13-14-15

Conservation + Climate, Hikers, Hiking + Backpacking

13-14-15

Photos above and below by 13-14-15

3 Boulder, Colorado based professional women spent the last four months taking on 13 14,000 foot mountains (14ers) in Summer 2015, dubbing the project ‘13-14-15‘

Kate Curtis, Elana Rabin, and Sierra Voss live in a fantastic area to get outdoors, but they’re familiar with the pulls of everyday obligations. They set out to hike thirteen 14ers in Colorado as a salute to weekend warriors and to show their appreciation for their home state and its natural playground. In doing so, they developed their relationships with each other, the Colorado landscape, and some of their favorite organizations.

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Over the past four months, Kate, Elana, and Sierra have been raising money for the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, Leave No Trace, and Women’s Wilderness Institute. All told, the trio has put more than a grand towards the groups and plans to take a weekend in October to pull their sponsors together to do local trail maintenance. The best part of all this? It means the spirit of their project will live on.

The group ended up getting in 15 attempts, 9 of which they made it 100% to the top. The rest of these, they made the smart decision to turn around due to lighting and/or snow. On reflection, the women took away this lesson on setting goals and summiting mountains:

We have learned it’s not all about getting to the top of each peak that we set out to climb this summer. If you go from goal to goal in life, you miss all the hours, days and years in between each goal. We found that 95% of this project was planning which mountains we would climb, packing up the car, road tripping somewhere, setting up base camps and hiking all the miles before the last approach to the peaks. The project’s greatest moments were actually not standing up on the top of each mountain – they were found in the moments in between.