Colorado Mountain School Turns 40

Happy 40th Birthday Colorado Mountain School

Colorado Mountain School was founded in Estes Park, Colorado in 1981 and we are celebrating our 40th birthday this year! Since the beginning, we’ve built a reputation on tens of thousands of days skiing, climbing, mountaineering, and teaching in our backyard—the spectacular Colorado Rockies—and across the globe.

Colorado Mountain School is also Colorado’s largest mountain guide company, an accredited guide service of the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA), and the country’s #1 AIARE avalanche course provider.

How We Celebrate 40 Years of Guiding at Colorado Mountain School

Two of our guides, Jason Antin and Jessie Ramos, decided to celebrate our 40 years by climbing 40 pitches as a team! They’ve selected Boulder Canyon, or BoCan as we like to call it, and climbed at Cascade Crag.

Although a popular climbing area, a tyrolean traverse is often the method chosen to cross Boulder Creek! Not a bad way to kick off the day! Next, a quick scramble up a short slope leads you to several bolted buttresses. Boulder Canyon has it all, single-pitch, multi-pitch, trad, and sport climbs. For this effort to celebrate CMS’s 40th, Jessie and Jason choose a few bolted, but challenging routes in the 5.11 range.

Climbers were first drawn to Boulder Canyon’s cracks and chimneys early in the 1950’s. And today, climbers still come to BoCan from all over. Therefore, be prepared for Boulder Canyon to be busy on the weekends! Want to get up here and rock climb when it’s a bit quieter? Book a guided climb with us!

What 40 Years Means To Us

“Any business that’s been around for 40 years is pretty impressive,” says Jason, “and that’s especially true when it comes to guiding.” Jason’s love for teaching mountain craft and sharing the outdoors with others inspired a move from Massachusetts to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where he has been working as a guide for over a decade!

“CMS has endured many generations of guiding…and I appreciate that it has endured the test of time. And it’s getting better.” says Jessie. Ramos’s appetite for rock, ice, and alpine climbing has taken him all over the world. Whether in his own backyard of the Colorado Rockies where he grew up, or on a journey in the middle of the Andes, he continues to discover the blessings of the mountains and explore distant cultures.

Thanks to our friends at Yellow Tent Nomads, you can watch as Jason and Jessie tackle 39 pitches as a team. And then, in classic Colorado fashion, the skies open up and it begins to rain. Maybe it made that 40th pitch just a bit more special?