Erin Ton believes she set a record. The trail running community disagrees.
BOULDER, Colo. — Erin Ton traversed below the summit of Crestone Needle, a 14,203-foot peak in southern Colorado, as heavy clouds formed during a late afternoon climb in July. Rain turned to hail. Lightning struck the mountain. Ton took shelter in a hollow cave and assessed her provisions. The 25-year-old had a thin Gore-Tex jacket covering a pair of shorts and a tank, without enough food or water to last the night. She did not have a headlamp. Her cellphone was dead. Her Garmin inReach satellite communicator only had a couple of bars of power left.
She considered sending a search and rescue signal, but she was halfway through her bid to climb 57 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks in just over two weeks and didn’t want to fall short. So she punched out a message to friends and family: “Might need help.” The device ran out of power before they could respond.
The storm passed enough for Ton to make a final push over the technical parts of the climb, but after she summited, she was forced to hike back out in the dark, using her memory and the stars to navigate. As she reached her black Jeep Wrangler at the trailhead, Ton was still rattled. She wondered whether she might bag her attempt and head home and eventually fell asleep in the back seat for a few hours.
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When Ton woke, she drove to the next mountain range and began to climb. She did not stop for seven days, summiting 23 more peaks. As she descended her final mountain, Capitol Peak, her family and partner greeted her. Ton shed tears of joy, not knowing the greatest challenge was yet to come. On Instagram, she announced her accomplishment: “Women’s Self-Supported 14er Speed Record: 14 days 10 hours,” she wrote.
Ton had already set more than two dozen speed records, including 24 hours of laps around Colorado’s Mount Sanitas and a 99-mile trek in Arizona’s Grand Canyon Crossings, despite stopping several times to cough up blood. She had won an eight-day stage race in the Alps and climbed mountains in high heels. Her “magnum opus” was the 14ers project, and no woman had ever attempted what Ton had in the Colorado high country.
But Ton’s account on Strava, an internet service that tracked her route, showed she had only climbed 57 of the state’s 58 14ers, omitting the southernmost, Culebra Peak. Her accomplishment — and what she chose to initially disclose about it — put Ton, an elite and polarizing trail runner, at the center of a debate about transparency and what constitutes a record. In the hiking and mountaineering community, many questioned Ton’s lack of honesty, a critical virtue of the adventure sports world.
Ton has said she should have been clearer about not hiking Culebra, a controversial private mountain owned by a Texas billionaire that offers trophy hunts and hiking access for a fee. But she has not deleted her Instagram post. She believes she has set a new standard in her sport and said she has petitioned a database of trail running records, Fastest Known Time, to establish a new category that includes all of Colorado’s 14ers except Culebra.
“I think a lot of [controversy] could have been avoided had I been upfront right off the bat and explained why I chose to skip that peak,” Ton said. “I never claimed to do Culebra. If you asked me straight up, I’ll be totally honest. I didn’t claim it as a part of this, and I didn’t want to.”
The Culebra problem
During the summer of 2021, Ton and her sister tried to hike up the north side of Culebra without a permit. Private ranch workers armed with rifles stopped them, escorting them down the mountain in all-terrain vehicles and handing them over to local police. Ton and her sister were charged with trespassing, but the charge was later dropped.
“I believe Erin felt that it was her right to summit a peak that is private by bypassing the process of signing a waiver and paying the fee,” Carlos DeLeon, the longtime manager of Cielo Vista Ranch, where Culebra is located, said in an email. “Like many people, the feeling of entitlement is there.”
Cielo Vista, which sits on more than 83,000 acres and consists of 23 miles of ridgeline, has long been at the center of land disputes. After a logging magnate bought the property in 1960, Culebra was mostly inaccessible to hikers until it changed ownership in 2004. Both of Ton’s parents grew up near the peak, and when she was a child, they recounted stories about heated and sometimes violent interactions that had occurred on the land.
William Bruce Harrison, a scion of a Texas oil dynasty, bought the ranch for $105 million in 2017 and has fought to restrict access claimed by descendants of the San Luis Valley’s original settlers. A permit to hike Culebra costs $150, which has caused friction in the adventure sports community, and many have chafed at the hunting practices on the property.
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Over the years, runners chasing 14ers records have secured permits sometimes months in advance and planned their attempts around the trip to Cielo Vista. As Ton prepared for her record bid, she wrestled whether to include Culebra. The ranch had not banned her despite the incident in 2021, DeLeon said, and would have welcomed her to run the trail this summer.
“Even after acting like a crybaby and posting a picture where she is flipping off my guys and made a big thing out of trespassing,” he said, “I would have allowed her to come on doing it the right way.”
In June, as Ton weighed whether she would climb Culebra, most of the slots to climb the mountain already had been reserved. She sent out a note on the popular 14ers.com forum to see whether anyone had a permit. In response, she said, she was met with criticism of her history with the property managers and her outspokenness against the ranch’s practices. She ultimately decided not to include the climb.
“There’s a super long history of people climbing the Colorado 14ers for speed records, and it’s always included Culebra because that’s one of the 14ers. Even though it’s on private land, there still is access,” said Peter Bakwin, a fixture on the Colorado trail running scene and co-founder of Fastest Known Time. “In fact, the logistics around that access has always been one of the major logistical factors in the 14ers record. So just to throw it out for the reasons that she did, to me, that’s just not legitimate.”
There is no dispute over the magnitude of what Ton accomplished. She trekked 365 miles with 159,356 feet of elevation gain in just over 14 days, becoming the first woman to attempt such a feat in self-supported fashion; she drove herself to each mountain, carried her own supplies and was not assisted by a crew. But her announcement on Instagram also led many initially to believe Ton had beaten the men’s self-supported Fastest Known Time, 14 days 17 hours 33 minutes, set last year by Minnesota athlete Daniel Hobbs. (Hobbs climbed Culebra.)
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“The golden rule of FKTs is say what you did and how you did it. I guess the community, it seems, isn’t [fond of] those who don’t follow that rule. It’s kind of considered cheating. And I think that Erin got caught up in the vitriol of that,” said Justin Simoni, a longtime mountain athlete who holds the self-powered, self-supported (he rode his bike between climbs) FKT for Colorado’s 14ers.
The trail running community demanded answers, and at first, Ton deleted comments that were critical of her attempt and blocked some users. By the time Ton clarified online that she had not climbed Culebra, her credibility had been damaged.
“It’s totally fair to say, ‘I like what you did there, but I don’t like HOW you did it,’ Mary O’Malley, a 14ers.com administrator, wrote in a Facebook post. “I sincerely hope she reconsiders her approach in doing the remarkable things and embraces a greater sense of humility, respect and the importance of a community.”
‘A much thicker skin’
On a sunny Wednesday in September, more than a month after Ton had become a lightning rod for criticism in her sport, she put on a pink dress and a pair of heels to climb a mountain outside of Boulder.
“It just kind of became a fun tradition,” she said of climbing in dresses and heels, which she has done occasionally for several years. “And now I see over time it’s evolved into a statement on women’s empowerment. I found a meaning in it that I didn’t even know existed there when I started doing it.”
After Ton posted pictures of her hikes online, a few national publications picked the story up. In response, she was accused of being a relentless attention-seeker, and she read misogynistic online comments, left mostly by men.
“I try to avoid confrontation as much as possible,” Ton said. “I haven’t done any harm to anybody. ... And since then, I would say I’ve grown a much thicker skin.”
Ton is used to people making assumptions about her. She’s known to be fiercely independent and outspoken, happy-go-lucky and free-spirited. But she hasn’t always had that confidence. She dealt with musculoskeletal issues as a teenager and hit a late growth spurt. Her breasts weren’t proportional to her frame and made it difficult to run and hike, which caused serious mental health concerns. She had a breast reduction surgery in 2018, which she called “one of the best decisions I have made in my entire life.”
Ton also suffered from scoliosis, and she endured several forms of disordered eating patterns as a teenager that returned when she became a competitive trail runner. She often compared herself with other runners, telling herself the less she weighed, the faster she would run. When she fractured the second metatarsal in her left foot in 2021, a doctor took a bone density scan and diagnosed her with osteopenia, the precursor to osteoporosis; her fracture had been the result of chronic under-eating in relation to the amount of training she was doing. That forced her to reevaluate her identity and to focus on running for the sake of enjoyment rather than performance.
“The mountains are definitely my church. They’re where I go to look for peace and solace,” she said. “The biggest thing is the sense of freedom, and that’s one of my biggest values in life — just the freedom to explore natural spaces, uninhibited, and to explore what my personal, physical and mental boundaries are.”
Ton has summited more than 90 of Colorado’s highest mountains, and she has climbed every 14er but Culebra in the Lower 48 states — including 57 in Colorado, 15 in California and Mount Rainier in Washington. She accrued more than 1.3 million feet of vertical gain in 2022 alone. It’s made all the more impressive by the fact that Ton did not get into the sport until she went on a recreational hike with her father and sister on one of Colorado’s 14ers in 2018.
Defining a record
Each Thursday afternoon, Ton must come down from the mountains and work a part-time job at Berkeley Park Running Company in Wheat Ridge. It suits her: She shows up in her hiking shorts, a tank and a pair of shoes from La Sportiva, the company that sponsors her and helps pay some of the bills.
The store prides itself on being Colorado’s first trail and ultra-running shop, a neighborhood hangout that serves as an alternative to countless big box retailers in the area. A couch and a shelf full of old running books sit near the front door. Highlights of a recent marathon play on a television above the stock room, and on the checkout counter is a stack of blue stickers made for Ton.
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Ton has not received a response to her petition to start a new FKT category. It’s a long shot to be approved because it could set a precedent for other runners to begin their own variation of FKTs and skip certain 14ers.
“I’ll still call it a record and be totally confident in that because looking back at previous efforts, they’re not apples-to-apples comparisons,” Ton said.
At the end of her work shift, Ton welcomed athletes into the shop for their weekly run club at a park nearby. One of the runners asked her what she had been up to.
“Just been in the mountains, 14ers,” she said.
“Oh, right,” the runner responded. “In heels?”
She nodded. “It’s not as hard as it looks,” she said, and before long, she gathered with runners outside to began their trek.
Ton led from the front. For about an hour, she could forget about the controversy that had engulfed her life and just run. She seemed to let go of whether anyone around her thought she had set a speed record.
“I think ultimately, what matters are people in the community and kind of how they view it and hold it up,” she said. “I would say that’s kind of how you define what a record is."
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