Five audacious solos in five frigid weeks.

Pyramid Peak, Mount of the Holy Cross, Longs Peak and Snowmass Mountain on consecutive weekends in January, then, in the coldest snap of the season, Feb. 7, a Knife Ridge high-wire act up one of the foremost icicles in Rocky Mountain winter, Capitol Peak.

That was this year, not 2002 as the summit register reads.

"Winter Solo Fourteener #43," Aron Ralston, 27, scrawled with a pen at 14,130 feet. "Beautiful day - clear, cool, calm + slight breeze."

Ralston had been higher before, like on top of Denali last June, but this particular pinnacle was grander, intoxicating even.

Employing a light-and-fast technique refined on the previous 42 climbs, an odyssey that began Dec. 22, 1998, with the comparatively easy Quandary Peak, Ralston carried only water, candy bars and an ice ax bound with duct tape. He left his pack and skis at K2, the 13,664-foot guard tower of Capitol's northwest ridge, and a camp at Moon Lake in the drainage well below.

After summiting and traversing back across the Knife Ridge - the "walk-up" route in summer that's rarely attempted in winter - Ralston skied powder back to his camp, then out to civilization following his West Snowmass Creek approach.

That he had no feeling in his hands for about an hour of the upper descent, when he'd lost the sun, was a concern. His gloves packed with snow while plowing upward through 6-foot drifts on the summit pyramid, causing second-degree frostbite on three fingers of his right hand and frost nip on the others.

But that was the only nick in five winters - out by himself, without a cell phone, radio or GPS, avalanche beacon, shovel or even a rope. He'd seen gray wolves - three males on the shoulder of Mount Massive last winter - and he'd run with them, too, marching up the 43 Fourteeners with a single turnaround.

"If you get away with something, there's a danger of making you feel like you made the right decision," said Dick Jackson, owner/guide of Aspen Expeditions since 1977. "And being lucky a few times, cumulatively, makes for a very aggressive approach. It's a syndrome."

Ralston, he now realizes, had the syndrome.

On Feb. 23, two weeks after the Capitol climb, Ralston and two buddies were blindsided by a massive avalanche on Resolution Peak, adjacent to the Fowler-Hilliard backcountry ski hut near Vail Pass.

Ralston was buried up to his neck, one buddy was completely submerged for 10 to 12 minutes, but all survived OK. A black eye for Ralston was the only apparent physical blemish. Ralston, a mechanical engineer by training, knows he crossed the line when he led two friends into that east-facing bowl in dicey avalanche conditions.

That much is obvious.

"That's still part of what I'm working through - Do I really have good judgment? Have I really just been getting lucky on all these trips? And what's going to happen when I try to go farther?" Ralston said.

"South Maroon? ...

"I think it's totally ironic - 43 successful summits without a single turnaround on any of them, going out regardless of weather but managing the risk appropriately, making good decisions and coming back safe. ...

"It's ridiculous. One of, no, I can't even say one of, the stupidest, most ignorant, asinine things I've ever done in my life, and I encouraged two of my friends to do the same thing."

Only two people have climbed all of Colorado's Fourteeners in calendar winter, between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox: Tom Mereness, 57, of Boulder was the first, from 1976-1992, and his climbing partner and friend, Jim Bach, 52, also of Boulder, the second.

Mereness did several peaks solo - including his first successful attempt at Capitol in winter after four failures - but no one has climbed all of them solo.

"Much more difficult that way, much more dangerous," Mereness said. "Just the trail-breaking alone ...

"But tell Aron good luck, and I'm impressed."

Few climbers probe Colorado's Fourteeners in winter, particularly tough ones like those in the Elk Mountains. The snowpack, historically, is hazardous and unpredictable. And many of the approaches harbor more danger than the climbs themselves, which, by Ralston's routes and his own admission, are not technical feats.

Mereness knew of just one other active winter climber, another partner/friend, Joe Burleson, 50, of Denver. Burleson is working on No. 33 this month.

But Mereness hadn't heard of Ralston. Not many people have.

"He could be getting very, very lucky, or he could be onto something. He could be way tuned in to what the possibilities are out there," said Michael Kennedy of Carbondale, an accomplished mountaineer in Colorado and the Himalayas and former publisher of Climbing magazine.

"The reality is that it doesn't make any difference really: He'll either survive the whole thing, and that's great, it's a great story to tell. Or he won't."

Armchair mountaineer

Ralston might be a genius. I didn't ask.

But going by appearances - a gangly 6-foot-2, 165-pound frame with a mop of brown hair, and a String Cheese Incident T-shirt - he looks more like a Phish head than gear head.

Ralston graduated from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University at the top of his class in mechanical engineering, with a double major in French and a minor in music (piano performance). He studied abroad for a year in Switzerland, played three years of club lacrosse, some rugby and ultimate frisbee.

Born, of all places, in Ohio, the Ralstons moved to Colorado in 1987 and succeeded in terrifying their sixth-grade son. "I had this vision that people skied to work, they skied to school, that they didn't even have cars in this state ... I cried myself to sleep several times."

During a three-hour interview, Ralston talked candidly about his adventures and misadventures, at times with passionate detail. He's open to criticism and debate, and keenly interested to hear what other mountaineers have to say about his project.

He would like to make a career as a guide, but currently he is a sales associate at the Ute Mountaineer in Aspen.

A month after completing his degrees in May 1997, Ralston joined the high-tech giant Intel. Designing "clean rooms," the ultra-tidy, dust-free factories where microchips are made, he lived in Phoenix, Ariz., Tacoma, Wash., and, for the last three years, Albuquerque, N.M.

Ralston was a self-described armchair mountaineer until 1994, when he returned to the family home in Englewood after his freshman year of college. That summer, he bagged his first Fourteener, Longs, with a friend on a day trip.

"Reading about the Everest tragedy in 1996, that was one of those things that got into my head in a way and motivated me to see, 'I wonder what I would do if I was in a situation like that?'

"And the day after I saw the [Everest] IMAX movie, I went out and climbed Humphreys Peak, the highest point in Arizona. I got lightning off the summit - I could see blue zaps going back and forth between my pole tips - and I was envisioning myself being on Everest. It's a total storm, isolated out by myself with only my own reactions to depend on, and I enjoyed it.

"I enjoyed the hell out of it."

Apart from clean room design, during Ralston's five years with Intel he managed to finish off his summertime list of Colorado Fourteeners (that's 59 by Ralston's count), and collect 36 of them in winter while living out of state.

He left the corporate world for a chance to climb Denali, the highest point in North America at 20,320 feet, last June. Ralston needed three weeks off and the answer was no. He quit and has no plans to return to engineering.

"I'd long ago figured out that I'm not going to be able to do these peaks in the Elk Range as winter solos on weekend getaways from Albuquerque. It's a 10-hour drive each direction. And with some of the more intense peaks being here, I said, 'I'll save those until I can actually live there.'

"Three priorities were coming into sync: There's the outdoor recreation opportunities for me and I've got a friend base here, people who understand me, what I'm up to. It's finding your home. ... And the third is just the culture and the music. Being able to walk 10 minutes from my house to go see the Wailers last night - this is a cool town."

After climbing Denali, Ralston returned to Albuquerque, rented his townhouse, sold off most of his possessions, packed everything else into his truck and came to Aspen. That was in November, well after the first flakes had fallen here.

"Intel was great for me - it got me into mountaineering, introduced me to people, I got to move to Tacoma where I started climbing more peaks, started doing things by myself, and then having copious fiduciary resources ...

"Since I read 'Into the Wild,' about the kid who drops everything, sells off his life and goes to Alaska, I thought I could be a rubber tramp; I could live out of my truck. That's kind of an attractive lifestyle to me actually."

With the friend base here, many of whom he met following the bands Phish and String Cheese Incident over the years, he couch-surfed for six weeks before finding a room in a house with employees from the Ute and Ajax Bike and Sport.

The day after Christmas he climbed Castle and Conundrum Peaks, Fourteeners both by Ralston's measure, and the adventure began.

Proving ground

"I don't hear of Capitol being climbed in winter very much," said Dick Jackson, owner of Aspen Expeditions. "I'd say it's not often. Not often at all."

"On one side, it's admirable, winter ascents of Fourteeners is quite a task, but the approach to one of these things might be more dangerous; but that's personal comfort-zone stuff," Jackson continued. "When someone's doing something solo, I admire that drive philosophically, but is it creating a level of commitment that's unreasonable?"

Jackson doesn't know Ralston; neither does Carbondale's Lou Dawson, the first man to ski all the Fourteeners and the author of the popular two-volume "Dawson's Guide to Colorado's Fourteeners."

But Dawson, who put up the second winter ascent of Capitol's North Face with Michael Kennedy in the 1970s, makes a clear distinction between the dangers of skiing and climbing in the backcountry.

"When you're solo [climbing] you're not practicing avalanche safety but rather avalanche avoidance. You're not out there to powder ski, you're not out there being a human trigger. You can wander around in a way to mitigate danger from above, stay on ridges and travel in some pretty heinous conditions, a lot more than people realize, when you're not out there trying to be 'Powder Joe.' All my winter climbing has been done in that kind of style; whereas when I've gotten into trouble is when I was looking for powder - with other people.

"And unless somebody told me that he was not being careful, I wouldn't accuse him of being crazy. I'd think he was a good mountaineer to accomplish what he's done. But if he's walking up all these avalanche slopes without a care in the world, following the carrot, I'd say, yeah, he's crazy. There's been guys like that, guys that climb crazy until they get killed, but this guy doesn't sound like that.

"After all, the way you master it is getting out there, seeing avalanches come down; your mental processes become very acute and you apply all your experience to it and that's how you get around it. That's how good mountaineers are made."

Ralston is cognizant of the risk. He was a three-year member of Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council and he has been attending Mountain Rescue Aspen meetings in hopes of becoming a member.

He says solo climbing clarifies the danger and the goal, casts off any and all false securities. "It's all me and my decisions," he said.

"Let someone know where you are and what you're doing, so if you should get into trouble at least there's a remote chance they'll know where to find your body," he added with a chuckle.

Ralston always leaves behind detailed itineraries with friends or family, with explicit instructions, should he become overdue.

"They're [Mountain Rescue] concerned that I'm going to be bait for the next rescue, which is the attitude we usually take when we see people who we don't know their experience or background going in to do something more ambitious than our perception of their ability: 'Oh, they're rescue bait.'"

The Colorado Avalanche Information Center issued moderate-level warnings on the days Ralston climbed Pyramid, Holy Cross, Longs and Snowmass. For Capitol, the pack was beginning to worsen, and the Feb. 7 warning for the central mountains called for "moderate [danger], [with] areas of considerable wherever slopes are steeper than 30 degrees and fresh slabs exist."

But on Feb. 23, the day of the avalanche near Fowler-Hilliard, the CAIC warning was severe: "Natural and triggered avalanches are probable to likely especially on steep, snow-loaded slopes 30 degrees and steeper on northeast through east through south aspects."

Ralston and friends Mark and Chadwick from Albuquerque arrived at the hut earlier than the rest of the 12-person party. After a cocoa and peppermint schnapps, the three decided to skin up Resolution Peak and have a look at the east-facing bowl, known as Resolution Bowl. They reached the top after 5 p.m.

"We're talking about how great it was to see each other and this experience of getting together - the hut trip phenomenon. What a great way to escape with a bunch of buds and have some fun. Then we started talking about how we were going to go down.

"They were going to ski back down this wind-swept ridge, but I'd gotten these new tele skis that I was just dying to try out in the powder, and I'm like, 'Look at this - this huge bowl filled with, it's gotta be 4 feet of powder.' I was feeling really overconfident about my knowledge of the snowpack from having been out 20 days over the course of the winter."

The group didn't dig a snow pit. While the others waited safely on the ridge, Ralston traversed into the bowl, across the steepest wind-loaded section.

"There's no cracks or whompfing, you know, so I keep edging out, then I look over my shoulder and tell Mark to watch me ... And it's 300 feet of great powder, I'm just, like, 'woohoo.' Every turn I'm dropping my knee and shouting out, and it's fluffing up all over me."

Ralston stopped by a cluster of trees, a marginal safe-zone where he could have traversed back to the hut. Ralston shouted up the hill for Chadwick and Mark to follow. Chadwick did, then Mark.

For a moment, the three were rejoined by the tree island.

"'Hey, Chadwick, drop down on your knees so I can get a picture of how deep this snow is, you know, make it look up to your waist,'" Ralston recalled. "I frame up the picture and as I'm pushing the button I see this spindrift coming in over his head. I'm like, 'That's weird.'

And the next thing I know I'm smashed into the snow, accelerated for zero to 40, sliding head downhill, skis up behind me, moving still at a rapid rate and realizing, 'Oh my God, we just all got hit by a huge avalanche!'"

As the slide churned to a halt and began to set up, Ralston managed to get his head above the debris. Chadwick, only partially buried, scrambled downslope to free Ralston, then the two used avalanche beacons to locate Mark between 10 and 12 minutes later. Ralston heard moaning and pulled off a briefcase-size block of snow to reveal Mark's head.

He looked horrible, "the gray-bluish paleness in his skin was harrowing," Ralston recalled, but he was breathing. In a frenzy, Ralston and Chadwick dug for another 15 minutes to free him.

Mark was hypothermic, but he eventually made it back to the hut under his own power.

Should I stay or should I go now

Ralston says he crossed a line about a year ago when he started skiing in the backcountry with greater regularity, at first simply to make the approaches easier.

"I noticed I have to make different route selection choices in order to keep on the skis and be able to ski out; it puts me on different terrain. Then I got to the point where I'm looking at Snowmass and Capitol, and skiing these things - it was exhilarating taking these hop turns in deep powder on a perfect slope - and it gave me overconfidence that led me into this 'Powder Joe' mentality on Resolution."

The Resolution Bowl avalanche had a crown up to 16 feet deep and a fracture line 1,500-feet across; the main slide triggered four sympathetic releases that ran up to 2,000 vertical feet down the slope.

In mountaineering, the line between feat and folly isn't easily discerned. And ultimate folly is only defined by tragic ends. Such could have been the case for Ralston and his friends that day.

"For me, it was spasms of crying, feelings of guilt that I didn't even recognize for what they were because I was thinking it was my leadership that got us into this," Ralston said of the night back at the hut.

"I do this all the time on my own and now I'm with friends - it should be even safer. 'Hey, look at that bowl!' What's the most naive thing you could possibly say heading out into a three-quarter-mile-wide bowl with a 2,000-foot fall line and knowing that it's deep: My safety tether was 'Watch me!'

"Because I was with friends, because I was out on new skis, because I'd been looking forward to this trip for a year, because there was 3, 4 feet of powder - it was too ripe; I can't pass this plum up."

Later, Ralston recalled, his friend from Alaska, who was in the hut when the slide hit, pulled him aside that night: "Aron, I think you were headed for trouble; if this hadn't happened now, it could've been, or it will be, deadly."

For whom the Bells toll

Local mountaineering observers can't remember a more ambitious climber than Ralston in recent history. It's cause for equal parts commendation and condemnation, and critical inquiry.

"What a guy like Dick [Jackson] or myself is always going to say is that we don't want to make light of it, like it's something everybody should start doing these things solo," Dawson said. "Rather it's something you do because you want that challenge."

And even Ralston has his doubts now.

Only 16 peaks remain on his wintertime to-do list: 13 in the San Juan Mountains, and the privately owned Culebra Peak and the mighty Maroon Bells.

Last week, Ralston said he was putting the project on hold for the remaining two weeks of official winter (ending March 21), but then he reversed his opinion.

From the top of Highland Peak a few days ago, Ralston observed avalanche debris in the Bell Cord Couloir. If it has already slid, as he suspects, the route could be safe for travel.

"It's all unneccesary, but at the same time it's entirely necessary for me. I wouldn't lead a happy life doing anything other than what I'm doing. This is my ultimate" - pause - "contribution whether anybody likes it or not. It's my art," he said.

"I almost look at it like music - musicians have their own style, they have their influences sure, but there's an aesthetic that they carry that they share with other people. Climbers are very similar. Not all climbers necessarily get along very well, basically over issues of style: What's appropriate? What's adequate safety precautions? What's good form? How to do this and feel best about it?

"You never know what's going to make you appreciate why you wanted to come in the first place, but you always know there's going to be something. That's why you go. There's always going to be something."

Surely, this weekend will be no exception if Ralston tries to ring the Bells.

"I'm feeling really good about the Bell Cord Couloir," Ralston said Monday night. "It'll be fun - if it's stable."