s kitchen one morning with a batch of latex rubber, a bit of leather, some glue, and Bill’s wife’s waffle iron. The waffle iron was not fit thereafter for cooking breakfast, but the result of their tinkering was the world’s first molded waffle outsole. Bowerman and Knight each chipped in $500 and built three hundred pairs of running shoes in Bowerman’s garage. Four of the top seven finishers in the 1972 Olympic marathon wore those shoes, which by then were selling under the name Nike.

  Nike, which Bowerman co-founded, took the manufacture of athletic shoes to unheard-of places in terms of performance science; they invented the wedge heel and the cushioned insole, among other innovations. They built shoes for every conceivable specialty, including climbing, hiking, bicycling, kayaking, trail running, beachcombing, and river rafting—all of the new outdoor passions except s
kiing, it seemed—on top of the traditional court sports. Even more telling culturally, Bowerman and Knight moved athletic shoes into the realm of fashion. The Nike swoosh, a near-universal symbol of cool, became a paradigm of the new global economy. Bill Bowerman died a wealthy man in 1999 at the age of eighty-eight, having given the world (according to Damian Cave writing for Salon.com) “a new way of looking at feet, a reason to exercise, and a new form of cultural expression.”

  Meanwhile, in Aspen, there were some who felt the roaring success of the postwar ski industry had gone too far. By the 1970s, real estate had replaced ski lessons and lift tickets as the engine driving ski-town economies. The ski culture was evolving away from the adventure and athleticism of the early 10th Mountain cadres and toward a safe and predictable, amusement-park experience, one among many recreation options in a resort setting. Many of the pioneers, including Pete Seibert and Friedl Pfeifer, had long since been eased out of management in favor of corporate, bottom-line types. Skiing was becoming less a way of life than a business, an amenity.

  Fritz Benedict, of the 126th Engineers and Aspen, had contributed as much as any man to the rapid development of Colorado skiing, but he, too, came eventually to decry the crowds and the cars, the industrialization of the sport he loved. He’d “discovered” Aspen before the war, before Pfeifer and Knowlton, when he hitchhiked up from Arizona, with his backpack and his skis, for the 1941 National Championships on Roch Run. At the time, Fritz was a student at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona. When he moved permanently to Aspen in September 1945, he was the town’s only architect.

  Benedict’s organic, Wrightian stamp can be found on scores of buildings in Aspen, from the Sundeck restaurant atop the ski mountain to the Prairie-style Pitkin County library to the first passive solar house (1946) built in the valley. From the beginning he was asked to contribute to base villages at many of Colorado’s flagship resorts: Vail in 1962, Snowmass in 1967, Breckenridge in 1971, Winter Park, and Steamboat. At Snowmass, Fritz envisioned a car-free village, like the ones at Zermatt and Saas Fe in Switzerland, with lodging right on the slopes so that “kids can ski home without ever crossing a road.” The slopeside lodging was indeed built and became a model for future designers. But other parts of the plan were too far ahead of their time; he had underestimated the power of the automobile in shaping American design. The pedestrian village was scrapped, and in its place a hideous heated roadway, called Snowmelt Road, was constructed to get the cars up to Fritz’s lodges.