WEST VIRGINIA
Ellie
A trail mark of love
The mountains teach Johnnie how to survive.
Ellie gives him a reason to come home.
He meets Ellie in West Virginia, a farm girl whose world is different from the Adirondacks he knows. What begins quietly becomes the love story at the heart of The Tenth Trail Mark.
Before Johnnie leaves for war, Ellie slips a silver St. Andrew's Cross around his neck.
A trail mark of another kind.
Something to carry into the mountains.
Something to guide him home.
And when Johnnie tells her—
“See you at the top.”
—the words have changed.
For Ellie, they mean something very simple:
I love you more.
THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE TENTH
The Men Beside Him
Johnnie goes to war carrying Ellie's cross.
But he doesn't climb the mountains alone.
There is Mineo. Hogan. Luby.
Men from different places and different lives, thrown together by war and transformed into something closer than friends.
They train together. Freeze together. Joke when there is nothing funny. Carry one another when someone can no longer walk.
Their friendship gives Johnnie's war its humor, its warmth—and eventually, its cost.
Because when the mountains of Italy finally rise in front of them, each man understands something the Army cannot teach:
The man beside you may be the reason you make it home.
Joe Looby · The Tenth Series
The TenthTrail Mark
The story behind the story
Explore the mountains, people, and history that inspired The Tenth Trail Mark—and the family story that led me to write it.
LAKE PLACID · THE ADIRONDACKS
The Trail Mark
Before they were soldiers, they were boys in the mountains.
In The Tenth Trail Mark, Johnnie Grey grows up in Depression-era Lake Placid, learning to hunt, ski, climb, and find his way through the Adirondack wilderness.
Johnnie is fictional.
The world that shaped him is real.
A trail mark is practical. It tells you someone came this way before you—and found a way through.
For Johnnie and his childhood friend Edgar Darby, the mountains begin as freedom. They race down the ski hill, explore the woods, and test themselves against a world that seems limitless.
At the bottom of every run comes the same call:
“See you at the top.”
At first, it's simply a challenge, a promise, and an invitation.
Neither boy yet understands how much those words will come to mean.
CAMP HALE · COLORADO
The Mountain Soldiers
America needed soldiers who could fight where ordinary armies could not.
The Army built Camp Hale at 9,200 feet in the Colorado Rockies and recruited men who knew the mountains—skiers, climbers and mountaineers.
They trained in bitter cold and thin air, climbing toward 13,000-foot summits with heavy rucksacks and hauling weapons through deep snow.
The mountains weren't simply where they trained.
The mountains were the weapon they were learning to use.
SENECA ROCKS · WEST VIRGINIA
After the snow came the rock.
At Seneca Rocks, the men learned to climb day and night, in rain and ice, sometimes trusting their lives to little more than a rope—and the man on its other end.
If skiing taught them how to fall,
climbing taught them how to hold on.
They were being prepared for a mission almost no other unit in the Army could perform.
NORTHERN ITALY · 1945
The Forgotten Front
By early 1945, the Allied advance through Italy had stalled beneath the Apennine Mountains.
The Germans held the heights.
Their artillery commanded the roads below.
Three previous attempts to take and hold Mount Belvedere had failed.
Then the 10th Mountain Division arrived.
FEBRUARY 19, 1945
Always Forward
On the night of February 19, about 190 men of Company I were among the first wave assaulting Mount Belvedere.
Before they crossed the line of departure, they were given two extraordinary orders.
EMPTY YOUR RIFLES.
They would climb toward the German defenses through darkness with empty chambers.
One accidental shot.
One muzzle flash.
One terrified finger on a trigger.
Any of them could wake the mountain.
In the darkness, surprise was their protection.
Then came the second order.
ALWAYS FORWARD.
If a man was hit, you did not stop.
If your buddy fell, you stepped over him.
The medics would come behind.
You kept climbing.
When Company I's commander was killed and the assault stalled, the men did not wait for another unit to pass through them.
They rallied.
With grenades and bayonets, they breached the German line and reached the summit of Monte Belvedere before dawn on February 20.
My father was wounded on Mount Belvedere.
He survived.
His journey home eventually brought him aboard the Shamrock—
to Charleston, South Carolina.
Decades later, Charleston became my home too.
Somehow, his path had led me here.
JIM LOOBY · COMPANY I · 85TH INFANTRY
My Father’s War
One of those men was my father.
Growing up, I knew him simply as Dad.
I did not know that he had earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
Like so many veterans of his generation, he rarely spoke about the war.
At 10th Mountain reunions, I listened to the men talk about the cold, the mountains and miraculous escapes.
I never heard much about heroics.
Mostly, I remember them telling jokes.
They used humor like a shield—a way of muffling the harrowing sounds of the past.
Only years later did I understand what their silence really was.
It wasn't forgetting.
It was protection disguised as silence.
Somewhere in this 1955 reunion photograph is my father.
I knew many of these men. I stayed in their homes. I skied and hiked with their children at reunions.
And growing up around them, I never would have guessed what they had endured.
They were simply some of the kindest, most honorable men I ever knew.
RIVA RIDGE
On the night of February 18, 1945, approximately 700 mountain troops began climbing cliffs the Germans believed effectively impassable.
No lights.
No talking.
Canteens were wrapped so they wouldn't clink. Climbing equipment was muffled.
For hours they climbed through darkness toward an enemy waiting above.
By dawn, they were on top.
The impossible mountain had been climbed.
But Riva Ridge was only the beginning.
MOUNT BELVEDERE
Across the valley stood Mount Belvedere.
This time, surprise was running out.
Company I, 85th Mountain Infantry Regiment, was in the first wave.
Nearly one man in three went down.
Johnnie Grey's experience of that climb is fiction.
The men who made it were real.
What They Left Behind
The 10th Mountain Division was a force of roughly 14,000 men.
In just 114 days of combat, nearly 1,000 were killed and more than 4,000 wounded.
They broke through the Apennines.
They crossed the Po.
They reached Lake Garda.
And they helped bring the war in Italy to its end.
But perhaps the measure of what they endured comes from the man who commanded them.
MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE PRICE HAYS
George Price Hays already knew what the worst of war looked like.
In World War I, he fought at the Second Battle of the Marne, riding through enemy fire to carry messages and coordinate artillery support while seven horses were shot from under him.
He received the Medal of Honor.
In World War II, he saw fighting in Italy and landed at Omaha Beach the day after D-Day before taking command of the 10th Mountain Division.
So when Hays later wrote about the battles fought by these mountain soldiers, his words carried extraordinary weight:
“…the battles of the 10th were as strongly contested and as bitter, and in many instances more intense than any I had experienced hitherto.”
George Price Hays · Commander, 10th Mountain Division
And yet, the men I knew rarely talked about any of it.
WHITEFACE MOUNTAIN · NEW YORK
The Trail Home
For a long time, it seemed the story ended with the war.
It didn't.
Near the summit of Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks stands a memorial to the men of the 10th Mountain Division.
Set into it is a four-foot piece of rock brought from Italy.
The bronze reads:
“In tribute to the men of the 10th Mountain Division, this rock was brought by the government of Italy from Mt. Belvedere, scene of the division's greatest battle in World War II.”
Mount Belvedere.
The mountain where my father was wounded.
A piece of it had crossed an ocean and found its way to the Adirondacks—the place where the story of The Tenth Trail Mark begins.
Years later, I stood there with my own children.
And I realized that the most important trail marks aren't the ones etched in stone or painted on trees.
They are the lives of the people who went before us.
The people who walked through darkness.
The people who showed us there was still a way through.
And the people who gave us a reason to find our way home.
The Tenth Series · Joe Looby
The Tenth
Trail Mark
THIS IS THE STORY OF THE MEN WHO CLIMBED.
Inspired by true events, The Tenth Trail Mark is a gripping World War II novel of courage, sacrifice, love and brotherhood during the 10th Mountain Division's legendary campaign in Italy.
In the dead of night, Johnnie Grey leads the 10th Mountain Division up an ice cliff the Germans call unconquerable. One slip means oblivion. One victory could liberate Italy.
Johnnie's survival instincts—honed in the Adirondack wilderness, hunting through blizzards to feed his family during the Great Depression—are his greatest weapon.
But his heart belongs to Ellie, the West Virginia farm girl who slips a silver St. Andrew's Cross around his neck:
a trail mark of love meant to guide him home.
READ THE BOOKSEE YOU AT THE TOP.