About Ninety-Pound Rucksack

For students of history, Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine has an eerie parallel: the Soviet Union’s 1939 invasion of Finland, which played out before a global audience as small bands of Finnish soldiers in white camo lobbed molotov cocktails into tank cockpits, then melted back into the forest on skis. The Finns’ guerilla sorties disrupted Soviet advances for three and a half months before being overwhelmed by a 4-to-1 advantage—and sparked the creation of the 10th Mountain Division, a gritty unit of climbers and skiers who trained for more than two years in the Colorado Rockies (often wearing ninety-pound “rucksacks,” or backpacks) to fight the Axis powers in extreme cold and mountainous terrain.

The story of the 10th is famous for good reason. Not only did its insertion into the war help end Germany’s occupation of Italy; post-war, its veterans founded and developed ski areas across America, started companies like NOLS and Nike and launched the fields of avalanche science and wilderness rescue.  

Ninety-Pound Rucksack is a podcast that examines the stories that made the unit famous as well as those history has forgotten. Equal parts real-time research, intimate conversation and revelatory journalism, Ninety-Pound Rucksack explores not only the conventional wisdom about the 10th, but the transformative power of the mountains to forge a collective identity among the mountain troops—and to ignite a passion for the outdoors that reshaped American society in the process.