Adventure Sports Podcast interview.

From 2015-2018, Connor Koch set out to learn more about his new home state of Colorado by climbing all 58 of the Colorado 14ers, a journey that kicked off his career in the mountains.

A photo journal across Montana, for ENVE Composites.

Montana hides itself; I don’t understand it yet, and maybe never will, but the famous Missoulian Norman Maclean was clear, “We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.”

I wrote the narration for this Outdoor Research Commercial, with a focus on brand heritage and early days.

Many, many mountains later, including all 58 Colorado 14ers, I begged the team at Arc’teryx to give some jackets and a little travel budget to myself and my best friend Jonny Morsicato. We spent a month in the deserts of the American West, climbing and exploring our hearts out, and returned with the stories that kicked off our athletic and creative careers. From the summits of hundreds of high peaks, we’ve never looked back.

“Unlike most of my other guests, there wasn’t very much out there on the internet to help me get ready for this interview, other than to know that Connor has a deep love for the outdoors and does an unbelievable job documenting his experiences exploring them. With that said… to say this conversation exceeded my highest expectations is an understatement.”

The small threads of joy and community weave together seamlessly here in the borderlands, proving to be something I’ve always known: bikes are a context for movement and connection, a rolling vehicle to break from the normal and tap into something more important. It’s not the bike that’s important – it’s the people.

We are products of our environment – thus, the Collective. Each of us operates in concert with each other, and with the support of our friends, families, partners, and communities, who lift us up and drive us forward into a better future. Beyond our immediate support circles, the real credit belongs to you: the person reading this who is living their own story, facing their own doubts, fears, and challenges every single day. We’re doing it for you, because your story matters, too. Saddle up and follow your heart. There’s a lot of life to live.

I thought again about hometowns, how Christian was a byproduct of the Mid-Atlantic as much as I of Southern California, Jonny of Colorado, Colin of North Carolina. Somehow, we’d all met in the middle, forging a friendship along the thin air of the Continental Divide, watching the waters flowing both east and west from our new home to the places that formed us.

My climbing days started with a series of ridiculous blunders, from leaving gear on the face of Boulder’s First Flatiron, to a less humorous and nearly fatal mistake in Yosemite. These are things you learn and grow from if you’re lucky, all part of the beauty and pain that mountains have to offer. Ultimately, I didn’t feel like I had much choice but to become a climber – when I’m off the ground, my heart sings, and I’m fortunate enough to be able to listen.

The Golden State Skyline is a human-powered, self-supported linkup of all fifteen 14,000’ peaks in California, stretching from Mt. Shasta in the Cascades to Mt. Langley, the southern tip of the Sierra. Along with my friends Jonny Morsicato and Charlie Firer, followed by film crew Colin Rex and Nick Smillie, I set off to complete the Golden State Skyline on August 14. Our planned route covered 800 miles by bike, 100 miles on foot, and 100,000 feet of vertical gain, including technical difficulties up to 5.9. But life had other plans…

Process. Routine. Presence. It’s a lot easier to say these words, to define them and understand them, than it is to practice them. To live them. I’m trying my best. Most days, that commitment starts with coffee. I’m on the road a lot, so simple and replicable is just fine. You can leave the scale at home for this one.

Before waking Jonny and Charlie, I stared out silently for a moment, watching the winds move the fire east across the rolling plains of Nevada, watching the emptiness become something else as the flames licked the skyline, clouds billowing gray, blue, purple, red, orange, black, building upon each other higher and higher, smokestacks climbing into the heavens.

You can spend months, even years planning an adventure like this. But once the trip kicks off, most factors are out of your control. I’ve learned, mostly the hard way, to attach my joy and growth to the process, not the outcome - the outcome is never guaranteed, but the process is totally under your control. More importantly, the process is nearly invisible. There was no glory in the 7-month training block leading up to the attempt. You have to love it, and you have to be motivated by something greater than validation. How you get through the process is arguably more important than the result.

I knew if I could spend long enough on the sheer, improbably blank rock faces of the world, they would one day transform into glass through an impossible and unprecedented geological phenomenon, and I could then look at the smooth, mirrored glass beneath my calloused hands and my rubber-soled feet and see myself, my real reflection, for the very first time.