The Nolan's 14 with Blake Wood | KoopCast Episode 41

what's going on trail and ultra runners welcome to another episode of the KoopCast a podcast where we discuss all areas of trail and ultra running as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast it is all about the nolan's 14 line the nolan's 14 line is a string of 14 14 000 foot peaks in the heart of the colorado rockies in the sawwatch range which is somewhere near the leadville and buna vista area there's been a lot of attention devoted to the line as of late because of all of the athletes that are doing it due to the covid19 pandemic as well as two incredible fastest known time performances by sabrina stanley and joy campanelli but i realized that a lot of trail and ultra runners and a lot of you listeners out there don't really know what the line is all about you can't conceptualize or it's very hard to conceptualize what it's like to run 14 14ers all in a row under 60 hours and even how the line came to be in the first place it seems somewhat random so to enlighten us a little bit i brought on none other than blake wood blake is an incredibly accomplished ultra runner in his own right he has finished the hard

rock 100 22 times out of the 22 times that he has attempted it he's also won the race before blake is also a five loop barkley finisher one of the few people on the planets that has finished the barkley marathons which is incredible in its own right but most importantly to this conversation blake was one of the conceivers and original finishers of the nolan's 14 line and we go through a lot of that history throughout the course of this conversation i always have a lot of fun with blake he has a really unique job in his day life which i want no part of and we start out the conversation actually talking about that and to time stamp this conversation just a little bit we recorded this before joey and sabrina set those fastest known times so any references to what the records are are a little bit dated sorry for that guys this is just how quickly these lines are moving and maybe between the time that i record this intro and the podcast comes out those records might even be broken again who knows but here we go let's get right into it here's my conversation with blake wood all about the nolan's 14 line i'm here live in my closet which is a it's actually a really good anechoic chamber you know with all the clothes hanging here and everything how would i you know leave it to you to start throwing out the

acoustical terms right off the bat how was how was your podcast uh earlier in the week uh that you mentioned that you're doing oh it was good that was a lot of fun um i think it went well um i am still waiting to get the uh recording um approved by our classification office just to make sure everything's okay i mean you know i'm i'm a derivative classifier you know and and uh obviously i didn't say anything i don't think i said anything classified and after i listened to it when i was out of my run it sounded good but i got i want to get another set of ears on it to make sure you know that we all agree it's okay and for the for the record what was it about again it was um this is a student at cmc you know i've been doing these lectures every semester at claremont mckenna college um to uh actually to a class that's taught a journalism class that's taught by one of my old high school friends at claremont and i grew up in claremont so this is hometown southern california and i you know for five semesters i've been going and giving a talk every semester about nuclear weapons issues okay you know what you know what we have what everybody else in the world has things like that and one of the students from a couple years ago is a senior this year and for her senior project she got a grant from the college to do a podcast series on nuclear issues nuclear weapons issues and nuclear proliferation and stuff like that so she asked

me you know i stayed in touch with her and she asked me to be her first um her first interviewee to just kind of lay you know lay out the basic stuff about you know what we have you know why we have nuclear weapons what they do for us you know what other countries you know roughly have things like that and you know based on i mean because yeah it's i spent 20 years as a nuclear weapons designer that's basically the job i retired from well i can promise you that this this podcast recording will be a lot more light of heart than the other one no doubt now that you're retired i've kind of wondered we'll talk about nolan's in a second now that we're not talking about you know weapons of mass destruction anymore well i know i i kind of wanted to know this because like i've always viewed i've always viewed your like your job or your your your former job right you've been retired for two years now two or three uh actually uh this will be four you actually it's four years now although i actually still go in a few hours a week just to help out with mentoring and review of of papers and things like that but i've always i've always viewed like your job as knowing like knowing the capabilities of the worst intended people of the world that's pretty much it no thank you no thank you at all it's actually a pretty good gig oh my god well i don't i don't i don't imagine it's a good i mean i imagine it's a good gig but just the fact that like you know like

the worst stuff out there like the literally the weapons of mass destruction i mean we say that word and it kind of like rolls off of our tongues like oh weapons of mass destruction but you actually know what they are yeah and who has them and and it's you know i mean you know it's one of these things where i feel like you know when i go to work in the morning you know it may i'm making a contribution to world peace you know it actually matters if i go to work you know and and it's kind of cool you know we write stuff that goes goes to the president and things like that oh god bless you blake jeez i'm better you than me i couldn't handle that i could i couldn't i couldn't sleep at night if i had to do something like that yeah i don't know you get you get used to it after a while okay well here we go back to the task at hand nolan's yeah it's nolan season and um the reason i wanted to bring you on is because you know you were one of the originators of this whole line and with the covid19 pandemic going on i i just imagine and i'm starting to hear through the grapevine that there are going to be a lot of attempts this year and it seems that every year it kind of gets ratcheted up like further and further and further and in terms of like the interest and the number of people that are that are uh uh the number of people that are going to do the line and things like that so i thought it'd be really pertinent right now to get you on the to get you on the horn because it's starting to it's starting to unfold it's a low snow season unlike last year was super high snow season and kind of compress the

window a little bit and you combine that with the covid19 pandemic and it's just right for a lot of people to uh to to to take a crack at the line so to start out with there's there's going to be i think everybody listening to this podcast it's a super endemic ultra running podcast obviously they're going to have some degree of familiarization familiarization with the line but they probably don't know like how like how difficult and how arduous and how easily like you could you can screw it up when you're out there especially if you haven't done a lot of recon or you're not good at reading maps even if you've got a gaia app so let's first like take a little bit of time and like describe the route itself and then maybe where some of the maybe some of the pinch points are on it yeah well the route itself is pretty simple the there isn't a specific route right the concept is pretty simple you start at one end of the saw watch range which runs roughly from uh above buena vista colorado up to leadville colorado you start at one end and there's a string of 14 uh 14ers 14 000 foot peaks between the two and you start at one end and you get as as many peaks as you can in 60 hours and hopefully uh you can do the whole thing and i think

since we first accomplished it on our third try in 2001 i think looking at matt mahoney's website i think i counted up something like 34 uh successful attempts um yeah 34 finishes in under 60 hours uh through last season um it's a i mean obviously it's incredibly scenic uh we used to actually have in the early days sort of an organized event until the forest service told us to knock the hell off because of course it's it's all in wilderness area um there was kind of a hiatus for a few years there and then people sort of started picking it up again and it's grown in popularity over the last few years really over about the last five or six years is when sort of it started people started making serious attempts again i think in 2014 um and uh actually i'm sorry earlier in 2014 20 i want to say like 2011 or something anyway people started making serious attempts again a few years after after we uh stopped doing it um it's a it's a terrific line because it's really really hard and you know right on the edge of being possible so that you know it shares that for instance with the barclay marathons and that's that's

not just a coincidence in fact fred vance who originally started setting this up had in mind something very like barclay and it's it's kind of right on the edge of possibility for for a good runner but it has the advantage that you know there's no lottery there's no entry fee you can do it whenever you want um you know if the weather's lousy you can come back the next weekend when the weather's better and do it you can try it you know a month later if if you do it and it doesn't work out come back a month later and try it again um and that makes it really attractive um and and easy to do and it's sort of become i think kind of a test test event a test case for people that are pretty serious ultra runners and and peak baggers to try and see if they can actually do this in 60 hours and so we've got these 14 peaks in the sewage it's a pick your own line running from leadville to the salida area or the slide of the leadville area if you want to go south to north let's start to get into a little bit of lore how long is the route and how much elevation gain and elevation loss is there yeah so so the year when finally four of us finished it in 2001 um you know mike tilden myself jim uh jim nelson and uh john robinson when we finally finished it my route on the map i measured out to be

something like 105 miles and 45 000 feet of climb i think if you know we didn't we didn't have gps watches then so that's just taking it off the map i think uh just from seeing how my gps usually matches up with what i measure on a topo map um it's perhaps as much as 10 percent longer than that um so you know something over 100 miles maybe somewhere between 105 and maybe 115 miles depending on the route and upwards of 45 000 between 45 000 and maybe 55 000 feet of climb so there's a range of air here i guess what you're saying right well and one of the beautiful things about it is there is no set course and you know people kind of you know over the years people have kind of figured out what is probably the most efficient course but even that has variations because it depends if you're going south or north it depends what the weather is you know there's places where uh you know if if the weather's lousy you know you'll probably want to stick to a trail in a section where if the weather's really good you can go straight down a ridge um there was one of the years we did it uh the second year we tried it in 2000 for instance coming off yale um i had done that uh in the other direction the previous year and it was a really really good we came down or you know this is on the east east ridge off yale that drops you down to the uh colorado trail and then down to the avalanche uh gulch um

trailhead and i had done that before and it was a really good route and so i came off the top but that year it was um dark and it was freezing rain and so the rocks were all covered with ice and that was just a nightmare yeah climbing down that you know in the middle of the night on icy rocks and was really really slow and that was a year you know because of the weather i would have been much better off taking the much longer trail and running down the highway which is actually how we ended up doing it you know the year we finished uh going southbound in 2001 that's a denisee creek area yeah yeah denny creek and yeah denny creek sorry anyway but but the other thing that's interesting is because since you're not trying to go from a trailhead to a peak by the most efficient route necessarily you're trying to get from peak to peak by the most efficient route um the the routes people take are often not regular trails or even regular climbers routes right um and that makes it a little bit different and and one of the joys of doing this the first couple years we were doing it is because we you know we had no idea what the most efficient route was we were using jerry roach's book about the 14ers to at least sort of get a sense for it but the sort of small crowd of us that were trying this thing uh you know that was maybe seven or eight of us uh you know would go up weekends in the summertime try different routes report back by email to everybody else and say hey i went up

this ridge on such and such a peak and you know it was a really good way to go or or this was really lousy don't do this i got really bogged down and it it really was the third year before we kind of felt like we sort of knew the best way to go this whole thing the origin of all this which we're going to get into right now it sounds like a bar bet gone bad it sounds like a bunch of ultra runners probably after a hundred miler they got together they're all kind of delirious and they've had a couple beers and they're like oh i i bet we could do 14 14ers all in one shot do you think we could no there's no way you could do it yeah i bet we could no you couldn't yeah we could and then everybody gets together with their maps and tries to actually figure it out that's what i've got in my head but how how's how did the reality of the origin of this nolan 14 actually play out well it's it's actually not too much different from that um uh fred vance who was sort of the the instigator of this whole thing um i uh first you know encountered him uh after the you know i first ran the barclay marathons in 1997 and put out a report about you know finishing the fun run and fred wanted to do barclay the next year and so he started emailing me you know asking me questions about barclay and how to get in and what the course was like and things like that but in in uh in doing that he sent me uh in february of 1998 this very enigmatic email uh which i actually was able to find on one of my backup drives somewhere

where he said uh um he he said he had an idea for a for you know incredibly interesting run and he'd give me two hints he said in he said uh in 1992 he says i posed a question to jim nolan who was not a runner but was a friend of his and and you know as an aside comment jim nolan had back in 92 had sort of just finished doing all the colorado 14ers on it just hiking anyway he said in 1992 i posed a question to jim nolan who was not a runner he came back a week later and gave me his answer 14 and the second hint he gave me was the proper name for the course can be spelled with the letters from wasatch and and he let me chew on that for you know a couple three months and then finally in in june of 1998 kind of came clean of what he was thinking about and he uh had been you know apparently back in 1992 had sat down with jim jim nolan and said you know how many 14ers to think you could do in in some amount of time you know if you want to try and set some kind of record for doing the most number of 14ers in in you know 48 or 60 hours what would it be and jim had said well it's probably you know probably the 14 14ers in the saw watch range and so fred had chewed on that for six years until 1998 and finally decided to try and set this thing up so in june of that year uh by then he was talking to me he was talking to john mcmanis who you know lived up in the area and and uh knew the area very well and plans sort of the you

know the three of us sort of started throwing around ideas for how you might want to do this um you know initially fred said you know let's make let's do it like sort of in the spirit of barkley um you know almost impossible no aid no fees um he saw it as kind of runners would go do it sort of whenever they wanted but you know wanted to try and finish it and had to provide their own aid this all matured as we went along um initially he was calling it the saw watch hundred and then after a while that turned into nolan's 14 mostly because he wasn't sure it was actually 100 miles initially we were thinking it was more like 80 miles um and he set the 60 hour time limit basically because he figured 60 hours was about as much as anybody could run and stay awake without having to actually make it a multi-day you know stage kind of race so you know we kicked that around for a while um you know by september of 1998 charlie thorne had been brought in uh you know as somebody else to kind of kick this idea around with um we decided then that we'd probably start a small group all at the same time um maybe with some aid in a couple places uh that matured um over you know sort of the september october time frame in 1998 until um fred had sort of through word of mouth collected a group of maybe initially seven runners that said they were interested in doing it um that morphed further

until he finally said okay we're going to set the field at 14 you know to go with nolan's 14 and he actually you know established a sort of an email list and started sending out updates to people every month or so saying you know here's here how here's how the plans are going and it sort of gradually got bigger and bigger um both in the number of people like i said he had 14 people initially um he finally you know appointed john mcmanus as as race director um he established an organizing committee that was you know myself and charlie thorne and fred and john mcmanus and jim nolan um i think there might have been somebody else in there he he uh talked to uh fred uh fred pilon who was the the uh editor for ultra runner magazine at that time and fred told you know he wanted to get results in when we eventually did it and fred said well you know we don't put in put results in ultra running magazine unless it's an announced race that's on our calendar and so you know and fred was trying to keep this kind of sub rosa you know kind of keep it on the sly and but finally he reached an agreement with with with fred pilon that that he could put a small little paragraph in in ultra running magazine that just kind of announced we were thinking of doing this and that that would qualify it for having results eventually in it and so eventually by the time you know we set a date august 27th for 1999 um by the time that rolled around uh we had

established aid stations with people working aid stations um we had a you know like i said a list of 14 runners although i think when it actually came down to it we only had four of us actually start um we had a lot of people who said they were interested in and bailed uh out on it initially you know the the four of us that have that started the first year ended up in 1999 ended up being myself fred uh gordon hardman and steve simmons and and um he fred rented a house up there that we all met at and could you know the aid station people could meet at and and uh it it became became kind of a real thing so you know that first year the real kind of catch thing in the first year in 1999 is we kind of had no idea how long this was going to take right you know and so we had aid stations but you know we had to tell the people you know because this was also before cell phones so we had no way of communicating with the aid stations no radio system or anything and so you know we had to tell the people that were doing the aid stations you know several of which were backpacking aid stations you know go to this place wait this long if nobody shows up by this amount of time they're not coming so you can leave and as it turned out finally it took us a whole lot longer than we expected and so you know we ended up with gordon hardman and me together and steve and fred together and you know gordon and i um you know got got to one place finally where there was supposed

to be an aid station and they'd already left okay we got to the next place you know eight hours later and and couldn't find them and figured they had left also and so and and actually it turned out later on that they hadn't left but we'd like walk through the forest about 200 meters away from where they were you know this was like at 5 a.m or something and just didn't see each other um so gordon and i uh going northbound ended up going as far as harvard and we were on top of harvard you know in a snowstorm not having had any any aid for about 24 hours at that point and decided you know we're going into our second night you know and and we kind of decided okay you know maybe it's time to pull the plug on this so we we walked down to pine creek you know there's a dirt road in pine creek four-wheel drive road so we figured hey we'll just go down there and we'll flag the first you know four-wheel drive guy we see coming up the road and get a ride out to the highway you know and and and all of our crews were all waiting at winfield you know which was like three peaks farther on yep the leadville yeah the right yeah right and so so gordon and i get down to this dirt road and we walk and we walk and we walk and it's nine miles out to the highway and we're just not seeing anybody on this road and it finally turns out the road's closed there's a gate on the bottom of it so we get out to the highway and it's it's dark by then and we're walking up the highway you know it at you know 11 o'clock midnight and we're trying to thumb a ride you know because from there you know it's like 10 miles up the

highway to the turnoff from winfield and then it's like you know 10 miles up the road to winfield and we're thinking you know we're going to be walking till morning at least and you know like i said no cell phones or anything we had these little frs radios we used to use which were fine from peak to peak or from peak to valley but you know you couldn't like call somebody arrange over with them and and so we're walking on this highway and and we're you know cars are going by very occasionally and we're sticking out our thumb and nobody's stopping and we're thinking what's wrong how you know and and we kind of look and realize oh we're kind of wearing our clown clothes you know we're you know we're covered with dirt you know i i had this multi-colored pair of wind stop you know rip stop nylon pants and a multi-colored you know windbreaker and gordon was in was in tights with some you know eric clifton like pattern on it and we kind of looked at ourselves and said oh okay we look you know look like hobos no wonder nobody nobody's picking us up and finally about midnight a car goes by and it turns around and it turns out it's jim nolan and he had just come by and seen us walking along the highway and and he said i saw you guys and i just thought to myself huh kayak or scum and he went by us and then he remembered he said yeah somebody said blake was wearing a pair of pants that looked something like that so he turned around and came back and got us and drove us up to winfield you know and of course our crew had no idea where we were you know they were waiting for us to come in but hadn't heard anything you know for many many hours so so that was the end of the first year and and i guess what do we make we made seven seven summits that year halfway there halfway

there how much time had y'all spent out on the course in advance of that first year like actually getting to know the terrain and the peaks and things like that not that much um i had been up a couple of the peaks mostly though at the northern end that we never got to so you know we were making it up as we were going along and for instance uh you know like gordon and i were on top of princeton and all of a sudden our hair started standing on end and the lightning started flashing and and we just took the first gully down from the summit and just you know motored down as fast as we could and you know we hadn't really intended to go that way but you know we had to get off the summit yeah so that's the way we ended up going and actually that turned out to be actually a pretty good way to go down um you know dropped us down in a maxwell basin and you know we had we had several several things like that where we're um you know like i said we were making it up as we went and and like i said that that resulted in us missing one of the aid stations completely um so the next year um we you know fred sort of set the whole thing up again uh we decided we would go uh you know i i prefer the northbound direction because i like having the sun at my back most of the day but fred wanted to try and change the direction and go southbound um so we did that and we ended up with uh that year we ended up with six of us starting uh going southbound uh that was you know myself uh you know gordon again but this time with matt mahoney uh eric robinson jim nolan and joe florio and you know

jim and joe were not in particular shape they they quit after after the first summit after massive um but the rest of us kept going gordon bailed out fairly early just because he'd had enough at that point but um matt and eric and i took a pretty good shot at it going southbound um and you know i ended up getting as far as princeton which was 11 summits and matt ended up getting to yale which was 10 summits and eric did columbia which is nine summits and basically i got down off of princeton um down to i guess it's alpine down there and um you know it was late afternoon it was kind of like you know i could keep going and get a couple more peaks but there's not enough you know by that time it was like 50 hours it had already been it's like there's no way that there's enough time to continue and and once you start from there you're kind of committed to go the whole way and you know i i wasn't you know i was feeling pretty good but but i couldn't do it in 60 hours and it probably would have been something more like 70 hours and you know that that wasn't appealing so i so i pulled the plug at 14 i read 11 summits that year so fast forward to the year that you finished which was the next year after that 2001 and that year we had let's see we had uh looks like looks like we pretty much had the full contingent of 14 people starting and we went southbound again um but we ended up particularly

with a really strong team with myself uh mike tilden um jim nelson and john robinson you know different from eric robinson they're cousins you know and and of course they're both uh cousins with brian robinson also um and the four of us kind of stayed together you know kind of off and on you know sometimes it was pairs of us sometimes it was three in one sometimes all four of us were together sometimes we were all alone it it kind of flowed but we were going pretty close to the same pace so we were never very far apart and um you know we kept kept cranking it out um we ended sort of the the big finale was we ended up uh um heading up princeton and i think the three of them were together going up princeton going up the ridge and i had decided to sleep for 45 minutes to try and settle my stomach so i was behind them and i went up maxwell gulch and could see their lights up on the ridge you know thousands of feet up above me and um you know and was was on the frs radios with them um and actually i take it back john it was it was mike and jim john was lost somewhere at that point because i remember at some point they're up on the ridge i'm down in maxwell basin and john gets on the frs radio and he says uh he says do you guys know where i am i said well you know and this this is like 3 a.m you know it's dark and and you know we say well what does it look like around you and he says

well i'm on this ridge and it's dark and we said well just just keep going up you know and and you're gonna hit some you're gonna hit some somewhere yeah and and which is a little digression here john robinson is is a very talented runner with no sense of direction and he would just pick a direction and put his head down and go like hell and you know and and earlier that's you know twice earlier that that same year one time on uh going on oxford i was following him up oxford in the middle of our first night and i could see his light out ahead of me like a quarter mile ahead of me and so he's he's going up the ridge to oxford and he gets to the top and he disappears over the summit and then i'm climbing up behind him but he never he never come starts coming down again you know i never see his light again and so i i get to the summit and i look around and i can see his light down the ridge the north ridge in the exact opposite direction of where he should be going and so i get him on the frs radio say hey john you're going down the wrong ridge and he says what oh i am you know and so i he turns around he waits you know and i wait for him and he comes back to the summit and we continue on together and and he had some special route that he knew going off oxford that he was sure was really fast and we ended up you know thrashing through the willows for hours trying to trying to find this route oh and then then a couple peaks later when we're in the morning of the second day i'm i'm going up harvard and again you know the frs radio crackles on and it's

john he says blake he says i i don't know where i am i said you know again i say well you know look around what you know he says well i'm on this ridge and there's a little peak on you know to my right and there's another peak to my left and again i just said you know just just keep going up john and you know you'll probably get there eventually and and he got there eventually but anyway so so now fast forward to to the finale so we're going up princeton and i eventually oh and i i i'm going from maxwell basin up the side up just just the side of princeton and all of a sudden i'm in the middle of this mountain goat nursery and this is you know this is like you know 1 a.m and um you know in the dark in my flashlight you know and this this is before led flashlights you know i'm carrying one of these you know double d cell you know sears roughneck incandescent flashlight you know which which doesn't throw a whole lot of light and the batteries don't last very long but anyway you know i can see animals you know i can hear babies bleeding and mountain goats running in circles around me and i'm finding the places where they had been bedded down you know and there's this whole herd of mountain goats sort of running back and forth all around me and i can hear them tromping around in the you know knocking rocks down in in the darkness and so i climb through this and i get up to the ridge and i eventually catch up to uh to mike tilton and and jim nelson and then it and then and by then john robinson had caught up with them so then the four of us are together and we go down the other side you know on the morning of the now the third day and uh we get down to the aid station we're kind of

you know you know my folks were there providing aid and they had their own people that were providing aid and you know i'm you know sitting there eating breakfast and stuff like that and then jim nelson comes down and says blake he says mike left me you know you know and i said well you know where's john he said john took off after him and he said do you you know let's let's you and me go together you know and and you got to know that jim nelson and mike tilton were were a pair you know they did everything together you know they had been climbing together for years and years and running together for years and years and years anyway so so so you know mike's motoring up antero john robinson's trying to catch him and jim and i are coming along behind and uh um eventually you know jim was not was falling off the back you know i i mean i started to get scared about if we had enough time to finish and so i finally told you know we went up to the top of antero together and i said i said jim i gotta you know i gotta start motoring you know i gotta go faster than this or else i'm not gonna make it and and so i drop off antero and i'm and i'm looking across so i can see the face of of tabawash and i can see there's john robinson spread eagle on this cliff and he chose some he chose this terrible line up up tabawash and he's stuck i know which one you're talking about he's like trying to go up the gully but he's on this cliff and he's spread eagle on this cliff and and he's and he can't go up or can't go down and and but you know and and he managed to have a hand free to talk on the rate

you know again on the frs radio to me and he's saying i'm stuck i'm saying i say sorry john i can't help you you're just you're just gonna have to figure this out and and so i i went up a ridge and went past him and oh and and the funny thing that happened then was steve bremner who was also running that year got married on top of princeton oh i remember him telling me that so steve and i we know each other here in colorado springs yeah we've been on the same uh 501c for yeah steve's a good guy and yeah and he had intended to get married you know on top of chavano which would have been the last peak but he didn't make it that far so so we're on the little frs radios and he's on top of of uh um of uh princeton with his you know now wife jim nolan is doing the marriage ceremony oh my god and jim had one of these you know draft dodging certificates from back you know years ago where you'd write off somewhere and they'd send you back something that said oh yeah you're you're now ordained in our church so so i have no idea if this was legal or not i guess in colorado it probably is but jim nolan was performing the the wedding i was on top of uh chavano the last peak um jim nelson was on top of uh tabawash one peak back and we're all on this frs radios together you know for like half an hour listening to this marriage ceremony and we can just you know i can just barely see in the distance you know on top of princeton i can see you know at the if i squinted see little figures up there that you

know and it was it was actually pretty cool and and so i hung around up there as long as i dared you know and then started motoring down you know and you know to get to the finish and you know and and mike tilden had finished you know maybe 40 minutes ahead of where when i finally finished and and uh uh i guess uh oh let's see i guess uh john robinson was next and he had made it up to the top of chavano in 60 hours but was over 60 when it got back down and uh jim nelson uh or actually i think i think john was just at 60 when he got down to blank cabin and and and jim was on top of chavano you know in 59 hours and you know was several hours after you know a couple hours over 60 hours when he finally made it down to blank cabin but but we figured that all four of us had finished and and uh you know what four other four other people jenny laforme eric robinson steve bremner and matt mahoney had made it as far as princeton um you know dennis hare made nine peaks and and hans dieter weissauer made nine or dennis hare made 10 peaks hans dieter weissauer made nine peaks and steve simmons and simon shadow light made seven peaks so it was a pretty successful year yeah so what was the difference in your mind between the first year where the furthest you got was seven peaks to the first year that you had this really successful year where a lot of people finished yeah actually one of the biggest differences was we had good weather in 2001 we had pretty good

weather the whole time whereas in 99 and 2000 uh we had several periods of heavy rain and lightning and you know for instance in 2000 at one point i think going up uh going up yale i was pinned down at at tree line basically uh going into the second night i think it was pinned down at tree line um on this very steep slope where there's this one big tree and i i could stand in like the one square foot you know on on the side of this tree was it's like the one square foot that was level and i had to sit there for you know something on the order of an hour just waiting for the lightning to pass oh wow and and it was it was actually pretty entertaining because uh you know i was getting kind of groggy at that point and i remember sitting standing there and this is a you know a pine you know and and all sudden i looked at the bark you know which is all rough and and the bark was like forming shapes of faces and animals and i just you know my mouth dropped open it was like watching television or something i just i just stared at this tree and it was like watching a movie you know it was transforming into all these shapes of these interesting shapes and and faces and animals and scenes and things so um and once the lightning passed i continued on up what's the best hallucination out of any of the folks that finished the first year wow um you know i i i tend to be fine on one night in you know two nights it starts to get a little weird for me but one thing that's important is that actually this course

has an advantage on is is you know if you're route finding you know something that engages your mind the second night's not so bad and i don't you know i don't get the hallucinations and things like that but if i get on a trail someplace where i can just you know motor along i mean or or walk and but don't have to think that's when it starts getting really really hard and you know mentally yeah mentally hard you know i start i start getting groggy and sleepy and can't stay awake and i start hallucinating and seeing things you know whereas if i'm mentally engaged trying to find my way that doesn't happen i think that's why the bad water folks always have the best hallucinations because all they're doing is they're staring at that stupid white line the whole time and every like the white line turns into things yeah right you know it turns into like the michelin man and like gold panners and old friends from high school and animals and stuff like that but yeah and i've had plenty of good hallucinations particularly at barkley and hard rock you know the couple times in hard rock i've been out in the second night you know not that many at nolan's because there was always something to keep my mind occupied i want to i want to i want to paint this picture a little bit more for the listeners in terms of like how hard the route is um because it's one that not a lot it's kind of like barkley we've made that analogy a few times where not a lot of people get to experience it although the accessibility is better there's no as you mentioned there's no lottery you can kind of do it whenever and blah blah but one of the ways that we can get a fix on how hard it is is by the people who have attempted it

and the people who have and have not finished yeah and you're one of them i mean you can start that picture right now i mean 2001 that was the year that you did five loops at barkley right yeah it was and 99 the first year we did it you know when i only did when i did seven summits that was the year that i won hard rock and set the course record yeah so okay you want you want to talk about the course record now because i know you wanted to bring this piece up just a a a um good example of the advances in the last 20 years of ultra running are in 1999 at hard rock like i said i i i won it and and set the course record okay and and this you know i mean i beat some good people you know i ran down carl melzer for instance from 40 minutes back to take the lead i love that i love the fact that you're throwing some shade at carmel well okay i'll tell you what happened with that later but anyway but um the time that i that i you know was the course record that year that i set you know where it is now in the all-time list at hard rock 20 years later it's i do because i looked at i looked it's 117 oh that's so unbelievable 117 yeah and you were the course record every every year eight to twelve people run faster than my course record from 20 years ago and that's just insane oh and and the thing with carl melzer is when carl melzer came back two years later he actually dropped out that year after i passed him when he came back two years later he lowered the course record by something like almost four hours yeah but still you were no slouch you still

i mean i was yeah i was a pretty good runner you're a good runner and but there have been a lot of other good runners that have attempted the line some of them have been successful and some of them have not and some of them have taken multiple attempts to actually get through the whole thing oh yeah yeah that that's not uh you know that that's uh pretty common um i mean you know look at some of the people that have been doing it you know i i mean the year we finally finished in 2001 you know i finished you know i finished five loops of barkley and nolans and hard rock jared campbell came back and did that a few years later and you know i i don't remember if it took jared several attempts to do it but i know jared has had attempts up there where he did not finish it and man jared is is amazing um you know there have been some big names that are coming you know anton kropichka you know had his his sort of infamous attempt where he went out trying to do something like 48 hours on it you know when when uh you know the course record was was quite a few hours longer than that actually i think he was even trying to go faster than that and and you know had had you know a film crew from his sponsor doing it and you know coming out and filming him for the whole thing and and ended up coming up with a three-part you know video that they released of of him cratering you know sort of halfway through so the the current fastest time there is under 48 hours yeah what is it it's uh i want to say

i looked that up nichols alex nichols i think yeah alex alex nichols uh i don't have it written down but it's like 40 oh there it is 46 uh 46 41 going northbound which is insane which is insanely fast fast that is insanely fast and he once again he lives here in colorado springs i've talked to him about it you know multiple times and he thinks that it's faster one because he knows how good he is he's a great runner but he's not the best runner out there two he says that you know he made some mistakes and had some low points and things like that what you've been there and you've seen the progression of the sport what do you think is possible out there well okay so let's let's sort of look at it this way okay when i finished it in 2001 it was roughly twice as twice my course record at hard rock okay roughly you know 60 hours versus 30 hours so okay you know the course record at hard rock now is what 22 something yeah you know so that might suggest that yeah you could be looking at somebody you know going under 45 hours probably maybe even lower than that um you know aiker carrera you know i mean uh alex nichols broke aiker carrera's record from you know from the year before by about an hour and man aiker carrera is is you know also uh among the best of of the european runners so he dropped a lot of time though yeah like he got lost on one section he missed his crew on a section or two

like it was not a not a clean not a clean ordeal for him i think if you got some of the some of the best people in the world to come out and do it my gut feeling is you could get down maybe in the 42 43 hour range which is kind of insane to imagine yeah it's insane on both on two accounts it's insane that it's that hard that a hundred a hundred in quotes a hundred miles can take that long for the best runners in the world and i mean personally having been out there and having seen you know a lot of runners out there it's insane that it could actually go that fast yeah i mean you know that's incredible you got you have to pick the pick pretty much the perfect line you'd need to have good weather but you'd need to be a strong enough runner you know that you can run most you know a whole bunch of the uphills that you know mere mortals like myself you know can just power hike is the is the best we can do on that i don't yeah i've not run at any of the uphills there um let's get down to brass tacks on the line itself are there one or two or three like critical pieces of the whole route that are either inordinately difficult or hard to navigate or even like insanely i know the whole line's beautiful but there's anything that like sticks out to you in terms of what are the critical pieces of it well some of the let's start with some of my favorite pieces of it um one of them is is uh particularly when you're

going southbound is going straight up to at the top of elbert um you know after you come off massive you can you can get over to the uh it's the west ridge i mean you know it's sort of a ridge it's not much of a ridge up elbert and that's just just you know several thousand feet just straight up you know and i mean but it's not so steep you can't you can't hike up it you know i mean it's not it's not rock climbing but it's just a amazing grind that doesn't let up and it's and it's pretty much a consistent um grade all the way up and it drops you right at the summit and that's pretty cool i think that's your favorite part because it's early yes and you're also feeling good mood because that's peak two just for people just for people who are not that familiar with the line that's peak two but that's my theory so keep going okay so so there's a couple others that i really like i really like princeton um again because it's uh from either direction it's a long way up yeah it's so big and it's really big and it stands out by itself you know that that uh particularly on the south side you know you're running like 10 miles on the colorado trail to get over to where you even start climbing um and and it's beautiful um and it's such an iconic peak that you know you can you can see you know it's got a it's got a good sharp summit um probably the best actually the best sharp summit is probably missouri or huron which are both pretty sharp pretty small summits

and and that's got some advantages and some attractions to it as well so as far as the harder parts of the course of course that depends some on again what time of day you reach things and what the weather is and all that but but there's a couple in particular that stand out um the route uh off of missouri when you're going southbound or or or up missouri when you're going northbound you're talking you can go on the ridge and there's a climbers route on the ridge which i've never done but you know a bunch of people try it every year you know the years that i was doing it and and they all said it was a pretty difficult class for ascent there and by that time i was i always figured you know by that by that time i'm tired enough that i don't want to try and do something that's dangerous um right next to it though there's a very nice shoot that comes down from the basically drops off almost from the summit uh down if you're you'd be going down it if you were going southbound and the the year we finished i tried that sight unseen you know i was i was on the summit talking to people on the frs radio and they said hey there's this great gully you know you just walk down like 20 feet down the you know down the north ridge and look for a red spot on the rocks and start down and so i walked 20 feet down and and i'm you know and of course it's in the middle of the night and i have an incandescent flashlight so i can't see that it's red but i just sort of you know there's you know and and and i say well okay here goes nothing and i just said and i started down the chute you know

as fast as my legs would turn not knowing what was underneath me and uh and it worked out and it turned out to be a really wonderful direct route down um but it was a it was a little bit of a you know leap into the darkness into the unknown that that took a little bit of a little bit of faith in what people were telling me there um as far as other hard parts though the uh the traverse across from harvard to columbia okay there is a route on the ridge that's again a class four route that i don't know that anybody normally tries to do but you know if you drop down a ways you know you can either drop down like to 12 800 feet and go across this boulder field or you can drop another thousand feet below that and go on the meadows um the boulder field if you're good on boulders the boulder field is a blast because the boulders are big enough that they don't move so you can get up ahead of steam as much as your lungs will withstand and basically run from you know jump from boulder to boulder and as long as you keep moving as long as you keep your momentum up you can just kind of like like it's like a monkey swinging from vines through the forest you just leap from boulder to boulder you know take a couple steps and jump and you get to the next one you take a couple more steps and jump and you get to the one after that and if you stop you're you know then you're climbing over each boulder laboriously one boulder at a time and then it's really slow but if you can keep up that head of steam it's fast and it's a blast that's also if it's dry too yeah if it's wet that's a oh yeah

yeah that uh the first year we did it when gordon and i were coming off of columbia it had been raining and you know we were doing the crab walk basically down the boulder field because it was so slow um you know but but in any case you know the the good you know the the uh rule you ought to follow is you always climb the rocks and descend the scree because if you do it in the other direction you know it's it's terrible both ways so climb the rocks and descend the scree there's still some areas where you have to descend the rocks and climb a little bit of scree i mean you can't like completely avoid all of that there's going to be some of it in one direction yeah but if you have a choice you know and i learned that the hard way from doing it the hard way a couple different times up there um anyway i think uh as far as difficult sections those are the only the those are the only ones that really stand out to me it isn't a really hard line you know i mean there's you can do this and not do anything harder than class two okay and if you and if you try and do you know take some of the trickier ways it might be class three you know you don't have to go the class four routes that sometimes people take but you're always not always but you're almost always above 10 000 feet yes like you only drop below 10 000 feet at the la plata trailhead and then in between intero and princeton uh i'd have to look at a map but that sounds about right it's very high and and and not only high but

but a very large portion of it is above timberline so that's one of the things that makes the weather so important because if you know if you're getting electrical storms you know it's it would be suicide to go over the tops of some of those peaks yeah and anybody who's ever been on a 14 or in a lightning storm knows how how precarious that situation yeah i've and i've done that um in fact the the year after we finished you know i i didn't need to do it the next year so i took a bunch of high school kids including one of my daughters up to do an aid station for nolens when everybody else was trying to do it in in 2002 and we uh you know while we're waiting for everybody to get up you know we all hiked up to the top of harvard and you know we're sitting on top and you know there were puffy clouds actually pretty much in the distance pretty far away and all of a sudden i look over at my daughter and her hair her long blonde hair is is basically standing on end you know and we hear this crackling noise and i'm saying to some you know is somebody like crinkling cellophane or something and then we look at my daughter and her hair is standing up and we all jump to our feet and just started running like hell down as fast as we could and you know got down a you know a couple hundred feet before it started hailing and the lightning started hitting and it didn't even look that close you know i mean it was just a nice day with puffy clouds off in the distance so man it can change in in a very short amount of time and you know if you're not familiar with that kind of weather

boy you sure ought to be before trying something like nolan's yeah that that sensation of having the electricity move in and it's like the only way that i can describe it is just eerie like it's it's almost as if a six or seven cents starts going off in your body and you can't really describe it now now that i'm you know old and chicken i mean you know my wife and i still go out and climb 14ers and and we're a little more careful now at 60 than than we were at 40 you know when i was doing nolan's oh man okay you you mentioned this one aspect kind of from the onset that i think is going to be important for for the people who are going to do it this year and also in future years is you guys started out and in it started to become a race like an actual authentic race with maybe a start line and a finish line the results were published in in ultra running magazine but at a certain part at a certain point in time that guy at the kibosh that was the the fifth year we started doing it which would have been 2003 um basically the forest service called up fred and said hey you know we we see you know that you guys are planning this organized race you know through the wilderness areas and we just want to tell you knock it the hell off and you know fred said well no no it's just a you know just a group of us that are going out for a hike together and all and they said no we've seen

your website you know that talks about aid stations and t-shirts and records and it looks like an organized event to us you know we'll be there the morning you said you were going to start and we'll write tickets to anybody who shows up oh wow and so you know we and you know i mean obviously we didn't didn't do it that year although people still went out and just did it on their own individually you know not not not that weekend but other weekends in august which is typically you know when when we would do this and and that was kind of the end of it like i said from you know after uh after that year uh that was 2003 it was really uh gosh it was probably about 2011 before somebody actually made a serious enough attempt to have done a lot of summits and that's when eric lee went up and actually got nine summits in 2011 so you know between you know between 2003 and 2011 it was kind of uh quiescent nobody you know people went up occasionally and reported they'd done a couple summits or three summits or something like that but nobody took any really serious shots at it but the no-no or the thing that the forest service had the biggest issue with was the fact that it was a quote-unquote organized yes exactly and you know there's obviously uh there's no rule that says you can't go up and

try and do this just on your own but you know the forest service you know you're not allowed to have organized events in wilderness areas and that's obviously been a problem for a lot of other races you know like western states when they made the what the granite peaks wilderness or something grand chief wilderness you know they had to get a special dispensation from the government to be able to continue to hold western states and we've faced the same thing in hard rock where there are some wilderness areas that are going in on the hard rock course and and we managed to get the local uh the local representative to write something into the legislation that said we could continue to hold hard rock so so this is you know this is an issue but as long as people just go up on their own and do it in you know ones and twos and threes no problem yeah and i think the the crux of it is is going to be what constitutes an organized event like what level of organization meet that meets a certain threshold is going to trip all of these negative things from happening is it a website like in your case right website t-shirts that are on is it somebody filming it is it promoting it through social media like all of those things are so nebulous right now that and i don't think we know yeah i don't think we know the answer to that in the forest service the way they change their management structure seemingly every few years where a new ranger kind of like will rotate in they have a different interpretation of that yeah and it will depend a lot on on who is actually in charge there and how they choose to interpret the rules you know uh the same thing has happened with you know rim to rim to rim in the

grand canyon you know at one time there were people organizing double crossing races and the park service finally put the kibosh on it are you are you are you worried or have any concern that that might happen to this route that the forest service kind of comes in and says yeah we're going to start policing this i don't irrespective of how they could actually do it or not i'm not worried about that because um you know they're they are you know recreation is important to them i mean you know part of their charter is to encourage recreational use of you know america's public lands and um i don't think that they i don't think they would feel even that they can be in a position of trying to say okay you're okay because you're going out to hike to climb a 14er and you're not okay because you're going to go out and try and run a bunch of 14ers all at once you know that's just too fine a line to try and draw yeah i think if anything something the thing that tips the scales or might tip the scales would be just the any media surrounding or people out there with drones or something like that yeah i could see that pretty quickly getting to be something that the forest service would say no you can't do that or retroactively yeah you know because they're not going to know when it's out there they'll see it and then they'll start hunting down whoever actually put the social media out i don't know

what they could do at that point i don't know if you you know i'm not sure if you need on public lands like that i know in some places if you're going to like film something for commercial purposes you actually need some kind of a permit to do that okay i'm pretty sure in forest service land you do or yeah so so that would be a way for them to uh you know put some kind of a limit on it i mean obviously you know if you're out there with your cell phone you know taking movies while you're doing it you know that's obviously perfectly allowed if you're out there with a film crew who's going to various places and you know and drones and things like that i could easily see that being something the forest service would say no to yeah there's this other aspect that a lot of it is off trail and personally i'm kind of conflicted about this so i mean in an effort of full disclosure like i've done the route i'm planning on doing the route this year i haven't done the whole route i've done 12 out of the 14 i'm planning on doing it this year i've been out there a lot in various capacities and each and every time i go out there i kind of struggle because i know there are areas that are on trail on standard you know standard routes up and down the peaks but there are also a lot of areas that are not on the trail and i also know as a kind of a trail builder here in colorado springs it irritates the bejesus out of me when i go and i build and maintain a trail and i go back two weeks

later and there's a bunch of switchbacks cut on the trail and i try to juxtapose that with i'm gonna go up you know this peak and i'm gonna cut all those switchbacks it is a different landscape but it seems like so hypocritical and i'm like do you wrestle with that at all or do you have any opinion i do wrestle with it some i mean you know from from you know i learned from backpacking with my father you know when i was in junior high school that uh you know cutting switchbacks is just ingrained into me that that's just something you don't do you know that's just like the worst you know that's right up there with littering it's it's just you know just something that is totally inexcusable and so you know where there is a trail um yeah people ought to use the trail and there's no excuse for cutting the switchbacks trying to trying to speed up you know your ascent or descent where there isn't a trail you know of course i mean there's climbing routes on all these peaks you know and you know jerry roach's book lists probably half a dozen routes on every single one of these peaks um some of them are are have become pretty well beaten in you know where there's a fair amount of damage uh you know that's been done on a scree slope or something like that um you know this in a sense nolan's uh because we're going from peak to peak rather than from trailhead to peak is de facto putting in some new routes that weren't there before and now that we have you

know now that it's becoming popular and getting to be a thing that that people are are doing yeah some of those i expect are are actually getting to form kind of a groove in there and i'm i'm conflicted on that um i don't come down strongly one way or the other um i do come down strongly as i said on the you know if there's a trail and you're going that way you ought to use the trail but if you're if you're taking some other ridge that doesn't have an established route on it i don't know you know i hate i hate to see damage done to the meadows and the tundra up there you know but but i think you ought to be able to to pick a route and go up it yeah it's tricky because like you said it is you do you do have to take ridge lines and take lines that have not existed before and even when i've you know my short experience out there which has been you know five or six years now i've seen trail getting worn yeah well i mean you see that at hard rock you know particularly on on grant swamp pass you know on on uh on the the north side of grant swamp pass you know when i look at photos that i took when i first started running hard rock back in 94 you know there was there was nothing to be seen there it was just a just a scree slope you know with maybe the slightest little trace down it and now you know you can't miss it i mean you know there there's a big wide scar going down it from

basically hard rockers from you know 25 years of hard rockers does this the is that forest service that manages it uh there i don't remember if it's forest service or blm i'm pretty i'm pretty i was gonna i was gonna ask yeah i think that's forest service but i don't know for certain do they come down on you guys no um well i mean we we have a pretty good relationship at hard rock you know this is you know going a little field here but we have a good good relationship with the permitting agencies at hard rock and and we work closely with them and you know take their advice on various things and uh you know the issue of how much damage is done by the number of people um is one that we spent a lot of time discussing with them yeah yeah yeah as you guys have to do every year okay blake so i'm going to do this in a few weeks it's probably going to be now that i'm thinking about it between the time we record this and the time it comes out excellent maybe i'll record yeah maybe i'll record the outro and give the synopsis of of what actually went down but i'm going to do this in a in a few weeks and so from a completely selfish point of view what advice do you have for me to get the freaking thing done in 60 hours pick your weather carefully okay and you know i mean you're in colorado springs so you're close enough that you know you can you can change plans if you need to i mean you know it's

not like you're flying in from the east coast and you know this is your one shot to do it um so you know if if you're planning on doing it and it looks like it's going to be thunderstorms all weekend long i wouldn't bother just stay home you know and and you know but if you get one of those one of those window you know i mean you can always get thunderstorms pretty much any day of the year any day of the summer up there but you know but it goes in cycles you know and as you know from various years at hard rock you know some some years it's almost entirely dry some years people just get pounded you you don't want to be up there in one of the weekends when you're going to get pounded the tricky thing about that though is you look at the weather and there's always a 30 or 40 chance of thunderstorms no matter how you like you look there's some there's some days where it's like 100 okay i'm gonna avoid those but there's this there's this range of what's going to be i was going to use the word ideal but that's not the right word there's this range of like what's going to be better versus worse and it's anywhere between if you just look at a standard weather forecast 20 and 45 or 50 chance of thunderstorms and that i just kind of like wrestle with it's like ah do i wait a day and like you know improve my odds or what it's not as clear cut as just like look for the good weather because there really isn't any perfect weather there's never well and and you need to be um you know you're experienced enough climbing you know climbing colorado peaks obviously jason that

that uh you probably have a pretty good sense for how much risk you're taking climbing into a thunderstorm and you know there have been i mean a bunch of times you know the years i was doing it the three years that i you know was attempting it or finishing it um you know every single one of those years at some point or another i was climbing up a peak you know that was getting pounded by lightning and thinking okay hopefully it'll be gone by the time i get up there and and you know and in in a lot of cases that turned out to be the case you know i mentioned the one time i got pinned down up there for an hour at timberline but there were a bunch of other times like going up la plata might have been the year we finished um you know i was climbing climbing up and climbing up and climbing up and seeing the top just get nailed and thinking well you know in maybe in you know an hour two hour time when i'm actually up there maybe it will have blown over and it turns out it did so you know but there's a fine line there you know as you well know it's easy to fool yourself to convince yourself that it's going to get better and it's going to get better and it's going to get better and suddenly you know you're in mortal danger so so you have to have a pretty you know pay attention to that well in 90 of the time while you're out there the weather pattern is pretty predictable it's the 10 of the time that it's not and that's when that's where people i think make the most mistakes because they can read it and you can see everything for the most part

because you're about treeline and you're going so slowly that you can look up at the ridges and look up at the peaks and go oh okay yeah you're right yeah hour and a half i'm going to be up there and all this should move off because i can see blue skies behind there and things like that most of the time if you've been out there enough you can read that but there's that like 10 or 20 percent of the time that it just like it moves it like the weather moves a different way like completely different way than it normally does or it doesn't move as fast that's where i think people get well so so the other thing to remember again is that you know this isn't hard rock where you know if if you pull the plug you might not ever get a chance to run it again okay i mean you know if it if it gets dangerous you know and you and you try and wait it out and it doesn't look like you're gonna you know like you're you're gonna be waiting too long you know it's not gonna get better you can pull the plug and come back next weekend that's right i can do that i could go and sleep in my bed right five hours back home sleep in my bed and come back don't don't tell yourself that because you know because then you might give up prematurely you know um i mean that that's not a good excuse because you're tired but but if you're in mortal danger yeah so blake what you're telling me is is be tough but be careful but don't put yourself immortal yeah be tough but be careful that's good good advice sage advice blake i appreciate it all right man we're gonna let you go i appreciate your time blake thanks for everything you do thanks for what you do for

the alternate community specifically with hard rock and the races that you run uh in los alamos you want to give a quick plug for the races that obviously didn't happen this year but yeah well our big local race here is is the james mountain trail runs we got a 50 mile 50k and a 15 mile and it's one of the toughest courses you know that you're going to find for those distances um it's beautiful it's at a great place of the calendar it's memorial day weekend so it's just the right amount of time before western states or hard rock to you know not burn you up but uh but be in a good way to test your fitness so anyway i would i would recommend that to anybody and i would recommend that as well i've done it several years i've had my athletes do it it is an awesome race and it's got the perfect vibe where you start and end at the posse shack which if if nothing else that's just an awesome name for a place to start and which is only a mile from my house so i can just walk walk to the start you know and then walk home afterwards and uh yeah it's awesome and you know we have we have you know a great new mexico food at the end and coolers full of beer and and it's a it's you know everybody hangs around all day long and waits for everybody else to finish it's a and there's like 600 in the whole you know in the three races there's like 600 you know the two long races have maybe 150 people in them and if you know blake well enough he might give you some beer that he brewed that's right i usually come with a with a case of homebrew for my special friends at the finish line there you go you just got a bunch of new friends from people listening to

this podcast blake all right man appreciate it we'll talk soon man i hope to see you on the trail soon all right and there you have it much thanks to blake wood for illuminating everything about the history of the nolan's 14 line and what it is all about many of you have reached out to me via social media on my personal attempts at the nolan's 14 line and while it is true i've been unsuccessful in two attempts to date at the line i am committed to getting it done this summer and i'm going to go back out there again with my wife and my dog as my trusty crewmates sometime during the end of august early september weather window permitting and quite frankly just get the freaking thing done so i appreciate everybody who's reached out to me on that if you have not had the chance to give this podcast a rating or a review on apple podcast go ahead skip on over there give the podcast a review it means a lot to me personally and helps out the podcast a lot appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you and as always we will see you out on the trails you