Roaring Fork Valley local Carly Valerious entered the record books last week, becoming the first recorded woman to complete the 53-mile, 24,000-vertical-foot Elks Traverse.

Linking all seven 14ers in the Elks Mountains, the traverse has been attempted a handful of times, according to a writeup on fastestknowntime.com, a website that tracks times for endurance challenges like the Elks traverse. Until recently, however, it did not have a single logged time from a woman.

At 3 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 20, Valerious changed that after spending just short of 37-hours deep in the backcountry. 

“We live in the ultimate ridge-link-up area,” Valerious said. “And it has just been a big inspiration for a while. In the summer of 2022, it was cool to see the ins and outs of the traverse when I went and ran in a drop bag and posted up in the (Maroon) Bells parking lot. It was inspirational.”

Several years earlier, Valerious had joined a crew supporting a local endurance athlete in his attempt to break the “fastest known time” on the traverse. The experience of supporting the attempt piqued Varlerious’ interest in doing the traverse herself and she began scouting, planning, and training. 

Her plan was to make her own attempt in summer 2024. However, within the two-day window she established in August of that year, the area experienced heavy, continuous rain. 

“That window that I took off had a torrential downpour for two straight days,” Valerious said. “So it just didn’t happen last season, you can’t predict the weather in the mountains. I just had to let it go, because I didn’t really have any more time in my schedule.”

This summer, though, the rain didn’t come for her planned window in August. 

“It was actually two of the hottest days of the whole summer,” Valerious said. 

Despite the heat, Valerious set off. Her plan was to do a “supported” run, meaning she would meet up with family and friends at spots along the trail to be resupplied with food and water to fuel the long journey. According to fastestknowntime.com, a supported trip can have any external support as long as the attempt is “self-powered.”

Some of Valerious friends joined her for portions of the run to provide encouragement in addition to fuel. Another Roaring Fork local, Mathias Gruber, was with Valerious for the full traverse.

“My dad and Mitch met me at the Maroon Bells parking lot,” she said. “They set up an ‘aid station’ of sorts where we just sat down, changed our socks, and drank some broth before continuing to run.”

The traverse ends in Ashcroft at the Castle Creek trailhead and passes through several prominent backcountry zones on the way.

“I was hoping to be done early on Wednesday morning, but ended up finishing around 3 p.m.,” she said. “We did Pyramid in the dark. The rest of the night we were just running on the East Maroon Portal trail all the way to the back side of Conundrum as the sun rose. It was really ideal.”

This was Valerious’ first time linking together this many ridges and peaks in addition to it being the first official time logged in the women’s supported category on fastestknowntime.com.

While the scale of this run was new to Valerious, she plans to continue pursuing similar endurance challenges. 

“When I moved to the Roaring Fork Valley, I learned about the Elks, and I’m still learning about the Elks, but was super inspired by those mountains,” she said. “Before, I had linked ridges and peaks, but not like this long or deep in the backcountry. I definitely plan to do more like this, hopefully lots more.”

This story is from AspenTimes.com.