Kilian Jornet grew up in the Pyrenees Mountains of northern Spain, the son of a man who operated a backcountry hut for mountain travelers. Since then he has made himself at home in mountain ranges across the globe as one of the world’s foremost ski mountaineers and trail runners. He is not fond of cities.
“If I am in the mountains — here in Colorado, in Nepal, it doesn’t matter — I can go places where I have never been and feel at home,” Jornet said Tuesday in Denver on the eve of embarking on an uber-adventure in the Rockies. “If I’m in a town, 30 minutes from where I live, I would not feel at home. It’s foreign. When I am in the mountains I can express myself and I can imagine things. It feels like where I’m meant to be.”
Even as his 72-year-old father is in the middle of a solo trekking trip in Peru — climbing 20,000-foot peaks along the way — Jornet’s newest adventure starts this week on Longs Peak. Over the next month, he intends to link as many fourteeners as possible in the lower 48 states from Colorado to the Pacific Northwest, a quest he is calling “States of Elevation.” To make the entire trip “human-powered,” he will travel from peak to peak via bicycle or on foot.
“Colorado, California, they are not that close,” Jornet said wryly. “That’s what scares me the most, these long bike rides.”
There are nearly 70 fourteeners in Colorado, California and Washington. Exact numbers are open to debate, depending on the criteria used, because fourteeners with sub-peaks can be counted as one or more distinct peaks. The Colorado Mountain Club and Colorado Fourteeners Initiative put the state’s number at 54.
Kilian Jornet of Spain (56) en route to winning the 2019 Pikes Peak Marathon. The world-renowned Spanish ultra trail runner also won the event in 2012. (Daniel Petty/Denver Post file)Jornet has long been one of the world’s most accomplished endurance athletes with a lengthy list of wins. Five times he won Colorado’s grueling Hard Rock 100, a high-altitude loop in the San Juans via Telluride, Ouray and Silverton with more than 33,000 feet of climbing. He won the Pikes Peak Marathon twice. Last year he climbed the 82 peaks in the Alps that reach 4,000 meters in elevation (13,100 feet) or more in 19 days, traveling from one to the next only by cycling and running.
Although he spent much of his career based in Chamonix, France, and lives now in the most mountainous region of Norway, he is no stranger to Colorado. He has done Longs “a few times” and several other fourteeners including Mount Elbert, La Plata Peak, Mount Sneffels and Handies Peak. He’s also climbed California’s Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states (14,505 feet).
He won’t climb every fourteener in the lower 48 on this trip. He will skip Culebra Peak in Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo range, for example, because it is located on private land. He also plans to run ridgelines that will take him over 13,000 feet many times.
He’s not looking for the easiest way up and down all those peaks, rather the most “aesthetic.” Instead of taking the normal route of descent from Longs Peak, for example, he will follow the so-called “LA Freeway,” a 30-mile high-altitude ridge route with lots of exposure on the Continental Divide which connects Longs to the Indian Peaks at Brainard Lake.
“It’s not about doing the fastest time possible, it’s about finding a nice (route), too,” Jornet said. “LA Freeway, it looks so nice, and so many friends here say, ‘You need to do it.’ Yeah, it’s not the fastest, but it is the most aesthetic. All of this project, it’s with this kind of mindset, to find the aesthetics of what the mountains have to offer.”
He has a roughed out a route through Colorado, then to California and on to the finish on Mount Rainier, but he knows he’ll need to be flexible.
“I have a spreadsheet with a lot of things, but it never works that way,” Jornet said. “If everything goes well — if it’s perfect weather, if I feel good, if there aren’t any setbacks, if I don’t get lost — but it never happens. Especially in projects like this.”
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High-altitude, 30-plus mile route on Continental Divide attracts uber athletes — and rescue missions Fewer people climbed these three popular Colorado 14ers in 2024It all started in that mountain hut in the Pyrenees near the border of Spain and France, where Jornet proved to be a little too adventurous as a boy for his mother’s liking. To rein in his wanderlust, she enrolled him in a ski mountaineering school for some mentoring.
“My mother saw that I needed to put my energy into something not too dangerous, because when I was 10, 12 years old, I loved to go out into the mountains,” Jornet said. “It was just by myself. I’d take my bike, with skis and a backpack, and say to my mother, ‘I just go for a quick loop’ and spend like, six, seven, 10 hours in the mountains. She said, ‘It’s good you have this energy, it’s good you like that, but put some control on that,’ so I started training and competing in ski mountaineering.”
That led to trail running and ultras. For the next few weeks, his playground will be the highest peaks of the American Rockies.
“I will start to run around and have hopefully a great experience, facing ups and downs, good weather and bad weather, moments of highs and moments that I will feel miserable,” Jornet said. “But it’s also for me to discover the landscapes of the west — that’s what’s going to be for me for the next month or so.”
Kilian Jornet en route to finishing third this summer in the Western States 100 at age 37. He won the prestigious race in 2011. (Alexis Berg/Provided by NNormal)Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.
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