The mountain-running legend has just completed States of Elevation, scaling every fourteener in the contiguous US in a single month, powered only by his legs
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s I waited for the sun to crest over Colorado’s Front Range, adjacent to the sprawl of Denver–Boulder–Fort Collins, a west wind gusted, sending a shiver down my spine. With temperatures around freezing on a rocky ledge at 13,700ft, I searched for reprieve on the lee side of a boulder. I could see the city lights in the distance, but was more concerned with two headlamps approaching quickly, a few hundred feet below.
Between us lay a slab of coarse granite, known as the Cables Route. It’s the most direct way to the summit of Longs Peak, but is less travelled because it’s rated a class 5 rock climb and often carries a river of verglas – black ice – running down it, which climbers must navigate.
This was how I started the first morning of Kilian Jornet’s latest personal endurance project, States of Elevation. In it, Jornet would summit the highest 73 mountains in the contiguous US – every peak above 14,000ft – all under human power, cycling between and running up each one. I was along to document the literal and figurative highs and lows, as Jornet attempted, in layman’s terms, to run a marathon and ride a Tour de France stage every day for a month.
