TRIUMVIRATE: Ted Mahon Becomes 3rd Person To Ski 54 14’ers
Powder: How much did Davenport’s mission to ski all of the 14’ers in a year affect you? Did that jumpstart you a bit?
Ted: When Dav announced his whole thing, I was around 40 peaks skied or something. In a sense, his announcement did jumpstart me. It opened a lot of peoples eyes to the potential of it. I was going through it with a lot of the harder peaks left. There are a whole lot of easy ones, to be honest, where you can practically ski right to the top. And then there are 10 or 12 that kinda define it, and one or two—like Capitol and Pyramid—that really make it what it is and keep it from being done often. He (Davenport) came along and made his announcement and I knew him from town and skiing and we were friends. We decided to get together for a bunch of the 14’er skis, and it got me more motivated. From there, he finished his thing and it was awesome to be a part of. And I probably had 10 left, so I banged those out last year and was left with two or three—one of them being Capitol. It was kinda good and bad. I don’t think that one (Capitol) is good to really rush into. It was a fitting end.
Powder: Was that by chance that Capitol was the final one, or did you plan on that?
Ted: I went up with Chris and Neal Beidleman to do Pyramid, where we skied a big breakthrough route that hadn’t been done in I don’t know how long. I went away to Valdez, and while I was gone, Chris and Neal did Capitol. I was kinda bummed because it’s not easy to find a lot of partners for this kind of stuff, especially with the real committing ones. And with those two out and having sworn to their wives not to go back, I was stuck—how was I going to get this done? You just kinda naturally look at Capitol and come up with whatever reason not to do it and say you’ll do it later. The next thing you know, it’s the last one, right? I didn’t want it to happen that way, but it’s just kinda how it went.
Powder: So how did it work, then?
Ted: Al (Beyer) insisted that there was a route on the west side. We got this guy to fly his plane late afternoon and took a bunch of pictures of the route, and we went home that night and looked at them. Sure enough, the route went off the top in true in Captiol fashion—super bony and not totally aesthetic the whole time. We printed out the images and brought them with us. Capitol in a day is a big deal, even in the summer. It ended up being an 18-hour day; we started at 2 a.m. and got to the base at 7. And it looked just like the photos like you’d expect, and we kept the “let’s go and see” attitude. We re-conned all the way up, and the next thing you know, we’re at the top. It was surprising; it was a random two or three days.
Powder: You climbed your ski route, correct?
Ted: Yes. That’s always kinda conventional wisdom. Sometimes, if the route is really that hard, it’s not climbable but maybe skiable. I don’t think the other side of the mountain is faster to climb. You’re contending with that knife-edge, a pretty famous part of the mountain, which is the standard summit route. In the end, our route maybe was a little more comfortable than the other side, because most of the climb on the west side is protected by the couloir and you don’t have the standard Capitol airyness until the very top. The knife-edge is this horizontal thing for several hundred yards and you can feel the gravity pulling on you. The exposure is what wears you down.
