51 Years Before Kilian Jornet, These Brothers Made 14er Speed Records a Thing

The jeep broke down. The route up Mount Rainier was filled with crevasses. An icy traverse between Blanca and Little Bear Peak in Colorado forced them to camp out at 14,000 feet.

Fifty-one years after brothers Tyle, Flint, Cody, and Quade Smith embarked on the peak bagging adventure of a lifetime, a few key scenes and moments remain clear in their respective memories.

“The best memory is from spending that summer with my brothers and father doing something that we truly enjoyed,” Tyle told Outside. “And realizing the bond it created, which has lasted all of our lives.”

But these recollections of the trip were recently unearthed by current events. This fall, famed ultrarunner Kilian Jornet announced he would run up and down the 68 peaks in the contiguous United States that stand above 14,000 feet—mountains colloquially called the “14ers.” Jornet, 37, is traveling to and from the peaks by bicycle, and his goal is to complete the journey in as short a time as possible.

In 1974, the Smith brothers and their father, George, took on a somewhat similar challenge. Known throughout Colorado as the “Climbing Smiths,” the four brothers set out to establish a speed record for climbing the 68 mountains (14,057-foot Ellingwood Peak was recognized as a 14er back then), while driving to and from them in a van. At the time, Flint was 22, Quade was 18, Cody was 17, and Tyle was just 15 years old.

They succeeded, ascending the peaks in just 48 days, which at the time was the record. They covered more than 500 miles on foot, ascended 215,000 vertical feet, and drove 4,000 miles in the family van between the peaks. During their journey, their time for climbing Colorado’s 53 14ers—a mere 33 days—shaved more than 21 days from the previous speed record.

It was a relatively smooth journey, the Smiths told Outside, except for a few twists and turns. A snowstorm here, a rainstorm there, a misadventure or two while getting lost.

“Pushing that darn jeep was definitely a team effort,” Flint said.

The trip helped galvanize the Smith family’s love of mountaineering and outdoor recreation. It steered the four boys as they became young men and set out on their adult lives. It also gave them a lifelong perspective on the famed peaks, which hundreds of thousands of people now ascend each year.

A Family Dedicated to Colorado’s Peaks

A story in the December 1974 edition of Colorado’s Empire Magazine told the brief backstory of the Climbing Smiths. In 1932, when he was just four years old, George Smith suffered a debilitating hand injury when he was run over by a neighbor’s car near his home in Denver. As an adult, George gravitated toward the relatively obscure pastime of hiking, because it was an activity he could do with his disability.

He raised his four boys to also love hiking and mountaineering, even though the past time wasn’t particularly popular. The family lived in a rural area of Aurora, far from bustling city of Denver.

“We didn’t have a neighborhood, we were our own tribe, and dad had this idea that we would all go hiking,” Quade told Outside. “It was an unusual childhood. We were tied to the mountains, and with that, we were tied to each other.”

Each boy picked up hiking through a combination of familiar peer pressure and inertia. Nobody forced them to climb peaks; instead, they simply wanted to tag along with their older siblings.

“Dad would act like everyone was in on the hiking trip except the person he was talking to,” Cody said. “He was like, ‘Do you want to come with us?’ He did that with each of us.”

The coercion worked. Quade completed the punishing Windom-Sunlight-Eolus linkup in the San Juan Range when he was just nine years old. Tyle, the youngest, summited his first fourteener, Mount Sherman, when he was just six. And as the boys got older, their father let them lead the trips.

“When we were little, dad was in charge, but quite quickly he’d ask us to do our own route finding,” Quade said. “He led as an equal partner, and that gave us a good sense of ourselves.”

The Smiths completed the 53 Colorado fourteeners in 1968 when Tyle was just nine years old. According to Cody, they were the 96th, 97th, 98th, 99th, and 100th people to complete the Colorado 14ers (per Colorado Mountain Club data). The next year, they climbed the 14ers in California and Washington, and George Smith documented the adventure in a book.

Primitive Trails and Tiny Crowds

By the time the Smiths decided to climb the 67 peaks, they’d already spent years hiking up and down the mountains. Back then, even the most popular peaks were relatively empty.

According to The Colorado Fourteener Institute, 265,000 people climbed one of the Colorado 14ers in 2024. On busy mountains such as Mount Bierstadt or Quandary Peak, nearly 1,000 hikers may reach the top on a single day.

That wasn’t the case in the early seventies.

“We had a feeling of solitude on these mountains that isn’t possible anymore,” Cody said. “We’d be up there on a Saturday and maybe there would be eight other names in the register.”

Mountains located far from cities or towns often lacked dedicated trails to the top. Sometimes the brothers would have to bushwhack up the sides of peaks, and then scramble through boulder fields and up unmarked terrain to reach the summit. Finding the route to the top was part of the challenge—and the fun.

“There were trailheads for certain peaks and some trails to start some of them, but mostly we had to find our own way and do our own route finding,” Tyle said. “It was always fun to see what route I would take versus my brothers to get to a destination like a summit ridge.”

Completing the Epic Trip

As mentioned before, details and specific memories from the 1974 expedition are unfortunately lost to time. According to Empire, they launched their adventure on July 4 with the ascent of Longs Peak. They completed five more peaks in the next two days: Bierstadt, Evans, Grays, and Torreys, and Quandary. They checked more peaks off the list in the next week, including Blanca, where they camped at the summit under a plastic tarp.

“The boys were moving a lot better than I was,” George Smith told the publication in 1974. “They’d sometimes have to wait for me to catch up. The day we went 28 miles and gained 10,000 feet to get to Holy Cross and Elbert was one of my toughest days ever.”

They completed the final Colorado 14er, El Diente, on August 4, and then piled into their van and drove to Bishop, California, where they ascended Mount Whitney, Mount Muir, and Mount Russell.

The trip came to a close on August 20, when the group ascended Mount Rainier in 11 hours.

“Relief, joy, sorrow,” Flint told the publication after completing the trip.

Pursuits in the Peaks

The Smith brothers operated a local mountaineering school in their teens and twenties, taking neighbors and interested kids on ascents of the 14ers. After the expedition, the four boys went their separate ways into adulthood. But none of them ever strayed far from their love of the peaks.

“Climbing is my identity,” Flint told Outside. 

As the decades passed, the Smiths watched as the 14ers became sought-after trails. In the eighties, the number of climbers to complete all of the Colorado 14ers increased to 30-plus a year.

“I think that our 1974 effort and the Empire magazine story put a spotlight on family climbing, and on kids climbing the 14ers,” Cody said. “But its difficult to directly draw some sort of meaningful activity increase.”

Speed climbers attempted to complete the Colorado peaks in as short a time as possible, and the fastest time dropped multiple times. In 2015, Andrew Hamilton completed the peaks in just 9 days, 21 hours, and 51 minutes.

Other climbers found ways to achieve even weirder accomplishments on the mountains. People have ascended them on unicycles, climbed them while wearing high heels, and while pushing peanuts with prongs attached to their foreheads.

The Smiths’ record was officially honored in the American Mountaineering Museum in Golden, Colorado, with a plaque and a large photograph of the family.

“The 14er craze probably would have struck even if the Climbing Smiths hadn’t covered 68 peaks in 48 days. There’s been an explosion in outdoor recreation of all types. Think of a way to enjoy the great outdoors, and chances are someone has thought of a way to attach some type of speed record or offbeat accomplishment to it.”