COLORADO SPRINGS — What’s next? That’s what Jon Kedrowski recalls thinking on Mount of the Holy Cross at age 8.
It was his first Colorado summit above 14,000 feet. “From there, you could see all these other mountains,” he says 32 years later, “and naturally, you wonder: What’s the highest mountain in the world?”
But Everest would not be next. He knew he’d climb it one day. “I just didn’t know when or how.”
When? In 2012, his first of two trips to Earth’s ceiling. How? Mostly through his resoluteness, firm as granite. That unshakable resolve he felt as a kid atop Holy Cross. That insatiable hunger for altitude. That drive.
That thing, whatever it is, that takes him to the moonlit tops of the state’s highest peaks, their rough floors preferred to his cushy bed.