Back in the 1960s, there came a time when fellows of the AdAmAn Club felt terribly old. Trudging through snow above Pikes Peak’s timberline can leave that effect.

“I think the idea was, Wouldn’t it be great if we had some teenage human snowplows?” Ted Lindeman recalls.

The required age decided upon was 16 — the age of the son of George Lindeman, who had gained membership in the historic club in 1961.

Clearly, the youngster proved himself worthy.

Ted Lindeman expects to make his 50th AdAmAn ascent on Monday, when the club starts on its annual mission to shoot New Year’s Eve fireworks atop the 14,115-foot summit.

His climbs outnumber any member living or dead. He’s made the trek for more than half of the club’s existence (the 100th celebration will be in 2022).

“Fifty. It’s hard to imagine anybody will ever repeat that,” says club ambassador Donald Sanborn.

Lindeman was first a guest “snowplow” in 1967. Since then, the recently retired Colorado College chemistry professor has missed only three New Year’s journeys: once when he was teaching in Vermont, another when he was preparing his Ph.D. thesis, another when he was in the middle of a breakup.

He was a graduate student at Cornell University when he met his lifelong partner, Kathy. One of their early conversations was about his New Year’s commitment.

“So that I would have no other ideas,” she says now. “I got into this not expecting anything else.”

How committed was he to the club? Take his ‘73 climb, his first as an official member. He took a bus home from college, getting stranded at a Kansas gas station for a day and sleeping on a pile of tires before the snowy highways opened back up. He was miserably sick by the time he headed up Barr Trail.

“I was not shooting for some sort of record. I really, truly was not,” Lindeman says. “I just love climbing with these rascals. They’re just good company.”

And they love having him along. “He’s a walking encyclopedia,” Sanborn says, drifting between subjects historical, cultural, geological and astronomical.

“My first hike there was a full moon,” says AdAmAn president Dan Stuart. “People wanted to know when the next Dec. 31 blue moon would be, so of course they turned to Ted. He did some calculating and came up with an answer that was at least plausible.”

Carl Lindeman remembers being 4 when his older brother, an amateur chemist already, instructed him on explosive powder.

“My dad appreciated Ted’s budding intellect,” says Carl, an AdAmAn member after Ted. “I remember hearing conversations at the dinner table that I didn’t understand. It was just the two of them talking about things scientifically mostly. But the mountains and climbing was equally important.”

As a Colorado College student in the 1940s, George Lindeman was known for showing up to Monday class bedraggled after a weekend in the hills. He studied to be a doctor but had a passion, too, for bright, loud displays of fire.

The story the Lindeman boys heard was that their father looked out the big, west-facing window of his bedroom at midnight Jan. 1, 1958, and watched the bombs burst. He turned to his wife and said, “I’m gonna be up there next New Year’s Eve.”

The man would take his sons on weeklong trips into the wilderness, toughing them up for their future tradition on Pikes Peak. The Lindemans have known many a wintry, windy climb, at times crawling through the alpine to reach the mountaintop.

Like all AdAmAn members, George Lindeman’s body eventually kept him from braving the elements, confining him to town for New Year’s. He died in 1992.

Adventure “really was what Dad lived on,” Ted Lindeman says. “It was just super by him.”

As it is for Ted, who feels his knees getting weaker. But for climb No. 50, he’s ready as ever.

“I certainly intend to savor this one,” he says.

Eyes to the sky

Look to Pikes Peak at 9 p.m. New Year’s Eve, when the AdAmAn Club traditionally shoot five fireworks in honor of the Frozen Five, the club’s first members. Full show starts at midnight.