In 2022, Dan Hobbs achieved the record as the fastest self-supported person to climb all 58 of Colorado’s 14ers— a mountain that exceeds 14,000 feet in elevation— in just 14 days.
In 2022, Dan Hobbs achieved the record as the fastest self-supported person to climb all 58 of Colorado’s 14ers— a mountain that exceeds 14,000 feet in elevation— in just 14 days.
Connect with Dan:
If you enjoyed this episode:
Thank you to our sponsors:
Listen to REI’s Camp Monsters Podcast!
Dan Hobbs:
I really didn't set the record for other people to see it. I would've been honestly happy if nobody knew because it makes it so much harder what everyone's watching and everyone was watching it seemed like. I'm really happy that I can share what I've learned, but the actual motivation and outcome was a very internal.
Shelby Stanger:
In his daily life, Dan Hobbs is a pretty normal guy. He lives in Minnesota, works as a chief revenue officer, and he's a dad to two kids. People who see him at the grocery store or at a PTA meeting would never guess that Dan is a record-breaking mountain athlete. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-Op Studios production brought to you by Capital One. In 2022, Dan Hobbs set the record for the fastest self-supported person to climb every fourteen-er in Colorado. For those who don't know, a fourteen-er is a mountain that exceeds 14,000 feet in elevation. These incredibly tall peaks have a certain allure for mountain athletes. Many of them require technical skills and are exposed with little protection from the elements. In Colorado, there are 58 fourteeners. Dan Hobbs climbed every single one of them in 14 days. To put that into perspective, that's like climbing a mountain every five hours for two weeks straight.
Dan Hobbs, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. You have a beautiful story. And yeah, you're a stud, all 58 fourteeners, fastest known time. I'm stoked to have you on.
Dan Hobbs:
Yeah, thank you. I'm super excited about this. Thanks for having me. And yeah, it's great to meet you.
Shelby Stanger:
So you're not like a professional athlete, you're not a full-time adventurer. Most people who break records that involve running and climbing have been climbers since they were kids.
Dan Hobbs:
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a different story for me. I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, so I worked hard, but I had never done a single competitive sport. I'd never been on a team for anything. I've never ran. I mean, honestly, until I was 27, I don't think I'd run more than two miles. So yeah, this was a later in life endeavor for me.
Shelby Stanger:
Walk me through this. Why did you fall in love with the mountains?
Dan Hobbs:
That is a great question that every mountain athlete asks themselves. What is actually fun and enjoyable about this? Because in the moment, it's like you're always in the sun. It's hard. You're miserable, your body's fighting against you. And then, you get to the summit and you look around and you're so close to heaven and you just feel incredible. And the view is amazing. If you're a spiritual person, I am, I feel like you're connected to God up there and it's really a mind-blowing experience. And then, you got to get off the mountain, which is often just as hard as getting on the mountain. And so, then you have this hard descent and the whole way down you're in pain and then you get done and you just feel like you've accomplished the biggest thing in the whole universe.
Shelby Stanger:
I've seen you write about this before and it's pretty vulnerable, but you said at one point climbing fourteeners really helped you through a dark point in your life. Are you open to just telling me a little bit about this?
Dan Hobbs:
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I'm divorced and I have two kids, and I got married very young, and it was a pretty traumatic relationship. The divorce was also very traumatic to me, and it pushed me into a place of depression and then a battle with suicide that went on for almost a year, and it was just a very dark time. I wasn't able to work. I was in bed more than 20 hours a day and just completely incapacitated by depression, and it was something I had never really dealt with in life until this point, and I was literally fighting for my life. And so, this was 2012 and 2013, I had climbed a few mountains by that point in my life, but maybe less than five probably. And sometime in May of 2013.
Well, I had read this article by John Prater, who his trail name is Homie, and he had tried to set the fourteen-er record and he actually, he didn't set it. He wasn't even able to finish. He had just a bunch of bad stuff happened to him .And oddly, nobody had really written about this in the way that it's well known now back then. And I had read that and it set this bug in my mind of like, wow, I would love to do that. I didn't even know how many fourteeners there were at the time. I had climbed a couple of them and had not done any of the hard ones and had no ambitions to ever do all of them, and just thought, wow, that would be so amazing to do that.
So I'd read that article, it was in the back of my mind, and then I was struggling with depression, struggling with suicide in a really bad way. I was living in a place right next to downtown Minneapolis, very urban environment, and I sat up one day in bed, woke up, and literally it came out of my mouth, which again, as a spiritual person, I think it came from a higher power. And I literally blurted out, I'm going to set the fourteener record, and I literally covered my mouth up and I was like, "Where did that come from? I am not going to do that." And then I remember just sitting there in bed, like, "Well, I don't know how to get out of depression, but maybe that's the way I'm going to do it." And so, right then and there, it was probably May 15th, 2013, I was like, I'm going to go try to climb all the fourteeners this year and set a record.
And so, I took off. I had no idea what I was doing. I had two young kids, so I didn't really have any way to train. I got a burley and put them in the burley and biked them around town. That was my training. So this is 2013. I showed up in Colorado in early August with my son, had no idea what I was doing, hadn't even looked at all the routes and found a Toyota Tacoma on Craigslist and set off to go after this thing. And I really had no idea if I was going to finish. I just knew I was on a journey and I wanted to go after these mountains.
I ended up finishing them that year the first time in 24 days. I was 27 years old and had zero acclamation, had no idea where I was going. It was a hell of a journey, but it was transformative for me. Because going into that, I felt completely worthless as a person. I felt like I was worth nothing and I was battling with suicide. And coming out of it, I felt strong and powerful and I could do anything. And I reconnected with myself through that journey, and I mean, I found myself again, but I also found a new self that I had never had before, and that's what the mountains gave to me. The strength I found in myself was just, it was transformative. I don't know even how to say it, but I started and ended as a completely different person.
Shelby Stanger:
Dan's first attempt at going after the fourteener record felt like a crash course and climbing mountains quickly. If he actually wanted to be the fastest, Dan had to iron out the small details that meant researching the most efficient routes, planning his nutrition, and getting in better shape. On that first try, Dan learned a lot. Most importantly, he realized that he was strong enough to do extremely hard things, a mindset that changed his life when he returned home. He worked hard at being a better father and began to build a successful career. From the outside, his life started coming together. But internally, this record still pulled at his heart.
Dan Hobbs:
I started a company. I was working in downtown Minneapolis. And two years later, I'm sitting in my office with a suit jacket on, and the news article pops up that Andrew Hamilton had broke the supported record, which was very different than the unsupported record. But I remember sitting there in my office reading this, and it just hit me, I had gone through this incredible journey In 2013, I had found the new me and the me that I wanted to be, and then two years later, I'm sitting there completely down the wrong path in life. And I just remember reading that article and the thought that came to me was, that should have been me. And not that I probably could have set the supported record at all, but I should have been trying for that. That's who I am. I am not this guy sitting in an office in a high-rise in Minneapolis, and I want to be back out there and I want to be in the mountains.
And so, that was a pivotal moment for me. The only problem was is I was running a company, had two young kids, and was trying to get my life back on my feet. And so, really nothing happened. That was 2015. But literally every day of my life from that day on until I set the record, I thought about the record. And I remember sitting down with myself and writing my bucket list. A bucket list is the things you want to do before you die. And then I said, what are the things that you have to do? If I got older and I could not live with myself if I didn't do this, what would it be?
Shelby Stanger:
I call that the F-it list.
Dan Hobbs:
The F-it list. There you go. I'm going to use that from now on. And that was the first thing that came to my mind. There was some more important things like raising my kids well and having good relationships with them. And then there was the record. And I realized, I can't not do this. I have to do this because I will not live with myself down the road if I didn't do it. I had these funny thoughts of me being in my sixties trying to set a fourteener record. I'm like, "That's a terrible idea. Let's just get this thing done."
Shelby Stanger:
Dan knew he had it in him to break this record. It was just a matter of time. Over the next seven years, Dan saved enough money that he was able to quit his job and focus on the logistics of this adventure. First, he had to figure out how to train at home in the Midwest. Minnesota is really flat, which made it hard to practice gaining elevation, adjusting to altitude, and scrambling over rocky terrain. But Dan improvised and made it work. He spent roughly eight hours a day preparing for the fourteeners. How did you train in Minnesota, I want to ask you real quick?
Dan Hobbs:
It sucks. It's hard. It's miserable. So Minnesota, it's really flat, and I live right next to a ski area that's got 140 feet of vertical if you can believe that's an actual ski area. And there's a hill there that I did 70 times a day to get 10,000 feet of elevation every day, four to five days a week for months on end. And it's like a 0.3 mile loop, and that loops like 127 feet or something like that over and over and over. 9 hours a day, the same thing day after day after day. And that's how I trained.
Shelby Stanger:
Would you listen to music?
Dan Hobbs:
Yeah, I had the same hundred song playlist on repeat day after day after day. I spent inordinate amounts of time by myself training. And the other thing that was very, very difficult in the training but also very beneficial was Minnesota weather is miserable. It's either really, really cold or really, really hot and humid. There's two weeks a year that we get that's nice weather. And so, I trained at 80, 90 degrees in full sun, super humid, doing my elevation laps and drinking two and a half gallons of water some of those days and trying to keep my electrolytes up too. And then, to go to Colorado where it was generally in the mountains in the sixties during the day was so much easier than being at home.
And so, the training really toughened me up in good ways. And I had friends that would try to join me with training and stuff, and they were just like, "This is so miserable, man. This is no fun at all." And I was like, "That's not really the point." I'm like, "You find the happiness. You don't have to have it given to you. You just find it. And sure it's probably miserable, but I'm actually really happy right now." Because I chose to be happy.
Shelby Stanger:
When we come back, we talk about what it took for Dan to set the fastest known time for all the fourteeners in Colorado. He also shares his advice for those of us who might be interested in climbing a fourteener ourselves.
Dan Hobbs is the self-supported record holder for climbing every 14,000 foot peak in Colorado. He climbed all 58 of them in just two weeks. If you're going after a self-supported record like this, one of the most important elements is transportation, because Dan was doing it without any help. He had to come back down every mountain the same way he went up and then drive himself to the next trek. As part of his preparation, Dan bought a van, he appropriately named it Beast, and spent an entire summer building it out so he could easily sleep and eat in it. The van itself was a huge investment, but it turned out to be a crucial piece of equipment during his record attempt. Just imagine each of these 58 peaks has at least four paths to the summit, all starting at different locations. Not only did Dan have to climb up each mountain, he also had to get himself from one trail to the next. There were thousands of routes Dan could have taken, so he had to choose carefully.
Dan Hobbs:
At home In Minnesota, I'd had these huge spreadsheets and I have five monitors at my desk, and I'd have maps up on all of them trying to sort this incredible maze out. And then, I'd come up with a hypothesis of, "I think this is going to work.' And then I'd fly out to Colorado and pick up my van and drive up there and drive all over the place and climb all these mountains and then be like, "That was a total bust. I was completely wrong." And I remember sitting there in my van multiple times just looking at my printed out maps and looking at Garmin on my phone. I totally screwed this whole thing up and I'm starting over. And so, it was like trial and error, trial and error, over and over again for preparation. And really, the fourteener records are won and lost in the logistics. You have to be an athlete, but it is about your efficiency getting between the mountains. It is definitely in the logistics to win these things.
Shelby Stanger:
So did you have a final spreadsheet when you figured out your route and you actually set the record?
Dan Hobbs:
I did. And it was very large. It was hundreds of lines long and many, many columns wide. And it was a really, really wonderful plan that worked for about two hours, on the record. It was really funny. So I should say one of the cool things in the fourteeners and the records is tradition. So this started many decades ago, and so there's these really wonderful good traditions that have developed in this that are actually rules in the endeavor. And one of them is you have to reach out to the prior record holder and talk to them. And some of the reason that exists is they're the ones probably going to keep you accountable to actually following the guidelines and rules. And secondly, it's just a really good thing to do.
And so, I reached out to Peter who had the record for whatever, 26 years or whatever it was. And it turns out he's just this most wonderful person ever, lives in Boulder. And he took the time to talk to me for an hour and he gave me some really good advice. And his record journey went to hell on day one. And so, he said, "Look, man, you probably have all these plans and a spreadsheet and you think you got this all figured out." And he's like, "The truth is, it's not going to go any way that you think it's going to go." And he's like, "So just forget all that and just remember to keep going and just don't stop. And that's all you really need to know."
And I remember getting off that call and I'm very analytical as a person, and I was like, "I have this down to a T. I have my spreadsheet. I know exactly how this is going to go. Peter doesn't know what he's talking about." And sure enough, within two hours of my record starting the whole thing went to hell. And I don't think I looked at the spreadsheet after day one. What was good though is I had worked so much on this, I knew how to improvise because I knew every mountain and I knew every route by heart.
Shelby Stanger:
After over a year of preparation, Dan finally started his record-breaking journey on July 5th, 2022. He took off in his van with all of his meals prepared and got started at 1:37 A.M. So I read that you climbed 58 mountains, 58 fourteeners in two weeks, and I read that that's the equivalent of climbing a fourteener every five hours back to back.
Dan Hobbs:
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Shelby Stanger:
That seems impossible. So would you do multiple in a day? How did you make this happen?
Dan Hobbs:
So the mountains are very diverse, and so it's not like there's one kind of fourteener. Some of them you can just walk up. Some of them, there's exposed climbing. Some of them are technical. Some of them are in the middle between the two. And some of the mountains are on their own, and there's a lot of miles to get to a single mountain. And some of them are right next to each other, and you can combo several mountains at the same time. But yeah, I mean the general gist of the fourteener record was that you go slow and you don't stop. You go 24 hours around the clock. You just sleep as much as you have to keep going. And you just kind of go a nice even pace.
And so, climbing four or five fourteeners in a day, some days that's extremely hard. Other days, like I climbed eight in one day. And then I would say the hardest day of the whole record, I climbed two, but it was for sure the hardest day. And I have a sticky note on my dash in my van. I said, "Just don't quit. Go slow." With five W's. And that was my motto. Every day when I'd get back in the van, it was sitting there right in front of me, just don't quit. That's all you have to do is not stop. And that's how you get four to five fourteeners done in a day.
Shelby Stanger:
What were some of the most memorable days?
Dan Hobbs:
One of the challenges that I have a really hard time equating on the record was I developed a dairy allergy. I think I had had this lactose intolerance thing starting for a while. I had stomach issues for the prior year and a half going into the record, and then the exhaustion during the record burned my whatever left I had of lactose tolerance went away. And so, I spent eight out of 14 days throwing up stomach sick and extreme pain. I would say 40% of the suffering I did was because of my stomach on the whole record. And all of my food was prepared before the record. I had spent two years figuring out a really good diet. Of course, it also included a lot of dairy that I suddenly couldn't digest. I figured it out on day four. I think it was day four or five.
And so, I couldn't eat any of the food that I brought. And so, then I stopped at grocery stores four times and it was just loading up on pre-made foods. It was just a terrible way to set a record, but it all worked out in the end. Day one was really memorable. So you start this area called Chicago Basin, and you either hike, it's like an incredibly long hike in. It's close to 20 miles just to the base of the mountains, or you take this tourist train out of Durango, the Durango Silverton Steam Train, and it drops you off about seven miles before the mountains. And so, the way to perfect the record is you take the train off the clock, you hike up and you start 3000 feet below the first summit. And so, you start way up in this valley off of a train, but you have to get four mountains done that day and then down to the train by 10:40 A.M. And then you got to get on the train and take your vehicle sitting where the train goes.
And so, I was super nervous about this. These were mountains that I didn't really get to train on. Two of them are pretty technical. By the time I got off the first mountain, I was an hour behind. And I just remember getting off the first mountain, looking at my watch and being like, "I can't believe I've already failed. I'm four hours into this thing and I've already failed." And then I got stomach sick and altitude sick. And so, when I got to the top of the last of the four, I was laying on top this feeling I was going to throw up, staring at the sky being like, "I am such an embarrassment." The whole world was watching and I'm not even going to make it past day one.
And then I called back to what I had learned in 2013. I was like, "Dan, are you who you think you are? Are you actually a strong powerful person? And do you really believe you're going to set this record?" And I was like, "Yeah, I do." I was like, "Man, get your ass off the rock and run all the way down and do whatever you can. If you don't catch that train, at least you've tried and did everything you could to catch that train." So I got myself up and I literally ran the seven miles, 3000 feet downhill to the train and got down there just in time. It turns out the train was late, so I probably didn't have to run quite as fast as I needed to, but-
Shelby Stanger:
How much of this challenge was, do you think, mental versus physical?
Dan Hobbs:
That's a really interesting question. The mental is definitely the hard part. But for me, a lot of people have asked me, "How did you keep going?" Day after day, and it's so hard. And for me it was never a question of keeping going. I decided in 2015 I was going to set that record. When I realized I couldn't live without it, that was just going to happen. And so, there was never once that I asked myself whether or not I was going to keep going. It was always, you're going to keep going and you're going to set that record. But the mental part that was hard for me was I do have two kids and I got myself into one very specific terrible situation. The Maroon Bells are two mountains, the south and north, and traversing between them is a class five traverse with a lot of exposure. And for most people, it's one of the most difficult parts of climbing in Colorado, or at least in the fourteeners.
And I got up there in the middle of the afternoon and this thunderstorm hit and it was a brutal storm. It was lightning, non-stop lightning. The mountain was electrified, the rocks were shaking and clacking because of the electricity in the mountain. Lightning bolts were hitting the top of the mountain and it was pouring rain, and then it turned to hail and snow and got to the right below the summit. And I just didn't know what to do. And this was the mental difficulty of the race is like I have kids and I knew I had to get home. And I sat there and I said, "Well, at this point you have a decision to make. You either go after this and set the record and maybe you don't see your kids again or you turn around and get off of this mountain."
And I would say that was probably one of the darkest moments of my life sitting there because I decided to set the record and those are the decisions you don't really want to have to make in life. And it turns out I made it. It was fine. But I felt like when I got done with the record, I just needed to go see a therapist and have 10 days on my own to just come to terms with what had just happened. So that was, to me, the mental difficulty of the record. It really wasn't about whether or not to keep going because it was physically hard. It was having to make those kinds of decisions and live with yourself through that.
Shelby Stanger:
Dan's journey was grueling, and sometimes even dangerous. It didn't help that he was sick and extremely sleep-deprived. When he wasn't climbing. Dan tried to rest in his van as much as possible, but he averaged only three and a half hours of sleep a day for two weeks straight. On his way up one of the final peaks, the exhaustion got to him. Dan stopped to take a nap and nearly reached his breaking point.
Dan Hobbs:
I remember laying down and being like, I just need 20 minutes of peace, and I slept. I woke up 20 minutes later to a lightning bolt hitting the mountain, hundreds of yards away. I don't know where that cloud came from. And it was like all hell broke loose. And I was running off, and you're completely exposed up there at 14,000 feet and there's nothing to protect you. And it was horizontal hail and lightning. It was like Zeus was throwing lightning bolts on the top of that mountain. It was crazy. And I just completely lost my entire mental state of being. And I started screaming at God and at the sky I was throwing rocks and literally just like a 2-year-old tantrum and just crying and screaming. And I don't know how long that went on, but when it was over with, I didn't have anything left. Nothing was positive, nothing was negative. I was just so spent, I didn't even care.
So when I finished, I had dreamed of this amazing finish running into the arms of my family and it was going to be so emotional and I was going to cry and it was going to be incredible. And then when I got to the finish line and I just sat down and said, "I'm glad that's over." And it was the most melodramatic finish, I just was like, "Can I go home now?"
Shelby Stanger:
Dan came down his last mountain around 7:00 P.M. on July 22nd, 2022. His family met him at the finish line with a beer and a burger. And soon after, Dan was ready to rest, he got into a real bed and tried to get a good night's sleep. But by 6:00 A.M. the next morning, he was cleaning out his van and preparing to head home. The weight of the record didn't fully hit him until he was finally back in Minnesota.
Dan Hobbs:
The finish was so melodramatic and then two weeks later it finally hit me.
Shelby Stanger:
Usually takes the length of a journey to catch up to you. So that makes exact sense.
Dan Hobbs:
Interesting. Okay, I didn't know that. That's really interesting. I was back home in Minnesota with my daughter on a beach next to my house. It was like a gorgeous day and she was playing in the water and I was laying there and my mind instantly went to the same place It had gone for nine years, to setting this record. It was just like a reflex. And I was like, "All right, so how am I going to ..." And then I stopped. I was like, "Dan, you set that record. That's yours and nobody can take that from you and you don't have to think about it anymore." So that was the moment and it set in, and that's really where the change started for me. When it finally hit me. I had something that no one could take from me and it was the one thing I wanted and needed out of life I now had.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you just give me some advice and some listeners some advice because I'm sure there's a lot of other people like me who want to try climbing a fourteener.
Dan Hobbs:
Yeah. So some good pieces of advice on a fourteener.First of all is before you go, just be in shape. You don't need to do a lot of incredible things, but be in good cardio shape. Whatever works for you, be in good cardio shape. That's how you get acclimated easy. That's how you enjoy the journey on a fourteener is being in shape. Secondly, go slow and don't stop. That applies to records, but it's also the very best way to hike a mountain. Most people I see that don't really know how to climb a mountain, they go their regular walking pace that they do at sea level on the ground, and they can only do that for like a minute. And then they get out of breath and they stop and they sit down and then they catch their breath and they get up and they do it again.
And that interval thing is totally destructive. The secret is you go as slow as it takes where you don't need to stop. And if it feels like you're hardly moving at all, you're moving like a half a mile an hour, that is still the fastest pace you will ever go on a mountain. If you go faster then stop and faster then stop, you will go much slower than if you just crawl and never stop. And so, that's the secret to hiking mountains quickly and doing a lot of them is that slow pace. So that's my two main pieces of advice. And my last one would be is don't race them. Just enjoy them. And if you see a butterfly, stop to look at the butterfly and a flower, look at the flower and enjoy every second of it because that's how the mountains are really meant to be climbed.
Shelby Stanger:
Not by fastest known times?
Dan Hobbs:
No, no, nope. What I do now is I set the MFT, most fun time.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that, the MFT. You should start a little record site about like the MFT. Like that would be amazing. I love that. I've never heard of that.
If you want to learn more about Dan, check him out at Minnesota Mountaineer on Instagram. We'll link to his profile in the show notes. If you want to hear about another amazing FKT, check out our episode with Jason Hardrath, a teacher who climbed the hundred tallest peaks in Washington. We'll link to it in the show notes as well. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Piers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Motila, and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.