Chris Davenport’s slideshow Wednesday at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies about his successful quest last year to ski all of Colorado’s 14ers in a calendar year was inspirational, informative, and at times — thanks to photos taken on top of a myriad of steep summits — jaw-dropping.

“What enthusiasm!” one older man exclaimed after the presentation. “I think I’m going to buy his book.”

Davenport has recently completed a coffee table book, designed by Aspenite Art Burrows, called “Ski the 14ers.”

The photo-filled book is organized to highlight the different mountain ranges in Colorado, but Davenport’s ACES presentation was more chronological in nature, and captured more of the drama of trying to complete his goal by his self-imposed 365-day deadline, which he did on Jan. 19, 2007, with three days to spare.

Ever since his days working on the race crew at the Snowmass Ski Area in the early 1990s, Davenport, 37, has been charmingly ambitious.

He’s got the looks and manner of the All-American Boy, but Davenport is also a serious and articulate individual who is not afraid to position himself for success, and then work hard at making his own good luck.

He has openly set lofty, even far-fetched, goals for himself as a skier, and then delivered with solid results time and again.

His big breakthrough came in 1996 when he won the World Extreme Skiing Championship in Alaska. That led to roles in more than 14 ski films, including the recently released “Steep;” sponsorships with Red Bull and a variety of other ski-related companies; and commentary duties with ESPN and ABC.

“I wanted to be a skier,” Davenport told the overflow crowd at ACES, as opposed to “working for the man” or “sitting behind a desk.” After years of international travel to ski big peaks, Davenport said he wants to spend more time in Colorado with his two young children.

CAREER DECISION
While trying to decide in late 2006 where his skiing career should go next, Davenport said that during a long bike ride through Hay Park near Mount Sopris he had the epiphany about skiing the Colorado “14ers” in one year.

He got home and checked in with his wife Jesse, a former Aspen Mountain ski patroller, who told him, “That’s a dumb idea,” given that it would be dangerous and likely impossible to pull off.

But Davenport, who had prior experience climbing 30 of the state’s highest peaks and skiing down 14 of them, wasn’t deterred.

He ran his idea by Lou Dawson of Carbondale, the first person to log ski descents on all of the 14ers, which he did during the years 1979 to 1991.

“You’re the man for the job,” Dawson told Davenport, which was akin to a pilgrim’s being blessed by the pope.

Davenport then set specific goals, which included not only skiing off of each 14er, but also documenting his experiences through a Web site, a book, and a movie. The latter has been stymied by related to commercial use of images shot in federal land designated as wilderness.

The highlight of Wednesday’s slideshow presentation was Davenport’s stories about climbing and skiing some of the gnarlier 14ers right in Aspen’s backyard — Pyramid Peak, Capitol Peak, and North Maroon Peak.

On April 13, 2006, Davenport, along with Aspenites Neil Beidleman and Ted Mahon, skied down what’s known as “the Landry route” on Pyramid Peak for the first time since former Aspenite Chris Landry pioneered the route in May 1978.

“In that one act, Davenport brought Colorado ski mountaineering back to the forefront of the sport, and showed that the challenging snow and avalanche conditions of the central Rocky Mountains could be overcome with modern gear, technique and timing,” Dawson wrote in the forward to “Ski the 14ers.”

The snow conditions that day on Pyramid were near perfect, and “we skied fast and made big turns,” said Davenport while showing pictures of the mountain’s steep face that made the feat look hardly possible.

Then Davenport steered the audience into a brief discussion of “managing risk” while ski mountaineering in avalanche country. “After all,” he said, “I don’t want to die.”

The first option is to “eliminate risk” by not going, or not skiing a route. The second option is to “tolerate risk” by going. The third option is to “mitigate risk” by throwing explosives to make a diagonal ski cut to purposely dislodge potentially dangerous snow. And the fourth option, Davenport said, is to “transfer risk, which is a fancy way of saying, ‘You go first.’” Then it was on to the tale of Capitol Peak and its infamous knife-edge approach with “death exposure on both sides.”

APRIL 20, 2006
If you are trying to ski all of the 14ers, Capitol Peak “will make or break you,” Davenport said, noting that his frequent climbing and skiing partner Ted Mahon has now skied 51 of the 54 14ers, but “not Capitol.”

On April 20, 2006, Davenport and Mount Everest veteran Beidleman successfully summited Capitol, which Davenport described on his Web log for the project as the “hardest alpine climb” he had made in the United States, at least “with skis on my back.”

Then the duo pioneered a new route off the summit that involved traversing off of a super-steep face just above a 400-foot cliff band in what was truly a “no-fall zone.”

“If you fall and you can’t stop yourself, you’re toast, unless you have a parachute,” Davenport said of the crux move they had needed to make while skiing Capitol.

Then he told the audience how he was surprised by a patch of glaze ice on the rock face, and how he fell on his hip before regaining his footing. He said it was as close as he came to disaster during his year-long quest.

The pair successfully completed the descent in what Davenport called the “proudest moment of my ski career.”

But, he noted, he and Beidleman were both “really straight-faced” at the bottom of the mountain with the recognition of how risky the day’s activities had actually been.

“It was the look of fear on our face,” he said, adding that both he and Beidleman had immediately agreed, “Let’s not tell our wives what we did!” (They found out soon enough.)

OTHER JOURNEYS
On Wednesday evening, Davenport went on to describe many other great journeys he had taken during his amazing year, including skiing a group of peaks in the San Juans with a group of skiing buddies, and using an RV as a mobile base camp.

Then it was down to Long’s Peak, the last 14er on the list. On Jan. 18, Davenport and Beidleman were rebuffed by the mountain’s high winds and freezing temperatures. “We were totally dejected,” he said.

But on Jan. 19, the weather let up and allowed Davenport and company to rally and reach the goal.

After returning to Aspen to celebrate his accomplishment, Davenport found he was incredibly energized, even though he had expected to be exhausted. So he finished the winter making ski descents of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, of Mount Rainier in Washington, and of Denali in Alaska.

Now, he has set more outlandish goals for himself, and is busy making plans:

• He’s going to ski the 15 peaks in California that are higher than 14,000 feet.

• He’s going to ski the iconic mountains of the Alps.

• He casually mentioned another book project detailing the “50 classic ski descents of North America.”

And there was probably no one in the audience on Wednesday evening who doubted Davenport’s ability to achieve all of those goals.

bgs@aspendailynews.com