Pikes Peak Region Trail Finder

(Eric Lee, right, traverses from La Plata Peak to Huron Peak during a run of Nolan's 14 last month. Photo by Ben Smith.)

By R. Scott Rappold, The Gazette

It's not a race.

In fact, Nolan’s 14 doesn’t officially exist, not even in the loosely organized way it did 12 years ago, when a handful of ultrarunners had the audacity to dream it up. There is no registration, prize for first place or finish line.

So what is Nolan’s 14 and why do people still whisper about it eight years after the U.S. Forest Service shut it down?

It’s that feeling you get after climbing a 14,000-foot peak: utter exhaustion and head aching from the altitude — multiplied 14 times.

It’s the mother of all endurance runs, higher and longer than the Hardrock 100 and Badwater Ultramarathon. Only four people have finished it.

It’s a run up and down 14 fourteeners of the Sawatch Range — Mount Shavano to Mount Massive (or vice-versa) — covering 100 miles and 44,000 feet of elevation gain in 60 hours or less.

To Jim Nolan, who helped conceive the (non)event that bears his name, it’s simply “the Death Run.”

• • •

The story of Nolan’s 14 starts in 1991, when Fred Vance asked his friend Nolan, who had climbed all of Colorado’s fourteeners, how many peaks could be summited in a 100-mile course.

Read a Nolan’s 14 course description and see maps of the finishers’ route here.

Nolan said the best bet for bulk fourteener hiking was in the Sawatch Range, a spine of bulky mountains in the San Isabel National Forest two hours west of Colorado Springs, where the peaks are relatively close to each other and unbroken by low valleys. But nothing came of the conversation.

Seven years later, Vance and two other runners were in Silverton preparing for the Hardrock 100 race when Nolan’s 14 came up.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that sounds really hard … but intriguing,’” recalled Blake Wood, of Los Alamos, N.M.

They agreed to give it a try in 1999. On Aug. 27 that year, four runners set out from near Poncha Springs with radios to keep in touch and 11 friends to set up aid stations along the way.

They knew it would mean a lot of bushwhacking and route-finding in treacherous terrain, sometimes at night when you can’t see the cliffs, and exposing themselves to afternoon thunderstorms.

(Elevation profile of the legendary run.)

“One of the attractions of this, it was such a simple concept: 14 fourteeners. You start at one end. You go to the other end. You’ve got 60 hours with any route you want, as long as you go over all the peaks,” Wood said.

But “simple” didn’t translate to “easy.”

The runners summited Shavano, Tabeguache and Antero, and resupplied at an aid station at Baldwin Gulch. They climbed steeply up a canyon into a thunderstorm on Princeton. On Yale, they ascended at night through hail, snow and freezing rain, but they couldn’t find the next aid station.

Going on, they summited Columbia and Harvard, but they couldn’t find the next aid station, either. Rather than continue in the dark, they called it a night and hiked nine miles to the highway and hitched a ride.

Seven fourteeners in 50 miles over about 40 hours: Mere mortals would call that a pretty big accomplishment, but the runners weren’t satisfied.

“In better weather, and with some logistical glitches fixed, I think it is feasible to do all 14 summits in 60 hours,” wrote Wood in a post-run report.

The next August six runners tried it, and Wood captured 11 summits, but the run again was plagued by bad weather and difficulties in route-finding.

Said Wood, “You’d start up a peak with lightning hitting around the top and hope it stopped by the time you got up there.”

By 2001, they knew the most efficient routes between the peaks, and a dozen runners took part. The weather finally cooperated, and four runners completed the course, staggering wearily down Shavano to the end with minutes to spare. Wood slept just 45 minutes in three days.

The beauty of the terrain, the solitude on the summits, seeing other runners’ flashlights in the dark far below and radioing them that they were headed the wrong way — Wood said it was a great experience.

“A lot of it is just sticking with it,” Wood said. “It just goes on and on.”

(Blake Wood stands atop Tabeguache Peak in 1999, the first year of Nolan's 14)

•••

Wood, Mike Tilden, John Robinson and Jim Nelson are the only runners who have completed Nolan’s 14. Thirteen tried in 2002, but only Robinson finished.

By then, word had spread about this run in Colorado that put all others to shame. One runner had created a website for Nolan’s 14, and an article was penned in an ultrarunning magazine.

Word also reached the forest service and in 2003, a few weeks before it was to start, officials said the run could not go on.

The course passes through the Collegiate Peaks and Mount Massive wilderness areas, and wilderness rules prohibit organized competitions, something organizers knew beforehand. They had hoped the run would stay below officialdom’s radar. After all, it was a run among friends. There were no fees.

“We tried to make the case at the time it wasn’t a race. It was just a bunch of friends getting together to climb fourteeners,” Wood said.

Officials were not convinced, and Nolan’s 14 ended. Five ran it alone in 2003, and the next year, only Vance attempted it, an effort that ended after four peaks because of rain and a lack of aid stations.

Nobody tried it in the next two years, or if they did, they did not post their reports to the website still maintained in the race’s honor by Matt Mahoney, who did the race from 2000 to 2002.

Nolan’s 14, it seemed, lived on only in memories.

• • •

Like a lot of people, Eric Lee came to Colorado and fell in love with the mountains.

An ultrarunner and research scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he got to know some of the original Nolan’s runners, and began exploring the Sawatch.

“I kind of fell in love with that area down there. While it’s somewhere that’s easy to access and there are a lot of people around, when you choose routes as you do on Nolan’s, you don’t see anyone else. You feel like you’re the only one on the mountain,” said Lee, 29.

With one friend for transportation and resupply, he set out on a Nolan’s 14 quest in August 2008, but after capturing four summits got lost descending Princeton and lost his nerve for continuing. The next year he got five summits, but stopped because of exhaustion and altitude sickness. Two other runners tried in 2007 and 2010, with less success.

Lee wrote on the Nolan’s 14 website, “I have developed a new respect for those few who have completed this entire route. The truly ludicrous nature of it cannot be fully understood until one pushes (himself) to the brink of collapse, only to complete a fraction of what others have done.”

Early last month, Lee tried it again, planning to summit nine peaks, starting with Mount Massive and heading south. Thirty-five sleepless hours later, he staggered and slid down Columbia on legs that were “only partially functional” to his friends’ car. He had climbed nine fourteeners, covering 27,000 feet of elevation and 60 miles.

“It’s the hardest thing I have ever attempted, physically and mentally,” Lee said. “You’re constantly engaged. You can’t really turn yourself on autopilot because you have to constantly know where you’re going, where your next step is.”

(Runner Eric Lee found some company atop Mount Elbert when he attempted Nolan's 14 for the third time, last month.)

But he might try the full course next year. 

He’s not the only one. A Yahoo groups forum has 131 members, several of whom talk about giving the fabled nonrace a try.

After all, people have done it before.

Said Wood, “You can do it, because we did it. But a lot of things have to go right and very few things can go wrong.”