Mike Donahue, who died of a malignant brain tumor at age 59 on Nov. 16, owned the Colorado Mountain School, training countless neophyte climbers and guiding experienced mountaineers to summits throughout the world.
The son and grandson of experienced mountaineers, he loved the mountains with a disciple’s fierce zeal, admiring their beauty as thoroughly as he comprehended their inherent risks. Longs Peak, the subject of Donahue’s 1992 trail guide “The Longs Peak Experience,” held a special place in his heart.
His maternal grandfather built the north Longs Peak trail in the 1920s and 1930s, and supervised the students who built trails in Rocky Mountain National Park. Donahue’s mother first reached the summit of the park’s Longs Peak at age 6, and last climbed it in 1997.
The Donahue family home lay close to Rocky Mountain National Park, whose peaks and couloirs Mike Donahue considered his backyard. During his boyhood, he worked on trail crews, and began working on mountain rescue crews as an adolescent.
As a teenager, Donahue hired on with a Longs Peak guiding service, assisting and later leading expeditions on the trails once guided by Carlyle Lamb and John Muir protégé Enos Mills. An enormous admirer of Muir, Donahue developed his own version of Muir’s mystic reverence for nature during expeditions.
Describing the appeal of Dream Weaver, a celebrated and usually inaccessible 1,500-foot vertical route on Mount Meeker’s concave north face, Donahue once told a Denver Post reporter, “Because it’s only in shape a few weeks at the beginning of the season, it’s sort of like when peaches are ripe.”
His words captured the evanescent appeal of climbing and mountaineering, said longtime friend, climbing partner and fellow guide Harry Kent.
“Mike deeply believed that climbing would and could help anyone on this planet,” said Kent, who led the first American winter ascent of the Eiger’s north face in the Swiss Alps.
“He said if he could get someone on the end of a rope, he could help them get a different perspective on life. For Mike, climbing was an individual, internal experience.”
Donahue’s clients included the first blind climbers to summit Longs Peak, and later the first paraplegic, a biologist who used a sled to reach the top. Donahue climbed with Beck Weathers, the Texan who became a minor celebrity as one of the American climbers who survived the deadly May 1996 storm near the summit of Mount Everest.
While Donahue joined or led expeditions throughout the world’s mountains, the peaks he knew best lay within sight of his Allenspark home. He and his wife raised their three children in the cozy log cabin Donahue inherited from his grandfather.
Though Mike and Peggy Donahue added a second floor, they kept the cabin simple – some might say to a fault. It lacked running water until a friend recently installed a primitive cistern system.
Donahue’s appearance reflected his unpretentious home. Throughout his youth, he kept a beard (and later a moustache) that glazed with ice during winter ascents and famously hid bits of pine needles and grass that, to his friends’ amusement, Donahue diffidently gleaned during his infrequent sojourns to town.
By 2003, the year doctors diagnosed a viciously aggressive brain cancer, Donahue calculated that he had stood on the 14,255-foot summit of Longs Peak 250 times.
In contrast, his three attempts to scale Mount Alice (elevation 13,310 feet) all failed. The third attempt coincided with the deluge that caused the Big Thompson flood on July 31, 1976. Bivouacked among the boulders at the base of Mount Alice’s east face, Donahue and his climbing partner, Kent, hunkered while lightning exploded around them like artillery blasts.
A ground current hit them, causing both men to reflect on the mordant joke they had shared earlier that evening: “What’s it going to take to stop us this time? Will we get struck by lightning?”
Predictably, Donahue applied climbing metaphors to his struggle against cancer. He compared chemotherapy to setting anchors in a technical rock climb. He never regretted that he and his wife went climbing in Eldorado Canyon shortly after Donahue began chemotherapy.
“Found out it was not such a good idea,” he confessed in an October 2004 letter posted on the Colorado Mountain School website. “My platelets were so low that if I had cut myself or begun hemorrhaging internally, I could have bled to death.
“But the climbing was great!”
Survivors include Donahue’s wife, Peggy Donahue of Allenspark; his parents, Warren and Helen Donahue of Estes Park; sons Topher Donahue of Nederland and Tobias Donahue of Fort Collins; daughter Nemonie Colville of Del Norte; brothers Brian Donahue, Toby Donahue and Kerry Donahue, all of Estes Park; and two grandchildren.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
