The break, when it came, was provoked partly by a conflict with his employer. Ralston wanted three weeks off to climb Denali — the peak in Alaska sometimes called Mount McKinley — the highest mountain in North America. Intel declined the request. Ralston made a decision: he quit. He was twenty-six years old, had a solid engineering career ahead of him, and walked away from it to live in Aspen, Colorado, and climb mountains.
This decision is sometimes characterized as impulsive, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Ralston had been systematically working through Colorado’s fourteeners — the peaks over 14,000 feet — since 1997. By the time he left Intel in 2002, he had climbed most of them. His goal was something no one had accomplished before: to climb all of them solo in winter, without companions, through the most demanding conditions the Colorado high country could produce. He had the technical skills to pursue that goal. He had decided, deliberately, to give it the time and attention it required.
In Aspen, he worked at a mountaineering supply store and continued climbing. He was embedded in the outdoor community of a town defined by its relationship to mountains. He climbed alone frequently, in conditions that would have kept most people indoors. He was, in the parlance of the outdoor community, an experienced and capable alpinist who also had a taste for the kind of solo risk-taking that experienced and capable alpinists sometimes develop as a consequence of their success.
In February 2003, approximately two months before Blue John Canyon, Ralston had a significant encounter with the consequences of that risk-taking. He was caught in a Grade 5 avalanche on Resolution Peak while backcountry skiing with partners Mark Beverly and Chadwick Spencer. No one was seriously injured. But the experience apparently fractured those friendships; according to later accounts, Beverly and Spencer did not speak to him in the aftermath. The incident was, on one level, a warning about what it could cost to operate near the edge of what the mountains would permit.