‘The most aesthetic line’: how Kilian Jornet climbed the 73 highest US mountains in 31 days | Sport

AS I waited for the sun to escape the frontal of Colorado, next to the sprawl of Denver – Boulder – Fort Collins, a West Wind, sending a thrill in my spine. With temperatures around freezing on a rocky edge at 13,700 feet, I looked for a stay on the side of a rock. I could see the lights of the city in the distance, but I was more concerned with two headlights approaching quickly, a few hundred feet below.

Between us, a coarse granite slab, known as the cable road. It is the most direct means towards the top of long peak, but it is less traveled because it is classified as a class 5 rock and often wears a river of ice – black ice – which flows them, that climbers must sail.

This is how I started the first morning of the last personal endurance project of Kilian Jornet, States of Elevation. In this document, Jornet would summarize the 73 highest mountains in the contiguous United States – each peak greater than 14,000 feet – all under human power, by bicycle and to raise each. I was documenting the ups and downs of literal and figurative, as Jornet tried, in profane terms, to run a marathon and set up a scene from the Tour de France every day for a month.

Largely considered to be the largest mountain athlete of all time, Jornet grew up at REFU CAP DE REC, a mountain hut in the Pyrenees in northeast Spain. With a father who worked as a mountain guide and a mother as a teacher, Jornet invited her first summit before the age of five. At 20, he was the youngest to win the ultra-trail of Mont Blanc (UTMB), considered the World Series of Ultrarunning.

During his two decades career, Jornet established speed records on AcConcagua, Matterhorn, Denali, Kilimandjar and Everest; won the Triple Crown of Ultarunning – Western States, Hardrock and UTMB – and dominated shorter trails, with 10 victories in Sierre -Zinal and 11 in Zegama -Aizkorri. He is a world ski-monteer champion, a successful author, founder of the normal shoe company, and an obsessive physiology which is often used as an India pig to see how his body adapts under stress.

Despite the distinctions, Jornet remains with a soft and modest voice. Although his racing success has strengthened his career and helped her accumulate almost 2 meters of Instagram, he is glory, sharing with me that many of his favorite days are solo adventures in the mountains. As we get older, he went from the race to daring endurance efforts like this.

Long Peak was the start of a trip that would take him more than 3,000 miles in six states, culminating on Mount Rainier in Washington. Meanwhile, my challenge – apart from joining Jornet for a peak here and there – was to write on the journey frankly, without using the hyperbole too much to approve his efforts from another world, an easy -to -fall trap. Almost every day, Jornet was doing something that would be considered the biggest, fastest or hardest, but stacking it on superlatives would remove its exploits from all their value.

At 3:30 am, I started to go uphill, an hour before Jornet and Kyle Richardson, the current long record, started their ascent. Now, from my advantage above the cables, I watched the two dance in a section known as Boulderfield and start technical escalation. I had taken my time on this part, carefully avoiding wet, iced and foaming fists, and I assumed that they would do the same. To my surprise, their rhythm slows down in a negligible way when they have set the vertical ground to the scale, moving so carefree that I doubted that they noticed the cliff at a thousand feet a few tens on the left.

As they got closer, I could hear them discuss past adventures casually, like old friends during a shaking race. La Roche Alpine Technique, ice and snow are the place where Jornet feels most comfortable and when he radiates the most joy. He arrived at my perch with an ear smile, gave me a quick punch, and we continued together.

At the top of long, Jornet stopped to take out his phone and take some photos, which he would send to his wife later, Emelie Forsberg, also a professional mountain runner and their three young girls. Despite the perception that Jornet’s life is dedicated to the continuation of the edge of the possibility, nothing means for him more than the family. Even after days with 20 hours of non-stop movement across the mountains, Jornet would try to call at home.

For him, this moment had been in preparation for years. In 2023, he climbed the peaks of 177 3,000 m in the Pyrenees in just eight days. The following summer, he invited the 82 peaks of 4,000 meters in the Alps in 19 days, only using human power to connect them. In search of a similar adventure that would allow it to explore a new landscape, Jornet landed on the American West.

It was the perfect link of his curiosity for the limits of the body and a desire to understand threats to American wilderness, both by personal experience and conversations with the inhabitants along the way. If it was not large enough, Jornet decided that he would follow, in his words, “the most aesthetic line”. When he shared this with me at the end of June, I didn’t know what he meant. But I was about to discover it.

After having summed up the long, Jornet could have turned, move and be mounted at the next top, save hours and considerable energy. Instead, he chose to browse the 38 -thousand highway at La, an off -track road with 21,000 climbing and descent feet, which took the rest of the day. I first found it strange, but over the days, I grew up to appreciate the value of aesthetics in the mountains – in part because it is emblematic of Jornet itself.

Jornet is a minimalist who often spends hours without food or water. He is an environmental defender who believes in the protection of wild places. He is so competent in technical terrain that it comes as naturally as walking. But above all, Jornet is an artist. Projects like Elevation states Are how he leaves his mark: encourage others to explore wild places, without leaving scars on the country itself.

During my third day with Jornet, while we climbed Grays Peak at the end of the afternoon while the end of a lightning storm exploded, I asked questions about his motivations. He explained that it was not the speed, records or even someone else by scientist. If he was not a famous athlete, he would still have done the route, probably with less support and brass band. The goal was so obvious to him that it was almost difficult to explain.

For Jornet, the mountains are a necessity. He wanted to see the distant ranges of Colorado, feel the vastness of the country of the basin and the range, and grasp the vertical relief of waterfall volcanoes, because being in these places gives him life. He also feared that some of these landscapes would not remain public or protected for a long time. But the most important part was what he left not said.

A few days later, Jornet ran the Elks crossed, a 50 -mile technical race near Aspen, Colorado, who saw only a handful of finish. The next day, he finished the 14 of Nolan, the most notorious of Nolan, the most notorious in Colorado, with only a nap of 30 minutes between the two. Like a scientist with a virgin canvas, Jornet was engraving the most beautiful line through these mountains. For him, it was art.

During my last day in Colorado, I traveled the back of Mount Massive and met Jornet near the summit. The sun had slept and the sky turned a blurred blue while the last rays disappeared. We stopped a few hundred feet under the top, looking at a family of four mountain goats grazing, carefree by our presence.

Jornet, fluently five languages, looked at me and said to me: “There is a lot of fauna here.” The previous week, we had seen the moose, the black bear, the Wapitis, the goats and the coyotes – a sign of a diversified ecosystem and a vast savagery which no longer exists in the Alps or the Pyrenees. It was a reminder to remain grateful to the wild places we still have, because they are far from guaranteed.

A week later, I gave up with Jornet in southern California, after pedaling 900 miles in five days of Colorado. The next morning, he started Norman’s 13, a 100 miles route with 39,000 climbing feet, connecting the fourteen of the Sierra. I joined it for a quarter of the route, divided into three sections, looking at the time known the fastest of 18 hours remarkable.

For most people, it would have been a relentless rhythm in one of the most distant ranges from America. For Jornet, these were two introspective days composed in the desert. During our climb Glen Pass in Kings Canyon National Park, he stopped, looked at the valley and said: “It’s beautiful”, before continuing. It may seem trivial, but the feeling was anything but.

Jornet has spent a lot of time in the most remarkable mountain ranges in the world – Andes, Himalaya, Alps and Alaska – but remains in real impression in each corner. For the rest of this day, I found myself appreciating what was in front of me, instead of letting my mind wander. Our lives are often so busy and complicated that we lose sight of the important things just in front of us.

During my last day in California, I met Jornet on Thunderbolt Peak, after finishing a technical riveline called The Palisade Crossing, covered with snow and rhyme ice. Despite only two hours of sleep in the previous two days, Jornet was surprisingly lucid. As he stopped to eat a sandwich, I asked what he thought of the route. “I would do it again,” he said simply.

I do not know if Jornet meant the palisades, the Sierra or the whole road, but I am sure that when it comes back, it will be an even more aesthetic line.