One recent morning along 14,000-foot Culebra Peak in southern Colorado, a pair of hikers offered some assistance to another they met.

They learned this young man named Jason had been backpacking around without a sleeping pad.

“It was like, ‘Oh my goodness, you’ve been sleeping on the ground?’” recalled Mark Reis, who was taking unrelated photos for The Gazette.

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He and a partner offered their own sleeping pad. Jason politely declined. Previously, on the drive approaching the trailhead for Culebra, they saw him walking by the road and offered a ride up. Jason politely declined then, too.

It was only later that Reis learned what the kid was up to.

“I was just so shocked to hear what he was doing,” Reis said.

Jason Heyn, 26, was walking to all of Colorado’s 54 fourteeners and climbing up them.

Then he would be walking to Wyoming, where he would climb 36 peaks above 13,000 feet.

Then he would be walking to Montana for that state’s 27 mountains above 12,000 feet.

Since starting with Pikes Peak in June, Heyn has been quietly on his way to finishing in Colorado and continuing on the little-known challenge called the Rocky Mountains Grand Slam.

The concept came to light in 2020, when one Eric Gilbertson reported the mission complete in 60 days. He was driving and had help from others. That’s the case this summer for Jason Hardrath, an athlete chasing a record time.

It’s believed no one has attempted the Grand Slam without a car, unsupported.

“People in Colorado are very nice,” Heyn recently said between mountains near Leadville.

Rides, gear, food — no thank you, he has said over and over again. Only once has he accepted an offer, he said: After two days and six summits across the Collegiate Peaks with a torn shoe, he agreed to a friendly hiker’s donation.

If all goes accordingly in Wyoming and Montana — finishing by October is the goal and a big “if,” he knows — Heyn estimates he will have walked something like 2,600 miles.

That’s about the distance from California’s Venice Beach to the old battlefield in Gettysburg, Pa. That’s about 400 miles longer than the Appalachian Trail. That’s closer to the length of the Pacific Crest Trail.

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But none of those comparisons works when you consider 117 summits rising above treeline, many of them requiring careful navigation and technical, Class 5 skills. Gilbertson’s log noted 432,500 feet of vertical gain across Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

Heyn’s mileage on foot would be something new.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Andrew Hamilton, regarded as Colorado’s “King of Fourteeners” and well familiar with obscure pushes in the mountains.

He’s familiar with athletes walking to all of Colorado’s fourteeners. The latest in 2021 finished with a reported average of 27 miles and 6,800 vertical feet per day for 43 days.

But walking ahead to more peaks in Wyoming and Montana? “I mean, who wants to do that?” Hamilton remarked.

Heyn has wanted to do it for more than a year now.

Amid an early career in alpine ultra running — proper preparation for calorie-counting and moving without sleep — Heyn learned about the Grand Slam and thought about combining two new passions: long distances and big mountains.

“It kind of clicked for me,” the Maryland native said. “Like, can this be done as a thru hike, this epic list?”

Planning began in earnest. Heyn crafted spreadsheets detailing times and stations for resupplying on food and water and other essentials.

To achieve as many as 18 hours of walking a day, he said he has traveled light, often little more than a rudimentary tent, an ice ax, crampons and hardly any more clothing.

“I made the mistake of not bringing a change of socks,” he said from Leadville, where he was munching on fruit from Safeway. “Now I have a change of socks. I have one more pair of shorts, a pair of wind pants, the same shirt I’ve been wearing for 43 days. I think I’m gonna get a new one today.”

Planning has been helped by previous records and data tracked on Colorado’s fourteeners, Wyoming’s thirteeners and Montana’s twelvers.

But when it comes to the rugged, glaciated collection in Wyoming in particular, available information does little to quell Heyn’s concerns.

“The big question mark for all of this is Wyoming,” he said.

The fearsome bunch includes Francs Peak, notorious for grizzly bears; one speedster’s online post about carrying a rifle served as a warning. As if the jagged wilds of the Wind River Range and Grand Tetons weren’t enough, Heyn will have to walk hundreds of miles between them and thirteeners on the opposite corner of the state.

“I’m taking a step into the unknown there,” he said. “I’m taking it day by day.”

So Heyn has been taking life since graduating college in 2019.

The partying from those days carried into the days after, he said.

“I’ve done a lot of reflecting as far as the time I spent just consuming alcohol and things like that,” he said. “It felt like it was ruining my life more so than being a productive outlet.”

The outlet became backpacking and running. With a remote job in software, Heyn has bounced around Airbnbs, living for weeks in different bases with mountains.

As he’s explored, he’s pondered the question of why.

“We always want to talk about the why, and it’s hard to identify,” he said en route to his next fourteener. “I just know I’m supposed to be out here doing this.”

A GPS tracker posts infrequent progress online. He didn’t sound interested in public attention and any calls for better data.

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“I know verification has come to the forefront with these things,” he said. “Frankly, if people want to dispute this, I’m fine with it. This is my experience. I’m certainly not out for notoriety or to get sponsors or anything.”

And thank you, but he doesn’t want any help, either.

No thank you, he said to Reis, the photographer who can’t get an image out of his head: Heyn walking alone by the road.

“I think about where he’s at right now — just on some road in Colorado,” Reis said. “Just walking down the road.”