To Each, Our Summit

Sunrise Over Boulder

Flying the Front Range in Colorado is always humbling. The mountains rise with a kind of permanence that makes you feel both small and alive all at once. On this particular morning, the sky was still bruised with night as I lifted off, the horizon just beginning to show a pale glow. The air had that mountain chill to it, sharp and clean, the kind that wakes you before the sun does.

As I climbed, the ridgelines unfolded beneath me, jagged and shadowed, until something caught my eye: a line of tiny figures inching their way up toward a summit in Boulder. Mountain climbers, making their push long before most of the world had even stirred. I thought about them starting in the dark, layering step after step against fatigue and cold, their goal somewhere above but not yet visible.

There’s something in that kind of quiet persistence that resonates deeply with flying. Aviation training asks the same of you—those early mornings when the runway lights feel like the only thing awake, the hours of repetition when progress seems invisible, and the steady pull of doubt that you learn to push past. Like the climbers, you move forward not because it’s easy, but because something inside you won’t let you stop.

By the time the sun cleared the horizon, the mountains were painted in gold. Light spilled across the cockpit, warming the glass, thawing the chill that had settled into my hands. I leaned back for just a moment and let it wash over me, the world stretched wide in every direction. Somewhere below, the climbers stood on their ridge, taking in their own hard-won view.

Different journeys, different altitudes—but the same truth. The reward isn’t just in the summit, or the sunrise, or the seat of an airplane. It’s in knowing you pushed through the dark to reach it.