55 Peaks
Michael Kittell '06 and Taylor Smith '07 managed to climb all of the highest peaks in Colorado without breaking down--or breaking up.

By Romel Hernandez

The boyfriend-girlfriend pair of Michael Kittell ’06 and Taylor Smith ’07 worried more about logistics than love last spring as they piled themselves and their stuff into her parents’ truck and set out to climb Colorado’s 55 highest peaks in 55 days. As for their relationship, “I didn’t want to be anxious about what-ifs. ‘What if this or that happens between us?’” Smith says. “We were just going to have to see what happened.”

Smith, 22, had just graduated from Pomona and wanted to do “something really cool, something completely opposite from school” before starting law school in the fall. Kittell, 23, had spent the year since finishing college living with his parents in Oregon, working construction and teaching, as he waited for his girlfriend to graduate. An experienced climber, he’s the one who hatched the plan to tackle Colorado’s 55 peaks that reach 14,000 feet or more—the most of any state—as a fundraiser for his hometown YMCA in Tillamook, Ore.

The couple met as students at Pomona, dated for two years and had traveled and climbed together. But nothing could have prepared them for the rigors of what they dubbed “The Colorado Climbing Calamity.” Many mountaineers pride themselves on climbing Colorado’s 14ers, but most do it over years. A few of the mountains are a pleasant hike to the top, but others can be treacherous, especially in snowy spring weather.

“The whole goal was to go and do something amazing and unforgettable that we might not be able to do at any other time in our lives—and to do it together,” Kittell says.

The shared mountain adventure would “strip away all the superficial stuff,” he says, “and boil everything down to the core of how we operate together.” That is, if they managed to stay together.

Together constantly for 40 days and nights, they learned to give each other space—both figuratively and literally. “You know, peeing in the woods five feet away can get pretty uncomfortable,” Smith says. “You can’t put a pretty face on every morning—and I mean that metaphorically, too. You have to be yourself. You don’t have any option.”

From Smith getting hit in the face with pieces of a crumbling boulder on Wilson Peak on the very first day, to dodging a blizzard on San Luis Peak and a lightning storm on Torreys Peak, to discovering a dead marmot stinking up the car after it got itself stuck under the hood, they came to expect surprises. Some days were exhilarating, most exhausting, and all unforgettable.

Kittell liked keeping a brisk pace, faster than Smith was usually comfortable with. They could have complained about the other going too fast or too slow, but instead they joked about it. Kittell would hike ahead 100 feet or so, far enough that Smith would sometimes lose sight of him—not that she minded. They came to appreciate the moments of solitude, while knowing they were still together.

Kittell always stopped 20 feet below a summit to wait for Smith to catch up before making the final ascent together, hand-in-hand. “That was our little moment of romance,” Smith says. “It would be like, ‘Did we kiss?’ ‘Check.’”

They took on roles that played to their strengths, with Kittell in charge of route planning and Smith responsible for gear. The trek built trust between them. Smith could rely on Kittell to choose the best trails, even if she sometimes disagreed, and he depended on her to know exactly where the ice axe was stowed away in the truck. They could pitch a tent and get dinner simmering on a fire without having to exchange a word.

There were moments, of course, when they would get snippy with each other. Kittell could get demanding. Smith could be stubborn.

“He wasn’t going to be this understanding boyfriend,” Smith recalls, laughing now, though she wasn’t at the time. “If I was tired, he wasn’t going to be like, ‘Oh, poor baby, let’s stop. I’ll take care of you.’ He’d say, ‘Suck it up. We have a mountain to climb.’ And sometimes that would just make me more mad, and I’d just say, ‘No, I’m going to sit right here and I’m going to stay right here as long as I want.’”

Not that they couldn’t be sweet. Every night, they put the day’s travails behind them and settled into a cozy routine of snuggling together over mugs of hot chocolate and reading aloud from the Harry Potter books.

They persevered, completing their journey ahead of schedule, in 40 days, 22 hours and 4 minutes. “Who’s counting, though?” Kittell says. And, yes, they survived with relationship intact—better than before, they say.

Today, living together as first-year law students at Lewis & Clark College Law School in Portland, Oregon, they can reflect on the ways the trip made them stronger. “Now, if one of us asks, ‘Can you do this differently?’ we just say, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Kittell says. “We rarely get our feelings hurt when we’re trying to figure out what to do, whether that’s doing the dishes or giving the dog a bath.”

Both Kittell and Smith say they’re too young for marriage. They have more experiences to go through, more mountains to climb together—though probably not 55 of them one after the other. “What got us through it was just living in the moment and not getting hung up on anything to do with the past or looking out to the future,” Smith says. “You have to remember: What’s in front of you is what’s in front of you.”