After 43 years, Gary Michael finally has reached the top. Or the bottom, depending upon your perspective.
Michael, a 69-year-old artist and former Metro State philosophy professor, lays claim to what may qualify as the most unusual record in the Rocky Mountains. In an era when peak baggers are continuously attempting to one-up each another in the race to summit all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains in the shortest time span, Michael took the opposite tack. His 43-year effort to climb 52 of the state’s fourteeners unofficially qualifies as the longest.
“I didn’t plan it that way,” Michael said. “It just took a long time.”
While the same high country purists who tend to hold the phrase “peak bagging” in distain might argue Michael’s feat remains shy of the Colorado Mountain Club’s current list of 54 fourteeners in the state (the debate over the “official” number of fourteeners has gone on for years), Michael is having none of it. It was never his intention to climb them all, or to set any records. Besides, his guidebook was written in the 1950s.
“I don’t want to say I’ve climbed them all, because someone will step up and debate it,” Michael said. “It’s not like I made a conscious decision to climb them all. I just kept climbing them. But for me, it feels like I’ve climbed enough.”
Claiming he is lucky to have “survived my obsession,” Michael hung up his hiking boots after topping out on 14,037-foot Little Bear Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range on July 2, his fourth attempt at what many consider the most difficult of the fourteeners to summit. Michael and his climbing partner spent a cold night on the mountain after being forced to bivouac when an electrical storm and darkness set in. According to Michael, another climber on the mountain fell to his death the same day.
“After the experience of shivering through the night on a rocky ridge, it seemed like a good time to quit,” he said. “The next day we found out a guy fell to his death and had to be carried out on a gurney.”
A Denver native and East High School graduate, Michael didn’t discover Colorado’s tallest peaks until his mid-20s, eventually becoming enthralled enough to tackle Grays and Torreys peaks at age 26 and spend the next several years working as a rock climbing instructor. During the next 4 1/2 decades, he slowly ticked off the list of fourteeners in his guidebook, climbing several of them more than once even after a hip replacement and the cartilage in his knee diminished to the point he could no longer hike without trekking poles and Vioxx.
When he returned to the valley floor below Little Bear and discovered his friend, Alice Smith, who ran the general store in the nearby town of Blanca for 43 years, had retired three days earlier, he decided it was a good idea to do the same. He still holds countless memories of the unique experiences found on every mountain, he said.
“Just because a blind guy went up Everest doesn’t mean a gimpy guy like me should walk up and down fourteeners. I just thought I’d been sent a real clear message,” Michael said. “I’m diminished physically. It is a kind of mythology to pretend otherwise. There may be something pseudo-heroic about defying limitations, but at some point it becomes foolhardy.
“I can leave one fourteener on the table, if El Diente counts. That’s OK. Fifty-two is enough. I feel good about them, and I’m thankful for all the partners I’ve had in 43 years. I can let it go.”
