Everything Had to Change
Anna and Dustin spent seven years becoming the people who could climb the Grand Traverse. It changed their lives more than they ever could have imagined.
Anna remembers the instructions clearly, "make the alien head, choke out the alien, punch him in the face." It was a stranger in a Wisconsin climbing gym who taught Anna how to tie a figure eight. That was the sum total of her technical knowledge the day she decided she was going to climb Devils Tower.
Anna and Dustin were in their mid-twenties. Dustin was a journeyman pipe fabricator and welder. Anna worked corporate infrastructure IT. Eight years each spent in good careers with no complaints. Neither of them grew up doing anything outdoors. "My parents didn't even go on trips or anything like that," Anna says. "I didn't grow up doing any of this. Neither did Dustin."
What they had was a gym membership and an inspiriting video that Anna had found while was shopping for quick draws on REI's website. That's when she found a film called Frank and the Tower, about Frank Sanders and Devils Tower. She watched in amazement as Frank discussed his life as a guide and constantly took people up this column of igneous rock. She had the thought: you can climb that? Just days later, at the gym, they got to talking about it out loud and a guy overheard them. He had just climbed the Tower with Frank Sanders, and had photos to prove it.
This new friend, Tomas, then taught them to crack climb. He took them to a climbing area called Devils Lake and showed them how to build top ropes. And at some point he started talking about a mountain range they had never heard of; The Tetons.
They bought a Teton guidebook, and In it, they found the Grand Traverse: ten summits along the spine of the range rated 5.8. Then and there, they made the Grand Traverse their goal.
"We were gym climbers," Anna says. "And I'm like, well, we can climb 5.8, right?"
Tomas told them they couldn't do that and Anna's response: "What do you mean we can't do that?"
Failure Led to Reorganizing Everything
In 2018 they drove west and tried the Grand Teton. Anna recalls, "We were gumbies!" They had a trad rack that was close to brand new and almost no idea how to use it. They never made the Lower Saddle. Altitude, fitness, everything, it all kicked their ass. They retreated, but they weren't discouraged.
They went to Devils Tower next, where their friend, Tomas, put them on El Matador. Picture an elevator shaft that you climb by doing the splits across the gap, roughly 120 feet of it. Tomas essentially had to haul them up the thing.
Two failed climbs in a single trip was enough for most people to let reality set in. However, on the drive home, Anna and Dustin arrived at the realization that in order to accomplish their goal, they would need to reorganize the next decade of their lives.
"We realized that we weren't going to become who we wanted to be living the life we were currently living."
So they stopped living it. They sold everything they owned, moved into a van, and left Wisconsin. They both dropped a significant amount of weight, followed a training program and got fit. This wasn't for a single season but rather a permanent condition of the new "reorganized" life.
"None of this stuff is worth it if we can't do the things we really want to," Anna says. "We went through an entire metamorphosis."
Building a life that could hold the goal
The van purchase brought them to Jackson, Wyoming, and eventually to a job at Alpine Valley RV Resort that came with a place to park it. Then a few years later, a move down the road to run Snake River Park in Hoback. This is where they live and work now, full time.
Their jobs kept multiplying in unlikely directions or rather unexpected but necessary directions. Dustin spent two summers guiding climbers on Devils Tower, the same rock that started the whole thing. Additionally, Dustin got a job at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, as a liftie and was later promoted to the tram. Anna now works at JHMR too, as a ski instructor and supervisor of other instructors.
None of that was part of the original plan, but it happened naturally, as if the world was conspiring to help them get there.
The story begins to sound like a book a lot of people loved as young adults. In The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, a shepherd boy leaves home chasing a treasure he saw in a dream, and what he actually gains is everything the journey makes of him on the way to it. The treasure is almost beside the point as the true value is what the boy becomes while on his journey. It just happens that both of them have read the book, and they see a similar pattern in their own story.
Along the way, they took an Exum snow course because they did not know how to move on snow, and met Dave Bowers, a tenured Exum guide who became a mentor and a friend. When they first told Dave about the Grand Traverse in 2019, he suggested, kindly, that they stop telling people about it.
"We had to break this climb down into a lot of other climbs that would build the appropriate experience," Dustin says.
They went to work and the climbing resume started filling up in the same way, one deliberate piece at a time. Teewinot in every condition they could find it. Mount Owen car to car. The north ridge of the Middle Teton - more than once. The Cloud Veil Traverse, South Teton to Nez Perce, in a day, twice. They rappelled the southeast side of Nez Perce a few weeks out just to see what was there, found serious rockfall, and used that information to decide they would reverse the route instead. Reversing it meant they could leave the rap line at home, which meant cutting weight. All of these outings became experiences that they logged away into their personal books of technical knowledge. Their technical knowledge was growing past just the ability to "choke out an alien."
A second Traverse attempt failed on a new moon. Without moonlight there is no ridge silhouette against the sky, and Teewinot is hard country to navigate blind inside a headlamp bubble. An aging Garmin drifted, and the route finding cost them hours they could not get back. They summited, did not like their timeline, and went down. Their packs were also still too heavy, and they needed to cut weight.
By the time they were ready for a final attempt, they had climbed nearly everything in the range. Two sections remained unseen: Teewinot to Mount Owen, and Mount Owen to the top of the Grand by way of Gunsight Notch and the North Ridge. That last one was the crux, and they would have to try to on-sight it.
They had also finally figured out how to cut the weight of their packs, and with that, their mentor, Dave, gave them the green light. They had both managed to get their packs weight down to 30 lbs for three days including food, water, shelter, a rack, and a small rope. Anna's was technically 29.9 lbs until she added the permit.
The Teton Grand Traverse
On the first day, they moved 15 to 16 hours, about 12 the second, and roughly 10 on the third - aiming to reach camp between 6 and 8 p.m. so they could sleep until sunrise and start again. Breaks were short and mostly dictated by water, fifteen or twenty minutes max, when they found it, and no more than ten on any summit before they kept going.
Food was carefully planned out: three RecPaks, plus Belvita biscuits, Nut Thins, Epic meat sticks, dried mango and electrolyte gummies.
"Primarily how I viewed it was, I was leaning on RecPak for all my real nutrition needs," Dustin says. The rest filled in the gaps.
The two, now bonafide climbers, found RecPak years earlier after food was one of the things that went wrong on their first attempt. They went looking for a solution in Steve House's Training for the New Alpinism and then went looking for something that matched the numbers recommended.
"These RecPak meals fit the description in Training for the New Alpinism exactly," Dustin says. "It's 700 calories in like six or so ounces. You just can't beat it, and then you don't need the stove or fuel. Just leave all that behind."
At the Lower Saddle they filled two RecPak pouches, one for dinner and one for the next morning, then climbed the Middle with breakfast already made and waiting in their pack.
"You don't have to eat it right when you find the water," Anna says. "You can just fill it and keep moving."
In past trips, the empty RecPak pouches have also earned a place in their packs. When a water bladder blew, one quickly became a new water bladder. When a reported creek turned out to be a seep shimmering down a wall, they held a pouch against the rock and made a funnel out of it.
When asked what it felt like to know they were going to finish the Grand Traverse, Anna got there in one word before she got there in a sentence.
"Boneless. I just felt a lot of love for everyone and everything. I was very happy. Very happy."
Dustin was still trying to make it all fit.
"It was surreal. It was almost like, did that really just happen? What the hell just happened? We really just went across all that. We're looking at it from Nez Perce, and we're like, holy shit, we just went across all of that."
When Your Goals Change Your Life
When you look at the list of what Anna and Dustin gave up, it’s longer than the list of what they climbed. Two careers, eight years each. Everything they owned - item by item. The state they came from. The (old) bodies they had. Anna tracked it all on a calendar she built herself, the final goal was broken into quarters, quarters into weeks, weeks into daily habits, because it could not all fit inside the life they already had. So they changed their life.
"It takes so much more than just time and money," Anna says. "I had to become a whole completely different person."
That's the whole story. Two people who had never heard of the Teton Range now live at the base of it and work full-time in the outdoors. Anna teaches skiing at a resort where she had never skied. Dustin guided on the rock that inspired them, ran the tram, and now runs a cabin village on the Snake.
None of that was on the list. There was only ever one thing on the list and they chased it so completely that it rewrote what they wanted, what they were interested in, and what they believed they were capable of standing on. Ultimately, it rewrote who they were.
In The Alchemist, the shepherd boy gets to the pyramids and learns the treasure was where he started. But that is not what the book is about, and the summit is not what this story is about either. What they were actually after turned out to be the years of becoming people who go and get it, and everything they have become because of the journey, living a life built entirely around going outside and pushing themselves to become something more.
The figure eight was eight years ago. Ask them what's possible now and the answer has less to do with skill than with commitment. "I want everything to be intrinsically motivated," Anna says, "whatever we dedicate ourselves to, as long as it feels right."