FKT: Tina Currin - LA Freeway (CO) - 2025-08-18

The LA Freeway began as little more than an idea. In the 1950s, Karl Pfiffner imagined what it might mean to travel from Longs Peak to the Arapahos without breaking from the crest of the Continental Divide. Half a century later, Buzz Burrell realized that vision in a two-day push, linking the tallest point in Rocky Mountain National Park to the tallest point in the Indian Peaks, stringing together every summit along the way. He called it the LA Freeway.

On paper, it’s 35 miles. In the flesh, it’s nearly 20,000 feet of climbing, all above 12,000 feet, with scarce water, exposed fifth-class moves, and weather that turns without warning. Perhaps two dozen people have finished it. No woman has done the line unsupported. For everyone else, it sits there—a jagged silhouette on the horizon, gawked at from Highway 36 into Boulder.

I moved to Colorado in late 2023 with the misplaced confidence of a thru-hiker. I’d just finished the Continental Divide Trail, the final leg of my Triple Crown, and assumed endurance on one landscape could be ported wholesale into another. I bought Gerry Roach’s Colorado Fourteeners and soon became fixated on his so-called Radical Slam: a seven-peak linkup (Meeker, Longs, Pagoda, Storm, Mt. Lady Washington, Battle, Estes Cone) capped with fifty pushups, like a hazing ritual with better views. That summer, 2024, I set the unsupported women’s FKT. For a fleeting, heady moment, I thought that was enough.

But satisfaction is slippery. By 2025, the LA Freeway had insinuated itself into my brain. Where most people take years to prep, I gave it three months. Call it audacious, call it stupid. For me, it’s just the way things get done.

I spent seven weekends on reconnaissance. Longs in the daylight, Longs in the dark. Pagoda’s west ridge. The serrated mess of Sawtooth, Algonquin, Paiute, Toll. Then Toll again, because if I was going to do it at night, I wanted a route more forgiving. Tanima. The Cleaver. Isolation, weighing the 5.5 direct against the chicken-out bypass. Finally, the back end: Pawnee Pass spilling into Apache, Navajo, Deshawa, Arikaree, North and South Arapaho. Piece by piece, I poked at every crux. By the end I was scared, but not scared off. What better way to explore my new backyard?

I wasn’t after speed. I’m no runner, and I had no illusions about chasing a record. I wanted something slower, more consuming: the act of piecing together a line that rewards persistence more than talent. The skyline itself seemed to say, go on, give it a try.

I spent weeks checking the weather and agonizing over my start: step off at midnight and gamble with verglas on the Cables, burning first light on mellow tundra? Or push off in the afternoon and stagger through endless grass and rock at night? The last ten miles are the real crucible—mandatory fifth-class moves, no shortcuts, on legs already beaten into jelly. At the last second, I chose midnight. If everything broke my way, I’d hit the final gauntlet as the sun cracked the horizon on the second day.

The opening stretch unfolded smoothly. Granite on the Cables was wet but not frozen, and the Pagoda West Ridge Bypass, rehearsed on earlier scouts, came easily in the dark. Chiefs Head was a long, wearying grind. Alice and Tanima passed in a fog. I looked forward to my first water: a small pool I’d noted before. But it had vanished, replaced by a hollow of damp moss. Late-season conditions reduce afternoon storms, but by then, the route only offers one reliable water source, and it doesn’t appear until more than eighty percent of the way through.

(A quick aside: in the FKT world, “supported” means friends pass food or water or pace stretches. You’re still doing the miles, but the logistics are outsourced. “Self-supported” is alone but allows caches or public resources. “Unsupported” is strict: no crew, no stashes. You carry everything, find your own water, and deal with whatever breaks.)

Most people tackle the Freeway self-supported, leaving caches at the few developed passes along the Divide. Unsupported, I had only two choices: haul ten pounds of water up thousands of vertical feet, or gamble. I gambled—and lost. A long, unplanned detour to Frozen Lake forced me off the Divide and down 1,000’ of loose, crumbly scree. Nearly two hours vanished, along with some optimism.

I pressed on, onto Isolation’s North Ridge 5.5 section and the long, unscouted tundra beyond. Complicated terrain between Ooh La La and Red Deer Peak caught me off-guard and may have been the emotional low point of the route.

By the time I reached the tricky third-class traverse between Algonquin and Paiute, the sun was slipping below the horizon. I’d hoped to pass this section before dark. Without the water detour, I would have reached a known bivy beneath Paiute just as the last light faded. I had almost no experience scrambling in the dark, and none on zero sleep. Moving blind, I couldn’t reach the bivy as planned. Nearly twenty hours in, my judgment began to slip. Sloppy moves, desperate shortcuts, a reckless chase for speed over safety. I knew the danger.

It took an hour to find a patch flat enough to rest: four feet of grass wedged between drop-offs and strewn rocks. I rolled out my two-inch foam pad—laughable at home, a tiny luxury here—and crawled into my sleeping bag. Pulse thudding in my legs, I allowed ninety minutes of sleep. Midnight would come, and I’d move again.

I cleared Paiute in the dark and pressed on toward Toll. Having scouted it twice, I felt confident about the moves to the piton chimney. Then a rogue electrical storm rolled in and parked itself over Toll. I dropped to the lowest perch I could find and watched lightning slice the skyline. Roughly one strike every twenty seconds. Not ideal.

I shivered for a few minutes, then accepted the reality: I had no choice. My sleep kit, just packed, was unfurled again. Thirty more minutes of “rest.” When I finally peeked out, the lightning had slowed—one strike every two minutes—and the storm was drifting away from Toll and toward me. Time to move.

Toll, Pawnee, and Shoshoni went down easily in the dark, and the sun was just breaking when I reached the Kasparov Traverse—a section that had haunted me through earlier scouts. Maybe that rogue lightning storm had done me a favor after all. I cliffed myself out more than once trying to navigate around The Chessmen, each time finally finding the obvious line and thinking, of course. Sometimes, clarity only comes after fumbling.

Apache and Navajo were a pleasure in the early light, but the descent to the tarn below Arikaree dragged on forever, mind-numbing in its tedium.

Finally, water. My first drink in many hours and the last until the end. I spent ten luxurious minutes sitting and refueling. Calories were low, my food plan long forgotten, and even with water I could barely choke down a Rice Krispies treat and Tailwind. Small hallucinations appeared in repeating rock formations. My pace slowed a little, but my mind slowed much more.

Thankfully, the last section had been fresh in my mind from my final scout. My body and brain were tired, and this was the crux of the entire line. The traverse to Deshawa dragged on like a fever dream, and the route-finding to North Arapahoe was enough to make a sane person question reality.

And then, slowly, the world began to settle. The trail became obvious again. Orange arrows marked the way, glowing almost unnaturally against the haze in my brain. I stumbled between the final peaks and down the looping switchbacks to the Fourth of July trailhead. A friend waited with drinks and pizza—a small, ridiculous miracle. I hadn’t seen another person in what felt like an emotional lifetime. I laughed, raw and shaky: “Are you real?” Then, quieter, almost to myself, “Am I?”

The answer came in the warm afternoon light. Real. Done. Somehow, both.

Many thanks to Grayson Currin, Dan Stone, and Bill Briggs for their emotional support. Thanks to Steph Abegg for her invaluable online beta. And thanks most of all to Jon Krakauer, a constant source of guidance throughout this project.