HIGHEST HEIGHTS Life, Love + Mountain Climbing

The turning point for Anna and Dustin Swanson came in 2018, after maxing out their vacation allotments at their jobs to head out on a thrilling mountaineering adventure in Colorado. “We had a trip planned to climb Longs Peak in the Rocky Mountains,” Anna says of the 14,259-foot-tall geological monstrosity that the young couple wanted to tackle in the northern Front Range. “That would have been the perfect objective for our skill at that time.”

After meeting on Myspace as teens, the soft-spoken pair had moved in together in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Dustin was a pipefitter. Anna did IT work. “Then we learned about mountain climbing,” Anna remembers. They became enamored with alpinists, and made a series of increasingly difficult treks up beginner terrain. But it was always a mission to get far enough away from the gentle rolling hills of their home state to take their passion to the next level.

So, when they got to Longs Peak, they were counting on a big payoff. But it was raining so hard that it would’ve been unsafe to climb. Clear skies were nowhere in the forecast. They’d looked forward to this for months, and used all