The five most inspirational outdoors stories we covered in 2019 – The Know
It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that when we combed through the archives in order to compile a list of our five most inspirational outdoors stories of 2019, four of them were about women.
For years, Colorado women have ranked among the uber-athletes of running (track and field and ultra running), ski racing and triathlon. In fact, when Sports Illustrated published a list of the world’s fittest athletes in January, as selected by a panel of experts, six Coloradans made the list and five were women: track and field Olympic medalist Emma Coburn of Boulder, ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter of Golden, ski racer Mikaela Shiffrin (best in the world the last four years) of Edwards, climber Sasha Digiulian of Boulder and ski racer Lindsey Vonn of Vail. The lone Colorado man to make the SI list was rock climber Tommy Caldwell of Estes Park. Mind you, this was a list that included NFL players (but no Broncos).
Our list of most inspirational Colorado outdoors stories includes two amazing ultra runners and an equally remarkable ultra triathlete, an indefatigable mountaineer and a Columbine survivor who overcame his demons through delving into extreme sports, and who now shares his journey in hopes of helping others.
Here’s our five most inspirational outdoors story of 2019:
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Hours after returning to her home in Boulder from a two-week mountaineering expedition in Alaska last summer, Clare Gallagher went to California and won the prestigious Western States 100 ultra race. It was the third year in a row that a Colorado woman won the iconic 100-mile race, following Cat Bradley (2017) and Dauwalter (2018).
Gallagher’s trip to Alaska wasn’t necessarily the best way to rest up and prepare for one of the world’s premier endurance tests, but when Caldwell invited her to go with him on a trip intended to advocate for saving the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, she couldn’t say no.
“I worked really hard, and I trained really hard all spring, but this ‘taper’ I had in Alaska, I can’t understate what a trip that was,” Gallagher said when we tracked her down in the Sacramento airport after the race. “We climbed like the second-highest peak in the Brooks Range, and I was super scared out of my mind. I thought I was going to die twice. Then I get to Western States and I’m like, ‘This is 100 miles on a trail, this can’t be that hard.’ ”
Dauwalter had a substantial lead 80 miles into the race and was on course record pace, but she was forced to drop out with a hip injury, and Gallagher won with the second-fastest women’s time in race history (17 hours, 23 minutes, 25 seconds). Two months later, Dauwalter overcame her injury to win another of the world’s most prestigious ultra races, the tour of Mont Blanc, a 106-mile run around the Mont Blanc massif in France, Italy and Switzerland. She was the first U.S. runner to win that race since 2014.
Over the course of four weeks in October and November, Laura Knoblach swam, biked and ran the equivalent of 20 Ironman Triathlons and shattered a world record for the “Double Deca” ultra triathlon distance at an event in León, Mexico. With 48 miles of swimming followed by 2,240 miles of biking and 20 marathons (524 miles), Knoblach covered 2,800 miles in 633 hours, 41 minutes and 39 seconds. That was more than nine hours faster than the previous world record.
“You walk the last lap with your crew and anyone who feels connected to you as a racer,” Knoblach said. “It’s special. It’s very personal. And to be honest, it felt really surreal. You’ve done this race for a month. It didn’t feel like I was actually finishing it, and it really didn’t set in. I was mainly just relieved that I could sleep. I told a friend, ‘I think I’m going to wake up and think I have to do more loops tomorrow.’”
Knoblach is an inspiration not only for her physical endurance. In 2018, she made national headlines after accusing her father, a politician in her native Minnesota, of abuse. She told her story to Minnesota Public Radio, which reported that then-Rep. Jim Knoblach “inappropriately touched her for most of her life.” He denied her claims but ended his re-election campaign after she came forward.
“I think being a positive person and looking for challenges to try to better myself is the reason I get up,” said Knoblach, who is another Boulder athlete. “My senior year of high school, I spent most of my nights sleeping in my car at friends’ houses. I moved out the day after I turned 18. I don’t think there’s anything in life that’s harder than that. I keep looking for it — there’s nothing harder than that.”
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Big’s Backyard Ultra is one of the toughest ultra races in the world because runners just keep running until only one is left standing. Maggie Guterl wasn’t just the women’s winner when the October race was run in Bell Buckle, Tenn., she became the first woman to beat all the men, too.
Guterl, who lives in Durango, ran 250 miles in 60 hours. The second-place finisher was Will Hayward of Hong Kong, who dropped out after 245.8 miles.
“Our lives sometimes are so easy,” Guterl said. “I mean, life is hard, it’s complicated, it’s stressful. But all the comforts we have — we can drive to Starbucks and get a coffee, and I can do so many things just straight from my computer. But there is something about raw suffering to achieve a goal that is much more rewarding. Obviously, yeah, to explore limits, like, ‘I can do this.’ Or, ‘Can I? I don’t know.’ Just to see what it’s like to go beyond some kind of barrier that you think is a barrier.”
Andrew Fraser was a junior at Columbine High School in 1999 when the shootings occurred. Three of the slain students lived in his neighborhood. After that, in quick succession, his best friend died by suicide, a cousin died and an uncle took his own life. Fraser went through what he calls “a dark night of the soul.”
He emerged from that period by taking up extreme sports: wingsuit flying off high mountains, high-lining (essentially tight-rope walking on nylon webbing high above the ground in natural settings), BASE jumping and rock climbing. When the Denver Museum of Nature & Science opened a temporary exhibit called “Extreme Sports: Beyond Human Limits” this year, it set aside a spot for him and his exploits.
“Being totally present with life and coming back totally grateful from the experience, it tended to be the more dangerous activities that actually provided that,” Fraser explained of his emergence from the pain of so much death around him when he was a young man. “I couldn’t get it just by taking a walk in the park or kicking a soccer ball. But if I was walking the knife-edge of a fourteener in the Rockies, I could feel the brush of death on my cheek as the wind blows, and I knew a misstep was going to cause my fatal tumble.”
Life is less extreme these days for Fraser, who teaches yoga at Movement Climbing + Fitness in the RiNo district, but he tells his story in hopes of helping others.
“I go to his classes, I’m thinking, ‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’” said his mother, Pam Fraser. “He’s very thoughtful, unusually so. He’s very deep. How does that jibe with being an extreme sports person? I don’t know. He just continues to look for new and different ways to impact the world. He wants to change the world.”
This year Teresa Gergen became the first person to climb all 846 peaks over 13,000 feet in the 48 contiguous states plus Hawaii. She also has climbed all 2,311 of the peaks higher than 10,000 feet in Colorado.
“I thoroughly enjoy rock climbing and the mountaineering that I’ve done, but I’ve been a list person since I was a young child,” said Gergen, who lives in Boulder. “It’s a personality thing, and there’s not much sadder, in my opinion, than a person trying to be different from who they actually are. When I discovered climbing, peakbagging is where my passion and my personality intersected.”