The low point of Zach Morriss’ life came when he was 14 years old.
“I had aspirations to be in the military and join the Navy,” Morriss said. “Those aspirations were put to a halt after spinal fusion surgery of my upper spine to correct scoliosis. The military would no longer take me, so I had to find another direction.”
Zach, the son of Rex and Jane Nederowski Morriss, had always loved the outdoors and started a journey toward becoming a mountain guide. As part of that journey, he set out to climb all 58 of Colorado’s peaks that rise more than 14,000. Now 33 years old, he completed the last climb on Sept. 26, summitting Mount Wilson and El Diente Peak southwest of Telluride.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Zach moved here with his parents and sister when he was 3 years old.
“I haven’t been that athletic most of my life,” he said, “but I always loved the outdoors, and I’ve always liked physical things that are hard to do.”
You learn a lot about yourself – Zach Morriss
After his surgery and rehabilitation, he got into running cross-country at Manitou Springs High School.
At Pikes Peak Community College (now Pikes Peak State College), he started bodybuilding.
“That was the first real sport that I truly got involved in,” he said. “I just collected too many injuries.”
As part of his major in outdoor leadership recreation technology, he trained in activities such as rock climbing, ice climbing, mountaineering and survival.
“I really just got immersed in the outdoors and fell in love with mountain climbing,” he said. “Not that it’s any easier than bodybuilding, but it takes you to a much more special place in your soul. The mountains are just a magical place, and you learn a lot about yourself.”
For the past 12 years, Morriss has been helping others experience those feelings. He’s worked as a tour guide with Adventures Out West for the past eight years.
Morriss aspires to become a top-level mountain guide by earning a professional mountain guide certification from the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations, a years-long process. The first step is certification from the American Mountain Guide Association — and climbing the state’s fourteeeners.
Pikes Peak was, of course, the first mountain he climbed, but it wasn’t the most difficult.
“It’s somewhere in the middle,” he said. The most commonly used system to rank climbs is the Yosemite Decimal System, which rates a mountain from 1 to 5 based on the techniques and difficulty of rock climbing required to scale it.
“In Class 1 and 2, you feel like you’re hiking, but there’s no real climbing involved,” he said. “With Class 3 and 4, there’s enough exposure that you could fall off, and Class 5 terrain dictates that you have ropes.”
Pikes Peak via the Barr Trail is rated Class 1, Morriss said, “which means there’s a trail all the way to the top, making it not technical. I went up the back side (the Crags trail), which is Class 2. You lose the trail a little bit, and maybe you do a little bit of scrambling here and there.”
The back route is a steeper 14-mile round trip, whereas the Barr Trail climb is 26 miles.
“Even though it’s not a technical day, you’re still going to put in some effort,” he said.
Morriss said the most difficult climb was Pyramid Peak, a Class 4 fourteener in the Elk Mountains near Aspen.
“I think I underestimated it,” he said. “I accidentally got onto some interesting Class 5 terrain.”
Now that he’s done the fourteeners, Morriss wants to tackle some of the state’s lower peaks that are more technical and start climbing the volcanic peaks in the Cascade Range such as Rainier, Baker and Shasta.
“I want to knock out some, if not all, of the fourteeners in the lower 48, and I want to go on to bigger mountains — Denali, Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro,” he said. “Maybe it will lead me to Everest one day.”
That’s the kind of challenge Morriss enjoys.
During one of his college courses, he remembers standing atop St. Mary’s Glacier, where the temperature was minus 30 degrees and the wind was blowing at about 70 mph.
“It was the first time I was in such an extreme environment,” he said. “I had this feeling like, ‘I don’t belong here,’ and yet I felt totally comfortable.
“I want to get people out of their comfort zones and show them what a cool place we live in, and that you don’t have to be pasted to your screen all the time and lose touch with this natural world around us.
“And maybe people start to care again about this world and protect it.”