Former APU juniors in the news!
Former APU juniors Tsaina Mahlen and Taryn Hunt-Smith completed the Cosmic link up on Friday July 16th and unofficially set the fastest exclusively women’s trip time in 21 hours and 33 minutes. The Chugach Front Range Link up (aka the Cosmic Link up) is an ambitious project that requires mountain runners to summit all 12 5,000-foot peaks in the front range of the Chugach mountains. The front range is the western extent of the Chugach Mountain range isolated by Ship creek and Indian Creek. According to the rules they are not allowed to disclose their specific route, but they climbed between 18 and 21,000 vertical feet and covered between 36 and 45 miles. We checked in how the day went with Tsaina:
“Between the two of we had done roughly half of the peaks and went in blind to a lot of sections. Thankfully, we had good luck with weather and route finding! Getting through some of the class four scrambling sections 18 plus hours in when fatigue had very much set in was a special challenge of its own, but Taryn’s impressive rock-climbing background helped a bunch. We both came away exhausted, bruised, bloody, and sore but very satisfied. I definitely underestimated how tough it would be in every way imaginable and how long recovery would take. Hopefully the legs will be ready for more mountains soon!”
This record is made all the more impressive because these two finished 7th and 8th in Mount Marathon just a few weeks prior! We are very excited to see our former athletes out setting high goals and getting after it!
Check out here for more! https://www.stockalpine.com/posts/chugach-front-linkup.html
Check out their photos on Instagram at @intsaina @tarynhuntsmith and additional photos @maxromey