Many feel God’s presence while spending time outdoors, and Father Dave welcomes Father John Nepil to discuss his faith connection to hiking the Colorado Trail. Father John is an avid hiker and mountaineer, and he has celebrated Mass atop all 54 of Colorado’s highest peaks. His new book is called “To Heights and Unto Depths: Letters from the Colorado Trail.”
Father Dave’s first assignment as a priest was also in Colorado, and he details Father John’s unique achievement of celebrating Mass on the state’s tallest peaks, also called “14ers.” Father Dave begins, “There are people who have this lifelong goal of hiking all 54 of the Colorado mountains that are taller than 14,000 feet above sea level…and didn’t you do it twice?”
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Father John details how he first began climbing the 14ers as a teen, before he became a priest. “I was ordained at 27, and I wanted to finish [climbing] them before my 30th birthday,” he says. “I saved the really challenging [mountains] to the end, so once those were out of the way, I thought, might as well just keep going,” and so he climbed them again to celebrate Mass atop all 54. Father John shares that friends join him for these hikes, and he has never said Mass alone on top of these peaks.
He explains how the title of his book originated from his first Mass as a priest. “My spiritual director was Father Raymond Gawronski, and he preached the homily,” Father John says. “He quoted Ephesians Chapter Three about the heights and the depths of Christ and said, ‘You’re going to spend your life going to the heights and pursuing the summits of Colorado’s high peaks, but you have to learn to go to the depths.’ It has framed my whole priestly life for almost 14 years now…learning that God dwells in the depths as well as the heights.”
Father John details how his book was partially inspired by his time as college chaplain at the University of Colorado Boulder, where Father Dave also served. Father John says, “CU Boulder was a very secular college campus, and I had a lot of students who did not feel comfortable going to Mass and questioned where am I at with the faith? I realized that this is an awesome excuse to take them and their friends skiing, hiking, and backpacking; that is where the conversations start to emerge. You get into the back country together, and it just disarms everything.”
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He weaves insights from his time as chaplain into a later hiking expedition. “The book is a travel narrative through the entire Colorado Rocky Mountains on the Colorado Trail, which is a 468-mile trail that runs from Denver to Durango…We did it in one [pass] in the summer of 2022 and the book contains a letter I wrote each day,” he continues. “Each letter [details] the travel and story of the mountains, and then also a theological aspect that helps us understand how we approach creation.”
Father Dave asks if Father John has any new hiking goals after celebrating Mass atop each of Colorado’s highest peaks. Father John responds, “People like me have to be careful that we’re always not chasing the next thing. A lot of this ‘going to the depths’ concept is about asking why am I doing this, and how does that correspond to what is the will of God for my life?”
“God loves that I’ve climbed [these mountains] growing up and loves that I do it as a priest, but [I also] keep that check,” he continues, noting that some people strive to climb more than 600 mountains that are 13,000 feet above sea level. “I’m not doing that. I’m going to keep climbing mountains, but there’s no list in mind.”
Photo Credit: Father John Nepil
