There’s something about the shoes.

“There’s so much magic in these shoes,” Craig Richard says.

He’s lacing them up now here at Garden of the Gods — his climbing shoes for these rock walls and towers he’s scaled for almost all of his 40 years of life. He remembers being 5 here at this formation alongside his father, the accomplished mountaineer Ron Smith.

Here the two are now, returning for another day at this very same formation. At 78, Ron doesn’t climb anymore. But he’s more than happy to regularly belay his son here at the Garden.

He’s more than happy to watch Craig lace up these shoes, these tattered and torn, patched-up shoes that are tight on the man.

“These climbing shoes used to be my dad’s,” Craig says. “He gave them to me when I was 13 years old. I’ve used them ever since.”

The shoes go to show this bond between father and son, this bond forged by climbing. It’s a “sacred bond,” Craig says. “The thing that’s just always held the family together.”

It’s a bond that has held fast in times good and bad, most dark and unspeakable. It’s a bond that runs deep.

•••

Ron’s dad was Ken Smith, who came to Colorado in the late 1930s from Kansas. The man would tell his boy of first driving out from those plains to these peaks, driving through the Big Thompson Canyon to the view that emerged in Estes Park. There loomed Longs Peak.

“From those beginnings in Kansas during the Great Depression and the old Dust Bowl, everything Dad had to endure,” Ron says. “And he comes to Colorado, and I bet it was like the dust lifted.”

There would be hard times, unimaginable times. Times recalled by photos the family keeps.

There’s little Ron beside his little brother, Richard. Little Dickey, they called him, before a horrific accident. Richard died at the age of 5.

Ron was 7 then. Still today, he struggles to talk about it.

“How my parents managed to survive that, I just can never imagine,” he says.

He might imagine it had something to do with steadfast faith; his dad was a Methodist minister. Ron imagines it had something to do with the outdoors, too.

“My dad thought the outdoors was a better way to go honor God than to do it in church,” Ron says. “He thought the real church to be in the outdoors, in God’s creation.”

Ron would battle his own demons. That much is clear when he mentions the little brother he lost.

“I discovered at one point I climbed to purely treat my depression,” says the retired psychotherapist and clinical social worker. “They call them T types. Thrill seekers.”

•••

He doesn’t need a thrill anymore. He’s content to simply be here with his son, on the ground holding the rope as Craig starts up the rock here at Garden of the Gods.

“On belay?” Craig hollers.

“You’re on belay,” Ron replies.

“Climbing.”

“Climb on.”

The two have always climbed on. Ever since Craig was 5 here at the Garden. It’s a favorite memory between the father and son.

Ron was shouting directions up at Craig, until the boy had enough. “Shut up!” he shouted at his dad.

“And I said, ‘Well, why don’t you shut up?’” Ron recalls.

A woman walking around the park approached the man. “This lady said, ‘Sir, you’re abusing that child. And I said, ‘Well, OK, I’m the social worker on call this week for child abuse. So you make that call and I’ll handle it.’”

It was true: The father and son had developed an early, rather unorthodox relationship. Craig at that time was calling his dad Ron.

It wasn’t so much that Ron wanted his boy to see him as a friend rather than a dad, but that he wanted Craig to understand an equal playing field of sorts — to understand an authority figure, yes, but also an imperfect man vying for respect. “You gotta respect your son if you want him to respect you,” Ron says.

Ron had no thought of authority when Craig was born in 1984.

“I looked at him and thought, That’s perfection right there. God put it there, and it’s my job to honor that,” Ron says. “All I have to do is nurture it, protect it and guide it.”

He guided Craig to the outdoors. And Craig took to it.

“I have clear memories of being super young and thinking, ‘this is what life is all about,’” Craig says. “About real adventure.”

At 8, the boy caught headlines for being the youngest person to climb Devil’s Tower in Wyoming — the start of a career that would take him to some of the most vaunted rock across the West, including El Capitan.

His dad caught headlines previously. They regarded his forays across Colorado’s highest peaks before North America’s highest: An unsuccessful bid for Denali was followed by a successful mission in 1981.

At that time in Colorado Springs, Ron ran around with a taboo, long-haired climbing crowd seen as rebellious and death-seeking. This was seemingly out of place for a professional counseling young, troubled minds. Ron pushed against the perception.

“Climbing for me is basically a result of the search for self-improvement both physically and psychologically,” he told The Gazette-Telegraph back then. “I work with real intangible things, trying to help people improve their mental health. One of the reasons I like to climb is that it is a concrete thing.”

Overcoming early trauma would be the toughest climb of all.

•••

Perhaps Ron’s career helping troubled kids was no coincidence. Perhaps he was trying to save the one he could not, his little brother.

Richard died from horrific burn injuries.

“My dad got his hands burned very severely trying to rescue him,” Ron says, quiet at the memory. “He was up at the pulpit a week later, talking about how lucky we were to have had this guy for five years.”

And how lucky they were, he felt, to have Longs Peak — the peak in view that first thrilled him on that drive out from Kansas.

Ron was 14 when he first climbed Longs with his dad. Later, he’d climb the peak’s sheer face thought to be impossible in his youth: the Diamond. “The most important climb I ever did,” Ron says. “Dad just revered Longs Peak.”

Later, in 2003, Craig would climb the Diamond as well, spreading his grandfather’s ashes there.

The climb inspired a note Craig wrote to his dad: “I will take the torch now and run with it across this Earth with the same passion and love you did, and I’ll make sure the flame never burns out.”

Craig carries with him something else. He goes by Craig Richard, his middle name.

“I feel like some of that spirit lives on,” Craig says.

•••

The spirit is a reminder. A reminder to cherish life. A reminder that would prove helpful one fateful climb.

In training for El Capitan, Craig and his cousin, Ken, took to Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the vertical, fearsome realm in western Colorado.

It was 2006. Craig remembers he and Ken climbing 1,000 feet up the wall to a confounding pitch. In trying to place his hands and feet, Craig fell.

He thought he was saved by a ledge, maybe 15 feet down. Then he noticed his ankle swelling and turning purple and blue. Sharp pain shot up his leg. It was broken in two places.

What followed was a harrowing, 18-hour crawl across the canyon floor alongside his cousin. But first was the long rappel down to the floor — just as perilous.

As the rope constantly snagged high above, Ken often had to free climb up the rock to unsnag it. In a later interview, he recalled his strength waning and doubt creeping in.

He recalled a line from Craig. “A line that will stick with me forever,” Ken said. “He said, ‘Are you going to climb up the rope again, Ken, or are you going to give up on life?’”

Craig knew life should be lived.

“I think that’s part of our family legacy, just this lust for life,” Craig says. “And yeah, I thought to myself there in the Black Canyon, I’m not ready to leave this world yet. I have too much to see and do.”

Sure enough, he’d achieve El Capitan a year after that fall. He’d travel more and push his body further. He’d say yes to whatever opportunity the world presented, including the fitness challenge show “Ninja Warrior” in 2016.

This was around the time his body suddenly betrayed him. Suddenly, he could barely get out of bed.

It was Lyme disease, which wreaked havoc on his mind as well.

“I thought about suicide during that time,” Craig says. “Everything had been taken away.”

But not those lessons from the family. Not that advice his dad repeated over and over to him as a child: pay attention.

“It wasn’t just pay attention,” Craig says. “It was paying attention to the world around you. And to me that meant just being totally present in life, really taking in just how beautiful the world is around you.”

•••

Craig has been sharing those lessons lately as a public speaker.

“I’m really leaning into, you know, these stories of going to dark places and coming back, and really finding a lot of light,” he says.

He’s still climbing, of course. “Moving meditation,” he calls it — a reflection of something his dad said once.

“Life is struggle and accomplishment. Setback and recovery,” Ron said. “Climbing represents the paradox of life. The pain and the pleasure.”

No greater pleasure than when father and son are together. As they are now at Garden of the Gods, the place where it all began for them.

Craig scurries up the rock. He takes in the view before the rappel down.

He calls to the man holding the rope below.

“You got me, Dad?”

“Yep,” he replies, “I got you.”

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