Really great article on gridding. Posting just to have it for posterity.
I’d like to take a moment to celebrate a friend and Boulder County resident, Jeff Valliere, who just achieved an incredibly difficult, multiyear athletic feat: He summited Bear Peak on every calendar date of the year.
Boulder offers a rare combination of world-class outdoor access and a community packed with highly fit and fiercely motivated individuals. This mix often produces unusual, impressive — and yes, sometimes arbitrary — personal goals.
I was reminded of this while hiking with my family in the Italian Dolomites. We met a Dutch couple who mentioned a friend of theirs with a local FKT, short for Fastest Known Time. It’s exactly what it sounds like: the fastest known recorded time on a specific route. I smiled. That term originated right here in Boulder.
Bill Wright, a local outdoor legend, is credited with coining “Fastest Known Time” in the 1990s. A few years later, Boulder athletes Buzz Burrell and Peter Bakwin helped formalize the concept by documenting FKTs online. What began as a loose collection of bragging rights evolved into a centralized, searchable database at fastestknowntime.com, now the global hub for this grassroots phenomenon.
One local example: Boulder ultrarunner Ryan Smith holds the Bear Peak (8,461 feet) FKT at a blistering 52 minutes and 2 seconds. That’s for a 4.6-mile round-trip route with about 2,700 feet of climbing. Incredibly fast.
But there’s another local endurance pursuit, arguably even more obsessive, called “gridding.”
The practice originated in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where hikers began attempting to summit all 48 peaks over 4,000 feet in every month of the year, a staggering 576 ascents. Known as “The Grid,” it took hold in the early 2000s and spread elsewhere. Athletes now attempt grids by summiting a peak, route or set of routes in every season, every month, or most punishing of all, on every date of the year.
That means climbing the same mountain on all 366 calendar dates of the year, including Feb. 29. Miss a date, and you wait a year. Miss Feb. 29, and it’s a four-year delay.
Gridding a route requires extraordinary consistency, dedication and—let’s be honest—a certain level of obsessive-compulsive persistence. John “Homie” Prater, an inspirational local athlete, was the first known person to complete this feat on nearby Green Mountain (8,144 feet), in 2017. A few other Boulder athletes have followed his lead.
Living near the trailhead for Bear Peak, with that same tendency toward persistence, I decided a few years ago to try gridding it myself. Nobody I asked could recall anyone having completed the Bear Peak grid. The race was on. I often bumped into Jeff on Bear Peak, and we’d swap Grid Progress updates. We were both close.
Last year, on Tuesday, July 17, I completed what I call “a version” of the Bear Peak grid. My first ascent was in 2012, and it ultimately took 1,328 ascents to check off every calendar date. I say “a version” because I usually stop at the wooden post just below the summit scramble. So technically, I’m the first known person to have gridded the post beneath Bear Peak’s summit.
Simon Testa’s “version” of the Bear Peak grid — all the days he climbed. Credit: Simon Testa
Jeff Valliere, a contributing editor at roadtrailrun.com, and an FKT holder himself, went further. On Aug. 4, 2025, he touched the true summit on all 366 dates, becoming the first known person to fully complete the Bear Peak grid.
John “Homie” Prater and I had the privilege of joining Jeff for his final ascent.
