Branden Joy - FKT on Montana’s 50 Highest Peaks | Koopcast Episode 59

trail and ultra runners what is going on welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast we feature another one of our cts athletes the hardcore the badass brandon joy brandon is coached by cts coach chantelle robitaille who you will remember from KoopCast number 13 and 57 and he recently set a new fkt on montana's highest 50 peaks which are all contained in the beartooth wilderness and the southern part of the state over the course of 17 days in this remote montana wilderness brandon tagged 50 distinct peaks that were between 11 400 and 12 800 feet of elevation and the entire route consists of 195 miles and 105 feet of elevation gain that is a huge line i caught up with brandon several weeks after this monumental attempt and after he had had some time to decompress rest and recover and compile his thoughts as you can imagine not everything goes to plan in these endeavors and they're inevitably a compilation of highs lows and mistakes along the way and we dive into it all you'll find brandon is a composed thoughtful young man with a keen sense of adventure that he's just tapped into and i can't

wait to see what is next from him so let's get right into it here's my conversation with cts athlete brandon joy i'm forgetting the time frame here brandon how long has it been since you finished this six weeks six weeks okay so six weeks like how do you feel right now physically or mentally go over both of them because they're both important right physically i feel pretty good um i've been back to to drink i'll call it training but it's i think as you know it's it's more of a lifestyle just my habit of just getting out and moving and and i feel good i don't feel like i can put in long days and a lot of vert and so and i've done some scrambling and some you know even in frisco where i'm at i went up and i just was off trail and did some pretty exposed class four or five scrambling just for fun so it's nice to kind of get back into that but i definitely don't have i don't have my foot on the gas pedal that's for sure nor should you say that yeah i mean i just and i think it's it's what i expected and after a huge effort whether it's this or a hundred miler especially when i'm going all out and i'm leaving really nothing out there i find

that the the recovery physically you know i can get back to doing things as per normal but i'm i'm not going to be able i would i would have a very hard time doing some tempo workouts or something just it would be ultra strenuous so physically overall it's pretty solid and then mentally it's been and just the adjustment back into normal life has has caught me off guard how how challenging that was and and and i didn't realize the impact and i'll call it the severity of the trip that i just did i mean it was really it was so much different like the stakes were the stakes were absolute rather than an ultra where you have a very structured safety net this was just just pure isolation i saw i only saw somebody on the summit of two peaks and one one of those summits was somebody that i met on the previous peak that decided to join me so really there's just no one out there and you're just responsible for yourself and and then yeah coming back and and having to readjust to work and and deal with the trying to digest the trip trip in tandem with trying to

acknowledge the physical and mental depletion at hand let's get into some of the exposure and no safety net features in a little bit but i think just to kind of outline things before we get to in the weeds a lot of a lot of people are just not familiar with montana's peaks and the ranges out there and as you alluded to they are quite remote and they can be quite technical so what you decided to undertake was to do the 50 tallest peaks in montana and the whole route from my understanding is between 104 and 105 miles or sorry 195 194 and 195 miles with over 104 000 feet of elevation gain so it's almost 200 miles with 105 000 feet of elevation gain is that correct correct and it took you 17 days to do it correct so it is a it is in every sense of the word like a monumental effort like you have to put aside nearly a whole month of your life to go and do something like this yes and i and i planned for the trip to take up to 30 days so when i set my food caches and i was corralling the the caloric needs for the trip i i i gathered 125 000 calories i was ready for 30 days of effort whether i got held up by

like weather or or injury or just general fatigue i had no idea what what the terrain was going to be like since i onsite of the route i didn't scope it out really beforehand and so there were just so many unknowns and and now after the fact i'm aware of what the distance and elevation gain was and the route but beforehand all i had to really all i could utilize was a topographic mapping system which i use gaia and then google earth and you're making straight lines all over the wilderness area right when and there's no trails but i mean i was less than 10 miles of trails and five of those miles were in one push so 95 percent of the time or more that i was out there which is just off trail navigation trying to figure out what's the most efficient and safe at any given point from where you're at to where you're trying to go how did all of this come about like what what solidified it in your mind that you said you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna do this in 2020 i'm gonna kind of take this thing on i guess it started i think a lot of people in the ultra marathon community and just general racing community have experienced the the pandemics effect on what their plans were for the year and mine

started about april and i had more or less a race a month through i would say september and most of those races were utilized or going to be utilized more as training but one by one those kept getting swept away and i kept thinking well you know the pandemic can't last much longer it can't be going as strong or it's it's going to subside enough for races to open back up and then meanwhile i was building all this fitness and then investing all this physical and emotional energy into training and training specifically for the next event and and finally i just got honestly i was kind of fed up with it um i was just i felt as i was burning these matches and my big race for this year was bigfoot 200 in washington and i i felt very ready for that and i think it was about six weeks prior to me starting the bear tooth trip that that race was canceled and i had suspicions that it was going to be canceled so i think i was already think i was already brainstorming but then really i had maybe a week and some change and i was just i mean day and night trying to figure out what i was going to do to to test the fitness mental and physical durability that i had worked so hard to cultivate this year what i was going to use

that energy towards and i was thinking about all different kinds of things for long distance running maybe room to rim to rim in the grand canyon do that a bunch of times or some big bike packing trips i you know i was i was all over the board but ultimately ultimately i i came across this a podcast actually shantel uh robitae my coach cts coach she suggested i i check out this guy justin simoni and he is a colorado-based multi-sport athlete that goes on these crazy human-powered self-supported missions and and ultimately i think she she understood that's what i wanted to do because all these races are so supported that you know one one permit is not available and then the race can't happen or you can't have more than 50 people in a group it can't happen so i just it was almost a rebellion against the idea of a supported event and i just wanted to do everything completely on my own i didn't want to have to rely on anyone for anything so you got your year foobard like a lot of uh that's a technical term by the way like a lot of athletes did um but it sounded like you were training super hard for bigfoot with the idea that bigfoot was actually going to happen correct

and so you parlayed that um that fitness that you had built up into this fkt this personal project where you're doing montana's 50 tallest peaks what was the time frame between when you decided to pull the trigger on that fkt to when you actually started there was a uh a five week five week incubation period that i had to to plan everything and i was using ultimately i did use the fkt website as an index to get ideas for what people were were doing for self sort of creative ideas of what people were doing in the outdoors and i saw that nate bender who's montana-based athlete established the montana twelvers in 2018 so there are 27 peaks in montana that are 12 000 feet and above so he established this new high route and i thought that was awesome and i thought about potentially doing that but it would only take me about a week and i wanted to do something a bit longer but i wanted to max out really at about a month so that's how i came up with the the top 50 once i did some research and i realized they were actually all in one mountain range which is this massive wilderness area called the absteroka beartooth wilderness i think it's the sixth largest

in the continental u.s wilderness area no motors no mountain bikes i think the trails have to be maintained by hand like no no chainsaws or anything i mean it's pretty wild out there so it's a rugged adventure is kind of what i'm getting at and you it's not like you prepared for 12 months for this i mean you had another objective in mind you were gonna you were uh you were gonna go do a 200 mile race obviously that got upended just like a lot of other athletes plans got upended and you kind of took it you you took it with your own kind of resolve and said hey i'm going to put this together based on inspiration from other people from the fkt's known website but still at the end of the day you had you didn't have the most like the the most accurate sense of even how long it was going to take you it ended up taking you 17 days and thought it might take you closer to 30 days so take me through a little bit of like that planning process of like starting to look at the route and go okay it's going to take me this long to go from here to here and here to here and here to here and what what did that actually look like that's a great question um the planning was a lot more complex than i initially anticipated i maybe it's just how my brain works but i think top 50 peaks you know it's it's fairly simple it's just 50 mountains you just go from one to the next but there were a lot of project

specific skills that i needed to cultivate or sort of explore before i went out there one thing i did i that was probably this the best training effort for this bear tooth trip was more or less unintentional it was something i was going to use for training for bigfoot in may i went out with john fitzgerald who's another cts coach and we did a traverse of the bob marshall wilderness and we were able to this this was during peak pretty much pre-hydrologic flow peak hydrologic flow and there was significant snow in the high country as well as i'll call it in the in the middle country so we had snowshoes it ended up being about 100 miles pick your own route it's a point a to point b and you know trails are in unknown condition you're having to navigate there were 30 plus miles of significant snow lots of river crossings basically no bridges you're wet the whole time and we were able to kind of play around with a nutrition strategy and then push on the sleep deprivation side of things because it was just two days and some change and then it was also great to

help me understand how to look manage my effort better because even training for 100 mile race we'll we'll just say that's a sub 24 hour effort once you start extending like two days and beyond and then what i was going to do in the bear tooth multi-week i mean it's it's a totally different ball game to try to recalibrate like how hard you're going or to manage your effort level when you're out there and one thing i learned from that bob marshall crossing was that i had no intention of pushing the sleep deprivation when i was in the bear tooth because there's only me there's one brain that's working at like half capacity because i was most of the trip i mean after a week i was so depleted i was more depleted physically and mentally than i had ever been before and i was having to navigate and make good decisions on really exposed class four and class five terrain every day meaning and by exposed i mean essentially climbing at when you're at uh when you're high off the ground and in a fall you can't fall is unacceptable so if i had pushed the sleep deprivation it would have just put me in in a bad spot so ultimately that all those different techniques helped me to

get my feet under me and you know i like switched backpacks and realized that the how i was carrying water was uh it was wasting time and john had this great these great collapsible flask with water filter in the cap basically and i was having to filter everything separately from one from one reservoir to another it was just a pain so running through all that gear as far as acclimatization it was one aspect i wanted to come in as prepared as possible and these are most of these mountains are 12ers which it's not that high i mean but it's still technical i think i think that's the the one of the points that you're trying to make it's still like it's still a technical ordeal like you have to have some yeah obviously i have that backcountry skills but you also have have to have some moderately competent level of rock climbing skills as well oh certainly i mean this was by far the most comprehensive climbing test i've ever experienced and and a lot of what i did out there is is undocumented they're not very well known like look on summit post and there's a photo of this cliff face and it has someone drew and micro and paint or something all these these bright lines of where

you should go and where not to go i mean what i was doing out there essentially when i got out there my route sort of went out the window because i put down this backbone i tried to figure out where the hot spots were meaning where the unavoidable class 5 terrain was because i was doing all this climbing in running shoes hiking shoes some hybrid i guess and with a 30 pound backpack i wasn't just going up fresh with normally when i'm climbing and i think when most people are climbing they just have their climbing shoes on their cinderella shoes that fit perfectly to your feet and you have a lot of control you can use your big toe and you can get on these really small holds and have a lot of grip and you have chalk and a lot of times you're just roped so you have that safety net as well and this was just getting to a specific place and choosing the route based on what i'm seeing and i tried to figure out where the best before i left i looked at the google earth and the topographic maps to try to figure out a digestible way to connect everything and then when i was out there i would oftentimes especially in the first half take what would be a more technical or direct or more interesting line and i found too that a lot of times the more technical lines had more solid rock versus these steep

loose scree bouldery slopes where i just found myself on the way up falling but you know going down is much more difficult sometimes i go down that way as well but it was just this constant decision decision tree that was evolving based on the day the weather how i felt you know how much food i had where my next water source was and how far i was from my next cash point how many peaks i was planning on trying to do that day i mean there was there were so many variables at any given point it was just it was so it was to say it was fun would be a diluted way to put it it was it was exhilarating it was it was absolutely the most sensational 18 days of my life so you are just purely in the moment so it i mean it sounds like you were using gaia while you're while you're out there correct yes okay so you were doing the research on this and you're compiling several different sources of information from google earth from maps from gaia itself and it sounds like you had the peaks plotted out but the routes in between the peaks you had some like exclusionary criteria meaning i know i'm not going to go there based on what i'm seeing during the research process but then when you got your like feet on the ground it's

you're looking at it and going yep i'm going that way like you're you're totally like eyeballing it exactly yeah and it went both ways i mean there were the routes that i planned up that looked the most reasonable from google earth and gaia and then when i got there often i just would take a more direct route it just it would be it looked shorter it looked more solid in some ways it looked safer and then it was also just more climbing and and i loved the climbing aspect of it but then there were it also went you know 180 degrees in a in an unpleasant direction where i would plan my route and on google earth 3d is incredible it's an incredible tool but you have no perspective for scale so sometimes i would plan a route and i'd get there and i'd get to the summit and okay i'm supposed to be going to this peak next down this route oh that's a 1500 foot cliff in front of me that is not going to happen so what i had planned was just absolutely absurd and then i again had to just think okay well i'm trying to still get to this peak i can't go this way and i'm cross-referencing what now i'm seeing with boots on the ground with my map you know looking at the time where you know how

can i how can i readjust or restructure getting to this peak and back such that it's efficient and safe and and ideally using utilizing it out and back so in one peak in particular that i'm thinking about as i'm talking about this i was able to kind of horseshoe around to a saddle and then drop most of my stuff like i just brought enough food and water for me to go out some at this peak and come back because a lot of the trip had these i could utilize these out and backs such that i could drop a lot of weight and they were they're they're out of the main routes call it the spine it's kind of like a rib coming out and and that saved a lot of energy to be able to shed that weight how did you initially decide that it was going to take you about 30 days because that's always i think that's one of the intimidating aspects that a lot of athletes have with trying to piece together their own routes especially in especially with routes that don't have that much data on them or history of other athletes doing them as they look at it and they have no idea how long it's going to take they whether it's a day or two days or whatever so when you were going through this process like what what made you think and it turns out that you were that that you didn't get this all that right

what made you think that initially it was going to take you about 30 days it was kind of a hail mary guess based on a few different factors i mean ultimately i had no idea and i just wanted to be ultra conservative that i was not going to short myself because the last thing i wanted to have happen was to get out there if i had only planned for say three weeks and then i'm almost to the end and i have to cut the trip short because i have to go back and resume life that would be that would that would uh that would stay with me for a while so i did see that nate nate bender he did the montana twelvers in four days and change granted he he was able to he did a lot of scouting he did it supported and he just went he was incredibly fast to do that in in four days so i thought well is maybe i will just assume that self-supported and on sighting the route it'll take me twice as long so that four days goes to eight days if i were to do the same thing okay double the peaks maybe double to triple the time so then that eight days goes to say between 16 to 24 days which honestly that was where i realistically thought i would land

if nothing horrible went wrong and and then that i just extended it to 30 days to give myself that extra leeway so that i wasn't cutting up you know at the upper threshold of 24 days as i mentioned and then it takes 25 and i don't get to finish the project so i think that was i kind of yeah i think ultimately i just used a similar project and projected that onto my own trip yeah it's convoluted ultramath is what i always like to call it right it's like okay somebody did this in this amount of time then i'm gonna do double that and since i'm doing double that i gotta double that and there's my answer so so it turns out so you're playing it for 30 you end up doing this in in in 17 days um what did the rest of the support look like that that you got while you were out there i know you did a bunch of caches but how many of them were there how far in between how long were you out before you uh before you got to kind of take advantage of any of the caches that you set so i i set four caches and studying them ended up being fairly challenging trying to figure out where they were going to go because after i i did some scouting on google earth again and i realized that tree line ends at about 9 500 feet and when i was out there i was at around 11 000 on average

and i tried to utilize where i would naturally where my route that i had planned out would drop down into a drainage and put a cache there but also have the caches be somewhat equidistant throughout the trip and i didn't want to use i mean i could have used bare barrels but i would have honestly needed like 15 it would have been it would have been absurd i would have i would have wiped rei out of their bare barrels in montana not just where i am locally so what did you and so i used five gallon home depot buckets and i spray painted them black and then i was stressed out about because it's it's prime grizzly yeah and black bear country and and i didn't want them to turn into some sort of pinata for a big game animal totally so so what i did is i when i did set the caches and each cache just for reference had about 25 000 calories and i figured that would last me roughly a week and then say six days and then i started with that amount of food as well so that would that would give me about 30 days total and when i set the caches i spent a lot of time looking for specific types of trees with with sturdy branches that came out from the tree that were a

little bit isolated such that a black bear couldn't climb the tree and then make its way over and start start digging into the cache but it also had to be at least 10 feet off the ground and and then so i put a lot of time energy into actually this specific orientation of where they were and then i did spend quite a bit of time just praying that nothing happened because from each cache point to the next i'm like i hope it's still there i honestly do because i and i set the caches a week before i started which was a massive effort in and of itself it it ended up being about 85 miles and 15 000 feet of elevation gain just to set these four caches and i was doing this i travel quite a bit for work and so that five weeks five weeks prior to me start when i had to plan this trip five weeks prior to starting i was out of town for half of that time and i was setting these caches in between field jobs in which i'm working like 12 plus hours a day and so it was just this it was this it was just pure chaos to to set these things and to make sure they were good to set waypoints on on my map and try and get that on my garmin as well and have backup systems and and just dot my i's cross my t's because the last thing again that i want to

have happen is get through three quarters of this trip and realize that one of my caches is gone or you get there and it's you know some i didn't think that anybody would really be out there because i set them all off trail yeah yeah but there was that there there's just part of me that that would really suck because i did this fully self-supported so once i got dropped off in the bear tooth i mean that was it like no external aid of any sort i had what i had on my back in my backpack and in each of my four cash points and and if if i had a gear failure of some sort i'd have to pull the plug on the trip sure or another option is i could coerce a friend into bringing me say another pair of shoes but then the trip would become supported i'd lose a bunch of time and it would be a pain so you're hiking 20 miles round trip roughly to set each one of these cash points and you're doing it in the middle of wilderness you're hauling around this huge five gallon bucket to to uh to to to drop off 25 000 calories is that how much you put in each one correct and each each cash weighed about 25 pounds as well and then you've got to find it right so so once you actually start the route you've got to find exactly where you put it so you've got to make sure that the point that you capture is correct

and i mean i agree with you it's an or it's an ordeal just to like set these cash points correct yeah and and from where i wanted to set them a couple of them would have actually been above tree line and so i had to redesign where the cash points went such that they would be below tree line because i couldn't i couldn't just if i put them above tree line then they'd just be on the ground just a nice you know two millimeter thick piece of plastic to get smashed by whatever comes by and and so when i was actually on my route it did end up adding in you know a handful of extra miles and a handful you know few thousand feet of extra elevation gain and loss but in the grand scheme of the entire trip it was it was a it was a small portion okay so let let's get to the let's get to the trip a little bit because i i think that one of the things that i want to learn a little bit more about and i think the listeners will uh the listeners will really get into is just how remote it is so first off the 50 highest peaks in montana are they entirely contained within the beartooth mountains correct okay can you describe what that mountain range is like i mean you obviously covered a big you know a really big portion of it so it'd be impossible to do in you know 10 or 15 minutes much

much less the entire length of this podcast but what are those mountains for somebody who's never been to montana before what are those mountains like what do they look like what do they feel like what's the terrain like the mountains are i i will say it is my i'm biased but it is my favorite mountain range in montana it's this it's nearly a million acres of just wilderness and there are very few trails there are a couple through trails but beyond that there are just these small veins that that barely go into the wilderness area and as such there are very few people that actually go in there and and a lot fewer people that go off trail none of the tallest 50 peaks in the state have a trail to the top so if you want to do granite which is the tallest peak or mount wood second tallest or whitetail or any of the other more common peaks you are it is a massive approach and i mean we're talking most of the peaks it's a 20 to 30 mile round trip if you want to get if you start from the nearest trailhead or the nearest access point and most of it's going to be off trail and it's just well i mean when i was out there as i mentioned i was far above treeline most of the time and then when i would go down into treeline

it's so thick so i kept thinking i i either felt like i was on the moon or in jurassic park there there really wasn't a lot in the middle and there the bear tooths are also pretty heavily glaciated which i think is not very well known i mean they're not big epic glaciers it doesn't look like mount rainier where it's a big white blob but they're everywhere in the glade there that was my water source mostly was just i drink directly from glacial runoff and snow melt i didn't have a stove with me or water filter so i was just drinking unfiltered from probably the cleanest water sources in the state because it's the highest mountain range and yeah that was pretty incredible and geographically it's in like the southwest part of the state it's just north of yellowstone i'm just trying to paint the picture of where this is and kind of what it looks like it's just north of yellowstone like southeast of um of bozeman the route that you took what direction were you generally moving in that mountain range so i i basically started on the wyoming montana border in the south and i made my way i would say clockwise it the route snaked all over the place but generally i

worked my way clockwise and ended in the northeast portion of of the beartooth wilderness and what made you decide to take that direction in terms of like the backbone of all of the peaks versus going the other way oh that's a good question total coin flip huh yeah i mean there were really i had two options and if i i wanted to when i identified the hot spots of the unavoidable class five climbing terrain i wanted for example granite and then the west granite traverse which is rated a five seven on the yds scale and you know if i could i would have liked to do that earlier in the route just because it's more technical and i don't want to get into the really technical terrain at the end but ultimately i just started in the south it just made sense with the route itself and i think that the bailout points towards the end would have been a little bit easier and i was more familiar with that area i think those those were some highlights but ultimately granite peak and some other technical terrain in that area they're in the middle of the route so it doesn't matter what end i start at and there's technical route

sorry technical terrain every day so ultimately it didn't really matter yeah and that's what i was kind of trying to get at because i know a lot of athletes that set these routes up they'll want to do it from hardest to easiest so they're doing the hardest and or the most technical part of the route when they're the most fresh and then as they're becoming more fatigued they're doing the easier stuff it's a little bit safer maybe they can move a little bit better and things like that but it sounds it sounds to it sounds from from your perspective is is a it didn't matter and b you might not have even had that information available to you in advance because it's not something that's so readily chronicled correct and i will say too 16 of the peaks i climbed so i i cross-referenced my route and all the peaks with what's available online after i got back and i found that 16 of the peaks that i climbed are fully undocumented meaning there is no information whatsoever online routes access points do's and don'ts i mean it's it is just a it's a black hole and so it really took just getting out there and and and seeing the peaks or the spires firsthand to start establishing what i thought would be

a reasonable approach to climb them and how you said you were trying to avoid a lot of the more technical stuff what how how technical did it actually get did you get into any like low grade class five type of climbing yes i mean i had i had exposed class four and low or low class five every day meaning you fall and you're not going home and i did the to clarify too i did the entire route unroped no harness no chalk no climbing shoes like no protection whatsoever and so i'm having to both climb up and then also descend these routes that i'm i just saw 10 you know first saw 10 minutes ago and they're true alpine i mean i don't think that crag climbers by crag i mean people that go to like sport routes and they go to established walls where where routes are bolted it's hard to have perspective for how loose the terrain is in the in the alpine i mean you have to test every single hold you have to be prepared for some hold under your foot to just fall off the wall and the rock isn't it's not clean i mean it's covered in lichen

and some moss sometimes it's wet sometimes i mean there are like ledges with this kitty litter gravel on it or these baby head rocks i mean there's there there there's nothing predictable about any given climb other than the fact that you have no no idea what's coming yeah it's slow moving terrain because you're having to test everything yeah yeah i mean in for example at one point i think on day six i did this i climbed this cliff face which i didn't need to and i i think it was about 400 feet tall it's the north face of sky pilot and i could have horse done a horseshoe gone around the backside and there's a reasonable class three you know maybe at most hike you know and then you come back around to plateau summit but i was just primed enough with with scrambling every day and dealing with that exposure every day and i but not enough time had gone by to where i was too fatigued to handle that physical or mental stress and i just got there and i saw a line and i just i just went for it and on this 400 foot vertical face i was on it for over 45 minutes and i had done an out and back so i left i had very little

weight on my back but it was just i think it's a testament to just how slow that is and on that climb at any given point had i fallen i would have fallen however far i was up that cliff face to the ground so 50 feet 100 feet 200 feet 300 feet that's how far you're going to fall before you make contact with rock yeah and here's the picture that i'm trying to paint a little bit because a lot of people will look at this and i i actually had to take a double take as well when i saw the little blurb that was mentioned in uh ultra running magazine in their was it our october issue yeah their october issue of 20 of 2020 where if you just look at the route stats 195 miles 104,000 feet of elevation gain people can kind of look at that and go okay that's a lot of elevation gain for 195 miles but why is it taking this person 17 days and the missing link that a lot of people are not are not going to be that familiar with is what that terrain actually looks like and how many and how often how frequently how much time you've got four points of contact down absolutely i mean i when i'm talking to people about it i honestly don't really like talking about the statistics of distance and elevation gain because even though it's a lot it does

not give perspective for what it's it's like out there i mean it is there's there's there's not a single mile in which you can just space out and yeah because it's it's not none of it's on trail and and it's all just on on boulders and talus and and everything is susceptible to movement and and then also doing it with 30 pounds on your back i mean that was just a huge extra load of of physical stress that i had to deal with throughout the entire trip well and your background so you've got a reasonable ultra running background you've done some ultras you're you're a young kid it's not like you've got you know four decades of experience or anything like that but you've got a reasonable ultra marathon background what was your climbing background like before you started this so i started climbing when i was in college i kind i grew up in the seattle area and didn't really do a whole lot in like outdoors adventure navigation type stuff i mean we did some pretty i would say like an average or standard outdoor lifestyle for that area and it wasn't until i went to college i moved to montana that i started cultivating a variety of skills and with

no intention other than i was just doing what i enjoyed doing part of that was rock climbing i started bouldering at the the gym on campus and really didn't like i just enjoyed it i wasn't that i wasn't a diehard but i started doing some solo camping and navigation off trail and doing that in all seasons so being comfortable not only with isolation but being comfortable not knowing exactly where you are and then also being comfortable in an apex predator central with a very at times very hostile climate so you know just camping alone like in january no one around for 10 miles hip deep snow and i'm in a blizzard and in my in in the middle of the night like it's so windy it flattens my tent and snaps a pole like just dealing with stuff like that and and being comfortable with it was huge and it wasn't until after i graduated college i i left the united states for about a year and a half and traveled and did some extended adventuring abroad and continued climbing continued

developing endurance skills and fitness actually did my first ultra marathon in new zealand and then when i returned to the united states that's when i really hit not only train i would say training but just a regiment being able to have a regimented training schedule and a refrigerator a bed like being able to wash my clothes and have access to more than one pair of running shoes gave me the opportunity to come start combining these skills and in doing bigger efforts and i at that point too i just started climbing a lot and it was initially utilized more as cross training with running was my main focus but then mountain biking and also you know more backpacking and stuff and i just over time i have enjoyed climbing more and more and more and enjoyed exploring the convergence of endurance sports with technical climbing and i think that before the bear tooth trip the pinnacle of that was for me last year in the summer i went to finland to race in a event called nutsialis and 100 miles had the race

of my life and still had about a week and a half in europe trying to figure out what i wanted to do like physically i wasn't there but mentally i was just on fire just excited about using my time and i ended up going to switzerland and soloing the matterhorn via the hornley ridge which was 12 hours sustained really exposed it's not that technical but just the exposure on that mountain is off the charts i mean a lot of the time you're looking at one two or three thousand feet before you to come in contact with the ground right and and i did that i guess you'd call it free solo so i mean no rope no harness no partner no protection so not only did i climb up the four thousand vertical feet but i also down climbed the entire thing and i think that gave me a flavor for like this endurance mountaineering side of things as opposed to just i'll say crag climbing or bouldering which is you know you're looking at maybe at most five or ten minutes on the wall for a sport climb but you came into this with like a pretty diverse skill set is what i'm trying to get at you have a climbing background you have running background ultra marathon background but what you decided to do with doing these 50 peaks over the 50 highest peaks in montana how how much

more grandiose was it than anything else that you have experienced like doing the mountain horn like doing a hundred mile race like doing like anything that you had previously done how far outside of like your normal scope of skills and endurance and things like that was it the way i look at the bear tooth trip and i in retrospect was ignorant going in to the project because i just don't know i mean you just plan something and you just you haven't done it i mean that's kind of why you're doing it but in retrospect it was it was a comprehensive examination of my entire life and all of my life experiences and all everything with my skill set outdoors endurance recovery navigation you know solitary confinement you name it it was it was everything and i wanted to target a multi-dimensional challenge this was just beyond anything i've ever experienced and i've thought about this a lot since i've been back which i've it's been about six weeks now and just processing why the trip trying to understand why it was so powerful i think part of it was because i was completely solo and self-supported i mean there's no high fives no familiar faces no hugs no hot chocolate there's just

there's nothing it's just you and your one brain and whatever limited capacity you have to try to make good decisions and continue through the adversity that you experience out there and i i mean honestly it the the bare tooth project makes every anything else i've done in my life or any singular effort feel as though it is it's just not even comparable this is just fully on its own so did you become a better rock climber a better runner a better endurance athlete from this yes i mean as i was since i i'd only climbed one of these 50 peaks before although i knew and i'd been on that type of terrain a lot it took some we'll call it a calibration of the different types of terrain and slopes and in bouldery areas and different levels of chossiness or or the rock quality i mean it took some time out there but i was just able to hone in and the more time i spent out there the more easily i could adapt to whatever terrain i was on so in that sense yeah i mean i was a

much better climber and you have to be a better climber if you are climbing with weight on your back extreme fatigue and you're in running shoes i mean that is that's just by by default and and it made me really slow down i mean as an ultra runner or just as a runner in general like especially doing trying to be competitive in events you're just trying to go fast like that is what you're trying to do and that's what you're trying to be good at and in this case what i was really trying to do was be good at being slow right because there's no there's no one's running this like i don't care who you are like the terrain is so brutal that i mean you could maybe take a kind of a jump step every few steps if you're really feeling excited but for the most part it's just it's hiking and i i also learned a lot about recovery i learned a lot about how i might improve my medical kit you know i i sprained my ankle when i was out there which was about halfway through i thought it was going to end my trip and and i just you know i worked with chantelle and tried to come up with some solutions that would help you know improve the condition of that injury navigation i mean it it was it tested every skill

that i had and and it also developed every skill was the lowest point where you actually sprained your ankle or was there something even worse than that the lowest point in terms of something immediate that i thought that could take me out of the trip yes i mean did i think i was going to die like was i stressed out that i was going to fall off a cliff uh no and so in some sense and i did i did feel that at maybe a couple points throughout the trip where i because i became acutely aware of my own mortality and and how fragile life is as you're just straddling some knife bridge 30 miles from nowhere getting harassed by the wind and beat by the sun i mean that was those were and especially in the last 10 peaks like that was by far the most stressful part of the trip because i was so psychologically and physiologically fatigued but in terms of a singular instant where i mean i made i mean it was on it was on a trail mile and i was just grabbing a granola bar out of my bag and i just next thing i knew i was on the ground just full pancake that's always the way

it happens yeah and it sucks because i was 100 miles in and i had i mean it was it was the the most benign terrain by far i had experienced the entire trip and i get leveled trying to just get a get a little snack and there was immediate swelling and it was interesting actually i mean maybe this is a this might derail us but i listened to your your interview with cory woltering and he sprained his ankle and pushed through it and about five or six days later i mean and it's totally counterintuitive to keep putting load on that on an injury and to think that it will do anything but get much much worse but in this case similar to cory like after five or six days and i i really didn't slow my pace at all i was still putting in big days i was being very cognizant of how i was stepping and trying to put more of the risk on of you know rock movement susceptibility and all that kind of stuff on my good leg and then more or less dragging my bad leg as an anchor behind me but after five or six days the swelling subsided and mobility returned more or less to normal and i was able to continue but it's super stressful i mean i'm not even if i was on a trail it would be stressful yeah yeah but to

be in that type i mean i was still dealing with you fall you die terrain every day with an ankle with like 50,000 feet of vertical gain 50,000 loss 100 miles uh you know nine days on my feet nine days out there no hot drinks i mean just dealing with all this stuff and then you're climbing this ancient virgin rock that's crumbling beneath you and in your body is just sort of worsening but yet your ankle gets better that's what's always been really weird because i've seen a number of athletes in this exact same expedition length situation where they have some traumatic injury five days into it that in any normal training circumstance they're out for a week like no training for a week they roll their ankle they you know damage their achilles or something like that but then they keep because the situation they're in they keep they keep going on in your case you kept going on and five days later it's better like there's no explanation for that it was it was very bizarre and and i didn't even know that that was that was a thing that that that that happened to other people and i've never experienced that myself because anytime that happens to me like during training or whatever i sprain my ankle or something

is strained like that's that's when you pull the plug you relax you do some physical therapy you get a lot of sleep hydrate well and you take a couple weeks off yeah yeah and and and listening to that interview with cory was there's just this light bulb that went off and i thought this is i have no idea what it was but i'm thankful that it happened and that was certainly a low point of the trip another low point was just the condition of my fingers from the constant climbing my fingers got brutalized my fingertips i wore i wore like a light pair of car park gloves and they worked really well and i cut the fingertips off so i'd have the dexterity i'd be able to feel the rock it's very important when i'm climbing to be able to do that and then also to be able to look at my phone and into to be able to navigate without taking my glove off every two minutes and what i didn't expect to have happen was i started after about six days my fingertips started bleeding there were just a series of micro cuts that got deeper and deeper and deeper until they more or less turned into gashes and on!

almost every single fingertip and some were worse than others but then i couldn't really do anything like i couldn't tie my shoes without searing pain or or stuff my sleeping bag in its bag you know in its bag or there was this little piece of velcro on on the ultimate direction fast pack that i used and i had accidentally like poke that with my thumb and it would just almost drop me i mean it was i had these these these little gashes on my fingertips but my entire fingertips were ultra sensitive pink you know lots of blood flow swollen and i had to try to manage that while continuing to climb and not make any mistakes at the same time pardon and not make any mistakes at the same time exactly yeah it was it was that was a very unique problem that i just i didn't even see coming and i only the only tape i had was duct tape and and so again i'm i'm working with chantelle thinking man i have a garment i can send text messages and she basically she said why don't you try wrapping them with duct tape and so i did and i just yeah it looked a little bizarre to have this guy in spandex shorts and looking a little deranged especially i

had a couple trail miles and i just have these fingerless gloves with every fingertip is just covered in duct tape and i had some people just be like what is what is wrong with you what a bizarre sight yeah it's very bizarre and the duct tape worked okay but it had some issues like it wasn't breathable sure yeah so anytime there's i sweat or like dipped a collapsible flask into a stream to get water and then water gets in it then i more or less get swamp fingers and and i began to get pretty you know as the trip went on i got pretty concerned about infection because these were just like gaping cuts on my fingers that were just getting deeper and deeper and and i had to keep climbing i i actually ended up re we'll call it redesigning the way that i moved when i was climbing so instead of you know grabbing on jugs or crimps or i guess grabbing grabbing onto things when i was climbing that were more fingertip focused and and like i would normally climb i ended up changing my climbing style such that i just had wider feet i tried to put a lot more weight on my feet and i was stemming with my arms so i i basically would lock out my arm full length and and

use my palms more as friction and and climb like that and when i would use my fingertips i would try to use that more as stabilization or more as a pressure point on the rock rather than actually holding some part of my weight and that was able to decrease the rate at which my fingers the condition of my fingers worsened you said that very cautiously decrease the rate at what your fingers worsened because you know it didn't make it better right i know you're trying to like dance around describing that yeah i mean i when i was halfway through i was aware that like this is very well something you know similar in the same vein is isn't is the ankle injury this is something that could easily just stop me in my tracks did you ever get to a point where you're like i can't do it anymore the closest i got to that was around peak 45 i mean i i sort of alluded to it a few minutes back but the last 10 peaks were very hard on me psychologically because even though my body i felt like had began to adapt to the training like to the training stress i was doing on average i was covering 6 000 vertical gain 6 000 loss a day i mean in just brutal rocky terrain rock you know constant rock

climbing constant route finding constant water source identifying and doing all this with a 30 pound pack and even though in the first half of the trip i didn't i never really viewed the climbing as stress like mental stress or the trip is mental stress because i was i was honestly just having a great time i mean it was stressful but in the best way and it's exactly what i wanted to be doing and i realized after 40 peaks that i was kind of crushed both physically and mentally and i even i even when i finished i didn't realize that you know i hadn't seen anyone in the last week like the last seven days i mean it was just pure isolation just and i think it's a testament to how focused i was just on on you know my two goals first goal was to get home make it home the second goal was to complete the 50 peaks or as many as i possibly could and i just had the idea of you know requiring some form of human contact or it just didn't even cross my mind i was just so lasered in to what i was trying to accomplish and in the next step in the next peak that everything else became insignificant and in those last 10 peaks i

was i had to be lazy i mean i began to sidestep even non-exposed or sorry i began to sidestep exposed non-technical terrain meaning that it's not hard climbing like you could just be walking on some slab maybe there's a little you know few pieces of gravel on it and you're you know could act as a marble but i was just seeing everything worst case scenario and even on just more or less walking terrain if i saw that i had the potential to fall and die i got really stressed out where and i've never experienced this before i did i and i just felt like this fear was washing over me and my knees were just wobbling i just i i couldn't there was this connection between my mind and my body and it was just going back and forth and it was spiraling downwards that my mind was having a hard time my body knew that it was depleted and then as a result my body was kind of shaky and then it would put more stress on my mind and then i feel like weaker and so instead of taking these what i would have normally done in the first half these interesting undocumented ridge lines for half or three quarters of a mile to connect some segment that i was doing i was i would descend two

thousand vertical feet on some loose bouldery junky slopes traverse that same horizontal distance and then climb that same vertical back up to where i was trying to get to initially it almost seems like you're just your risk tolerance just totally went to crap because of the total cumulative fatigue i think that that would be an accurate statement so you're sitting there on the 45th peak you got five to go did you realize you had five to go or you you'd counted them correctly at that point i knew at that point that you know i only had five left and i yeah but the the stress was just it was beyond anything i'd experienced in in a different way and i that 45th peak just descending from mount hague there's really only one good way to do it and it's down this it was probably the worst quality rock i'd experienced the whole trip that your hands are on so you're pulling rock off all over the place and i and again i have to use it more as a pressure point because if you start yanking on anything not even yanking just like pulling you're going to be pulling things off and you're pulling things essentially into your body so it's going to drop onto your foot or hit you in the shin knock you off balance and then send you you know cartwheeling down the mountain you don't want that and then your feet are it was i think it was somewhere between a 40 and 60 degree slope of just this

compact dirt with gravel on top which is i mean you might as well have been on a pile of sloped marbles and and there were these weird ice lenses because it was in the shade so some you know some points i'd be trying to get my foot stable and i'd just be slipping and not know why and then my my shoe would be wet it was just that was the most stressed i was and and i i wanted to complete the trip but i just i mean and i think if i went and did that now it would be fine because i'm fresh i've i've had time to recover physically and mentally but just at that point i could not handle it and i was it took me forever to get down that and it was it it was beyond taxing so was there something that like turned it around for you at that point where you're thinking about not doing it or was it not even a question like you had to go on oh i knew that this 45th peak i knew that this descent would likely be the last serious technical descent that i'd have to do fully loaded so i also had my full backpack on me on that ridge line i had to do and the lap my last undocumented spire i think it was called 11443 there's a ton of these mountains that are just named after their elevation right and and i had no idea what i was going to get when i

got there but it turned out to be fine not super technical just this steep slab and and then the rest of the trip i had a good hunch that it would be more or less i'll say non-exposed that is really what mattered rather than it being technical or not the exposure was just getting to be too much and so i think i knew that getting down that 45th peak would was sort of my last hurrah for having to worry about dying by falling off some cliff and it's almost like success by like a failure is in front of you so that's why you're going on yeah yeah but there's never really a point where i've had people ask me like did you ever want to quit yeah yeah and the answer is no i mean i was and it's interesting too because the specific 50 peaks like the tallest 50 peaks in montana it didn't really matter what they were that project was designed such to be it was a structural framework for me to test myself in my fitness and the skill set and it was it was beautiful breathtaking sunrise sunset nature full wilderness experience but ultimately it didn't really matter what mountains i climbed so much as it

as how it affected me what would you do different now having like a little bit of time and space to like look back on it like what what if you were ever to do this again are you going to do it again what would you do different i really don't want to do this again good answer if you were to advise somebody who is going to go out and do it how would you tell them to do it differently than you let's put it that way on it i i'll preface this by saying i honestly don't recommend anyone do this ever like it's i i just don't i mean uh but if someone did want to do it i give yourself time and i think it's a testament to these longer um you know self-derived projects that people are taking on during the pandemic or or in other times like just make sure that you have plenty of time and you know again like to deal with weather to deal with injuries to deal with just general fatigue and so that you're not stressed on on the clock and you can you you don't have to worry about time like you are just out there you've got one speed you've got one focus and and especially with this and the in the the huge difference that the between doing a race

and doing this i mean there's a lot of differences but the main thing for me is just the the absolute severity of the potential consequences out there and you just need to be on your game 110 percent of the time i mean and you need to appreciate that every line you're doing is significant every step you're taking could result in you having a very bad time i mean the second day i was out there i was descending this boulder slope coming down from a peak i mean i was well below a peak just coming down this glacier moraine area and i rolled some boulders and my leg fell in this crack and i had boulders just pile on my leg and i had full leg entrapment on the on the second day and i wasn't doing anything remarkable i mean i wasn't doing anything cool i wasn't climbing i wasn't on a summit i was just trying to descend just trying to get down into a drainage and and that made me really recognize i've had to stop i mean i had this moment of like what am i doing out here yeah sure what's the yeah what am i trying to accomplish out here you know i i could potentially there's a lot of risk and and i'm you know i'm not this is just a point a to point b it's it's nothing

significant and i had to really stop i mean i sat down and and kind of had a in introspective discussion of just slowing down taking it easy and and really focusing on every step being absolutely methodical and meticulous and just slow and having that be the priority beyond anything else dude it just sounds like the whole thing the whole way that you that you describe it it is just not for the faint of heart potentially i i don't yeah and that's why i i just don't it was it was as i mentioned it was by far the most stress i've experienced in my life and and as another testament to that is just how long it's taken me to try to recover since i had been back and it's and it's it is hit me in ways i mean it's the most beautiful 18 days of my life 17 17 days and change it was out of this world and it was also the most traumatic and coming back there was this level of depletion far beyond anything i'd experienced in tandem with trying to process this unworldly experience that only

i was witness to the the entire project changed my changed my life simply and how i view my time how i view how i want to spend my time in the future how i want to dedicate in what ways do i want to dedicate my time to athletics in the future well you so you got into this originally because you because bigfoot was canceled so now i mean are you thinking about doing ultra marathons differently having had this experience because there's this like stereotypical pattern right we go do one race and then we rest and we go do another race or whatever but because you've had this experience does that make you look at that any differently absolutely i mean the week after i got back i received an email from the race director of bigfoot saying hey by the way for those of you that deferred your registration you know you can defer to 2021 or 2022 if you want to do the event in 2021 now's the time to register and i talked to chantelle that week and to put it politely i said i just don't this this race is no longer relevant to my life it is just not something that i'm interested in dedicating a years of training time and energy just to spend three days

of sleep deprivation on a course that has been pre-designed and flagged i mean it's a great way to test yourself in their incredible experiences but this project has illustrated to me that what i'm looking for and what i crave is a bit of a different flavor so are you ready to to let everybody know what is next or do you even know i have a lot of ideas brewing but i mean the short answer is no and and it's not because i'm trying to hold some mystery as to what i'm doing is i honestly just don't know i mean i've spent six weeks trying to understand and and process what is now what is important to me like it coming back and made me really think about what is worth spending my time doing and and i don't know and and i've been so focused on racing the last several years that it's a huge shift for me and i want i will say though i mean i want to push the convergence of endurance sports like long brutal efforts with technical terrain adventure navigation and you know potentially doing that with somebody else but also

the solitary aspect of this trip was for me just another echelon of spiritual awareness and development and i would be curious to spend more time in that mindset well brandon i i appreciate the angle that you're coming at this with and i really i'm just really heartened to hear the thoughtfulness that you're now putting into whatever is next for you um i always like it when athletes take a little bit more of a creative approach to what they're doing as opposed to chasing races around which is fine and if that's what you know if that's what their kettle of fish is if that's what they really enjoy but if something like this is has made you take a little bit of reflection and pause on what's meaningful and really what's going to get your kind of blood going in life all the more power to you man i can't wait to see what is next from you makes two of us i'm excited and and hopeful hopeful for the future and and what opportunities it may bring and what doors may open so brandon if people want to know a little bit more about you or about the route that you did where can they go and look that info up so info about me i think the best place in the route and and information on the route would be my instagram and my instagram is the wild ned with underscores

between each word and what i've done since i've been back i've been in the process of compiling a trip report and and doing a daily summary of things that happened or experiences unique things that happened to me when i was out there and then i've made a post for each of the 18 days that i was out there you know with nine or ten photos and and videos from that day and i think i mean it's a it was a lot of information for me just to go back through and try to understand for myself what happened and so i think it's it would be a good amount of information for other people if they wanted to see that and then you can also i mean i posted a lot of other things about adventures or travel from the last handful of years that's the best way to kind of get some more insight into who i am and what i've done i will uh i'll i'll do you a favor i'll link all those in the show notes if you get the trip reports compiled before this show comes out you got a couple weeks so now you got a deadline i'm sure a lot of people will be curious about it and once again brandon i really appreciate your time and i'll say i appreciate your perspective and your outlook on what it takes to inspire you and what you want to do in the future i think it's really cool and it's very refreshing great yeah and i really appreciate the time and there you have it much thanks to brandon for coming on the podcast today that was a much bigger

route and sounds far more arduous than i had originally thought it was more power to you brandon you're not going to catch me on anything like that anytime soon and i cannot wait to see what the future holds for you my friend if anybody out there thinks that one of our cts coaches like chantelle who is brandon's coach is the right coach for them for any of your next year's adventures or races go ahead hit me up on social media or go to train right.com information on all of our coaching packages can be found at that website and i would love to connect you with one of our cts coaches that's it for the KoopCast today appreciate the heck out of y'all and we will see you out on the trails