The Whole Enchilada pinballs down the wickedest terrain in Moab, Utah. The trail begins above 10,000 feet in the La Sal Mountains, among the aspens of Burro Pass. After a brief uphill prelude, it plunges nearly 8,000 feet over 27 rowdy miles, into the red-rock canyons near the Colorado River. It’s a feast with every Moab flavor: sculpted slickrock, cliff-edge single track, and thundering descents that threaten to rattle the fillings out of your teeth.
Thousands of pilgrims attempt the Whole Enchilada every year, though many settle for a partial serving because snow blankets the upper reaches for nine months. This stretch is loose and ski-slope steep, maxing out at a grade of 37 percent. (Blue-rated ski runs fall between 25 and 45 percent.)
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The crux of the Whole Enchilada is a gauntlet of hairpin turns and precipitous ledges known as the Snotch. It’s a geo-illogical riddle as mind-bending as an M.C. Escher staircase that somehow goes up and down.
“It’s basically a way down a cliff,” says Moab legend Kyle Mears, who is among the handful of skilled riders who can clean the Snotch without inadvertently soiling their bike shorts.
Thirty years in Moab have made Kyle Mears a pioneer of gnarly climbs and fearsome descents. He’s that guy who got the bike world abuzz by bombing a 230-foot near-vertical rock face. He runs the Whole Enchilada Shuttle Company, which hauls thousands of riders a year to the top of the famous trail. It takes most competent riders three to six hours to descend.
One winter day five years ago, a friendly stranger approached Kyle at the Moab bike park. Clean cut and earnest, he was an athletic five-foot-nine, 165 pounds, with warm brown eyes and a guileless smile. He rode with skill, precision, style, and nearly zero ego.
“See that triple?” the stranger said. “Think that’s possible?”
Kyle looked across the waves of dirt he thought he knew by heart. Only then did he see what the stranger saw—a new interpretation of the jump lines he’d ridden thousands of times. That line—he’d never seen it before. It cleared three jumps instead of two. Was it possible?
“I don’t know,” he said.
He watched the stranger size it up, commit, and sail over the triple. Confident. Clean. Effortless.
Dude, Kyle thought. Who is this guy?
Braydon Bringhurst was a 28-year-old dad with a second baby on the way. A recent film grad from Brigham Young University, he was living with his father-in-law in northern Utah, where he and his wife, Nicole, had started a small wedding video business. He was riding a Breezer Repack, a graduation gift from his father-in-law. This was his first year on a proper mountain bike.
Braydon loved descending, but also climbing. He and Kyle started attempting technical climbs together on Porcupine Rim. Kyle challenged Braydon to try lines he never would have considered.
Within a few years, Braydon had found a way to combine his film degree with his passion for riding. He was making edits, short mountain-biking films for sponsors, serving as director, producer, editor, and talent. With Nicole behind the camera, he would wheelie, whip, spin, flick, bonk, drift, pivot, and flip on his bike with an intrinsic ease that called to mind monkeys at play in the jungle.
He had also crafted a signature style of riding he called “upduro.” He floated up trails most riders would only consider riding down. He did it without hopping, in one fluid motion, like water flowing uphill.
One day Braydon looked at the Whole Enchilada and saw something new.
“Maybe I could climb this thing.”
He didn’t want to just grind up the beast. He wanted to flow up it—disabling gravity and ascending as stylishly as a rider bombing down. He wanted to pedal up every single inch of the Whole Enchilada. Even the Snotch.
This had never been done. “People reverse it for sure,” Kyle says. “But nobody has ever tried to make every move on the way up. Nobody would dream of doing that. Like, it’s not even a thing that would cross people’s minds.”
Were it anyone other than Braydon, Kyle might have said, Dude, are you nuts? But Braydon was a singular creature. He had the kinetic IQ to blend explosive power with precision, proprioception with control. Yet his superpower was something else.
Somehow, Braydon believed he could do “this thing I thought was impossible,” Kyle says.
It would take a year of preparation—deliberate practice, skill-building, pushing the limits of his endurance—to make the impossible possible. But even that wouldn’t be enough. He’d need to tap his greatest strength, which transcended physiology.
He’d have to train his mind.
When his Whole Enchilada dream emerged, Braydon began to see his past through a new lens. Events, even tragedies, that once seemed unrelated now appeared cosmically linked, like stepping stones along a path, each leading him to—and preparing him for—this goal that now consumed him.
At four he got his first bike—a $2 garage sale Mud Puppy with 16-inch wheels. He rode it until it broke, then wept inconsolably. He bought another one just like it from a neighbor for $1, and his world spun right-side-up.
Then he saw a video of Evel Knievel. That’s when his dad came home to find three neighborhood kids lying side-by-side in the street. Five-year-old Braydon was jumping them on a ramp he had built out of plywood and cinder blocks.
When he was nine, Braydon started racing BMX. “Don’t worry about the guys next to you,” his dad told him. “Just race your own race.” He often won. Within a decade, he’d be a multiple-time national champion in the Expert class, the division just below pro.
As much as Braydon loved winning, he loved riding with style even more. “I had to race to get sponsors,” he says. “But for me it was always more about having fun and a sense of flow and speed and style.” He particularly loved the rhythm section—the undulating waves of dirt meant to be pumped, jumped, or finessed with a manual wheelie.
In seventh grade, he got into slopestyle skiing. He entered his first competition a few days after learning a 360 in a skills class. He told his dad he thought he could win if he landed a 720—two full rotations. “He could land the one,” his father, Steve Bringhurst, recalls. “So why not just spin twice?” Braydon closed his eyes and imagined himself popping off the jump, rotating twice, spotting his landing, and skiing away. He nailed the trick and won the comp.
Five years later, the day before slopestyle nationals, Braydon had a problem during practice. As he carved off a jump for a Switch 1080—three rotations, with a backward launch and landing—his right ski kept catching the lip and ejecting. Spinning through a 70-foot jump on one ski was “super sketchy,” but he managed to land without getting hurt. The problem kept happening, lodging a splinter of doubt in his confidence.
Where other athletes might have spent themselves on more practice, Braydon focused his energy on dislodging the mental splinter. “I can do this,” he told himself. “I’ve got this.” All night, he visualized his 5-trick run, which ended with the Switch 1080. By the time he slipped through the starting gate on the day of the competition, he’d landed the trick hundreds of times in his mind. He helicoptered through the air, spinning too fast for his mother to recognize. She saw the human blur and thought, Oh dear. I don’t know if Braydon can beat this guy. He nailed the trick and won the national title.
By now, Braydon knew he could perform under pressure. But he wasn’t sure why—or how.
The one place he didn’t excel was the classroom. Diagnosed with ADD, he rejected the meds, which made him feel like a zombie, and channeled his restless energy into biking, skiing, wakeboarding, and pole vault. He felt at home in the air.
Braydon had been raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and after high school graduation, he set aside his bike and skis to go on a 2-year voluntary service mission, a tradition in the LDS church. He moved furniture, pulled weeds, and did a lot of listening to people who needed to fill a friendly ear. “When I focus on other people,” he learned, “I’m so much happier.”
When it was time to come home, re-entry was hard. He and Nicole had been dating for several years, and their romance had survived his absence. Now they butted heads and broke up for a while. His parents’ business was struggling in the recession, and their house went into foreclosure. “Everything I’d known was flipped,” he says. Hungry questions circled: Where am I going? What am I doing with my life? Why am I so lonely?
When a younger friend asked Braydon to mentor him in the pole vault, he was grateful for the chance to focus on something other than himself. A coach saw them practicing and encouraged Braydon to apply for a track and field scholarship at Brigham Young University.
The next hurdle—the biggest of his life so far—was raising his ACT score by six points to be eligible for the NCAA. He studied with the same ferocity he channeled into athletics. He took the ACT over and over, failing three times to make his target score. On his fourth try, he made the grade—just barely.
On the BYU team, he found the demands of pole vaulting as mental as they were physical. “You don’t just have to be incredibly fit and strong and fast,” Braydon says. “You have to be mentally fearless.” As hard as that was, college was even harder. What did I get myself into? he thought. I can’t do this.
Then he walked into Craig Manning’s classroom.
Most BYU athletes took a sports psychology class taught by Craig Manning, PhD, a specialist in mental strength training. Dr. Manning’s master’s thesis examined the attributes of high-performing athletes across all sports, and he would use his findings to coach Red Bull athletes, Olympic skiers, and pros in the NHL, NBA, and NFL.
“What’s the point of learning a skill if we don’t have control over our minds?” Dr. Manning asked in the classroom. He’d studied this deficiency in many competitive athletes. “They have amazing physical abilities that have been refined over years of training, but they haven’t developed their minds.”
Dr. Manning’s class gave Braydon a vocabulary and framework for the skills he had started to learn on his own. “It gave me clarity on where to spend my energy,” Braydon says. “You have to be deliberate.”
The foundational skill was self-belief, cultivated through controlled self-talk. There would be moments when, sprinting down the runway toward the vault, something in Braydon would whisper, No way—you’re never going to make this. Then he’d shout, “I can do this!”
He transmuted his anxiety into actions he could control. He was short for a pole vaulter, so he compensated by building explosive power through 300-pound squats immediately followed by box jumps. His standing vertical jump improved to 36.5 inches—pretty much the same as the average NBA player’s.
Pole vaulting was so strenuous that he could only do 8 to 10 quality vaults between warmup and fatigue. He learned ways to maximize the quality and minimize the quantity. A coach showed him how a PVC pipe would bend like his fiberglass vaulting pole when jabbed against a wall, simulating the feeling of planting. The drill let him practice a nuanced skill—again and again and again—with minimal exertion.
“Practice makes permanent,” he remembered Dr. Manning saying.
Every time he looked at his phone, he saw a number that he’d set as his home screen: 5.50. It was a constant written reminder of his goal—5.5 meters, half an inch over 18 feet. He dog-eared Dr. Manning’s book, The Fearless Mind, and logged his progress in a mental strength journal. Every night, before falling asleep, he visualized himself sailing over the bar.
The day he did it, he burst into Dr. Manning’s office, breathless.
“It works!”
His senior year, Braydon was on track to have his best season ever. A strained hamstring derailed that plan. But because of what he had learned—a formula he could apply to other parts of his life—he felt something other than disappointment. “I knew my mindset was still there,” he says.
Braydon became the fifth-highest pole vaulter in BYU history. He also became a six-time Academic All-American. He credits the mental skills he learned in Dr. Manning’s class. They were so valuable, so powerful, so integral to everything he did, he took that class every semester—10 times in all. “The mind is like a muscle,” Braydon says. “If you stop exercising it, it’s going to struggle. If you stop learning, you plateau.”
Manning said something else he took to heart. “You have to do something you love. If you don’t love what you do, you’re not going to do your best work.”
Mountain biking combined the elements Braydon loved about other sports and merged them into one passionate current, like tributaries of a river. The bike-handling finesse of BMX, the aerial tricks of slopestyle skiing, the explosive flight of pole vault—all of it came together on two wheels.
He found joy in “the absolute beauty of single track and the freedom in nature it gives.” Other riders admired his steez—that signature blend of style and ease that makes absurdly difficult feats look effortless. Not just landing a backflip in a wheelie, but the way he could glide up jarring terrain.
“He was the first guy to make climbing cool,” says Devin Riley, vice president of marketing for Canyon North America, who noticed Braydon on Instagram and decided to sponsor him. The other thing that set Braydon apart was a disposition Dr. Manning describes as “confident humility.”
“I know how to make riding a bike look really fun,” Braydon says. And that came across in his edits, which soon overtook weddings as the primary business of Burst Media, the company he founded with Nicole. Like their wedding videos, their mountain-bike films were produced by a crew of two: Braydon in front of the camera, Nicole filming with a gimbal, Camera B on a tripod. He liked it this way. “You have to have a good connection with the person behind the camera,” Braydon says. “It works for us.”
They’d gotten married and had their first daughter, Mae, during college at BYU, where Nicole, a sprinter, was also a star on the track team. After graduation, they moved in with Nicole’s dad in a suburb of Salt Lake City, where they had their second daughter, Nova. They eventually bought a house in Boise, Idaho, where they’d dated in high school.
Braydon felt grateful, almost guilty, for all the blessings he’d been given, including this chance to make a living doing something he loved. He knew he was privileged, and he wanted to pay it forward. He wanted to live by the BYU motto: Enter to learn, go forth and serve.
One day in 2016, Braydon was skiing in Utah with his 27-year-old cousin, Cole. He would often ski with Cole and his younger brother, Cody, 21. But Cody had stayed home that day, saying he had some stuff to do.
Cody was six years younger than Braydon and full of heart. As kids they’d shared adventures: riding go carts, hiking Utah trails, stunt-jumping into beanbag chairs from the living room stairs. As a teenager, Cody loved rock-crawling in his Jeep and making GoPro films of Braydon riding his dirt jumper. A car accident when he was a young adult had caused lifelong injuries, but Cody was still able to mountain bike.
Braydon missed his cousin that day on the slopes in Utah, and thought about texting him to check in. The next morning, Cody’s mother found her son’s body in his living room with a suicide note. The news came as a shock to everyone who knew him. No one had realized how much he was struggling.
A year later, Braydon tucked a handful of Cody’s ashes in his pack and climbed a Moab jeep trail in the landscape Cody had loved. Regret and grief consumed him. If he had known his cousin was suffering, could he have done something to help? He pedaled to the edge of a cliff, unfurled his fingers, and watched the wind take a handful of Cody.
Years later, during the pandemic, Braydon realized that everyone around him was facing some personal struggle. Many of those struggles were invisible. It reminded him of how he’d felt in the lonesome year after his mission. It made him think about Cody.
He reflected on something Dr. Manning had discussed in class: the idea that shame and regret live in the past, fear and anxiety exist in the future, and the only thing we can truly control is our actions in the present.
What if he took on this crazy quest—climbing the Whole Enchilada—and documented the struggle on film? Through the narrative, he could share the skills and mindset that had fed this dream.
The idea excited and scared him, as an athlete and a filmmaker. Opening up about his personal life felt riskier than anything he did on a bike. But maybe it could help people feel less alone and better equipped to conquer their own mountain.
There was a quote by spiritual author Marianne Williamson that he came back to again and again. He’d read it in Dr. Manning’s book and saved it on his phone’s home screen:
“As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
In the high-desert La Sal mountains surrounding Moab, there is a narrow temperate window between summer heat and winter snow. The climb had to happen in October.
Eleven months out, in November of 2020, Braydon drove eight hours to Moab to scout the Whole Enchilada. The upper stretch was snowed under, so he focused on the bottom half. The first four miles were “downright radical, bad-to-the-bone, gnarly climbs.” After that came “a sea of ledges,” an unrelenting staircase of curb- to hip-high ledges that he would have to bunny hop.
Then, 14 miles in—about halfway—he faced his ultimate challenge: “The beast. The mother of all climbs. The Snotch.”
Riding down it was a double-black-diamond tantrum. It zigged and zagged down a slickrock cliff that scraped the edge of a mesa. The prelude was an off-camber cascade with a steep hairpin turn to the right. After a chunky narrow chute came the moment of truth and pucker: a nearly 180-degree switchback on the precipice of a cliff. Trying to turn would jackknife the bike, so most riders would brake to a standstill, then try to hop and pivot. The final descent hugged a handlebar-scraping wall and plummeted down two slickrock slabs as steep as playground slides. The sandstone was blackened by skidding tires and polished by sliding butts.
Braydon stood at the bottom, studying the puzzle. Was it possible to ride up this? He honestly wasn’t sure. I can do this, he told himself. With a friend filming on an iPhone, Braydon attempted to find out.
He thought he knew what it would take. “A lot of raw power, torque, and inertia,” he says. “You have to create a sense of acceleration.” But his normal tricks didn’t work here. No matter how much speed he carried, the pitch killed all his momentum. Over and over, he’d stall, unclip, walk down, and try again. Several dozen tries later, not a single success. He turned around and drove home.
In Boise, he studied the videos like a football coach watching film. He’d taken “notes” by thinking aloud on camera, recording what gear he needed to be in and how to time his pedal strokes to avoid clipping a rock. The unforgiving line demanded ultimate precision. He choreographed each move and played the sequence in his mind. Every day, several times a day, he visualized himself riding up the Snotch.
He simulated Snotch-like moves on rock gardens close to home. He practiced endos in his backyard, grabbing the front brake, flipping the bike, and leap-frogging over the handlebar. He found a wooden drop with a two-foot gap and relentlessly bunny-hopped up it. He filmed himself to critique his form and move with more economy. His body was getting stronger, but he was also training his brain, strengthening neurological pathways, the reflexive mind-body magic also known as muscle memory. After thousands of repetitions, many of the crazy-hard moves became not only easy but reflexive, done without thinking, a phenomenon called automaticity.
Endurance was his weakness. To train for the Whole Enchilada, he faced an interesting challenge: building slow-twitch endurance for an all-day climb without cannibalizing the explosive power of his quick-twitch muscles, which he’d need to catapult himself up the Snotch.
He sought coaching from Greg Montgomery, a friend who competed in Nordic skiing and cross-country running. Braydon didn’t know what his lactate threshold was, never mind his V02 Max. His heart rate monitor stayed in a drawer. He didn’t own a power meter, or want to.
Greg counseled Braydon to ration his energy on the first technical climbs and on bunny hopping eight miles of ledges, which would tax every muscle in his body. “It’s like a thousand burpees,” he says. Efficiency here would be key, because then came the Snotch. And after the Snotch came 14 more miles that grew progressively steeper.
At first, Greg prescribed classic endurance-building workouts: 8-minute intervals at or just above threshold; 5-minute intervals redlining at V02 max. Braydon smiled and politely rejected this plan. For a sprinter, anything longer than 15 seconds felt like an eternity, Greg says. Plus, this kind of workout required riding on a road. In the limited time he had to ride, he wanted his tires on dirt.
“You only have so much energy,” Braydon says. “You only have so many hours in the day.”
Greg came back with another approach that would “optimize what he enjoys.” They key was a soul-crushing motorcycle trail with a mix of steep and mellow pitches. The steep bits—20 percent grades with lousy traction—would force Braydon to redline. On the mellow stretches between them, he would ride as slowly as possible, training his body to recover.
The “terrain-mediated” intervals played to Braydon’s strengths, Greg says, and “decreased the mental load.” They would still be hard and painful, but because they could be done on a trail, they improved the suck-to-fun ratio.
Braydon and Greg rode the motorcycle trail once a week to build endurance and mental stamina, learning when and how to dial back effort to ration energy. On 40-mile rides with 4,000 feet of climbing, Braydon would finish with a technical climb to recalibrate his explosive moves with a body and mind fatigued.
To fit this much training into his busy life, he tag-teamed with Nicole, editing films with a daughter on his lap and glitter in his stubble. He rode at dawn, while the girls were sleeping, kept dumbbells by his desk, and did box jumps on the kitchen counter. “It’s not flashy,” he says. “But it’s how I do the flashy things.”
In early 2021, life threw a curveball. Nicole was pregnant—a joyous surprise—and due in late September. Right before the climb. They’d need to find someone else to do the filming.
Then in April, another setback. Braydon was practicing cornering drills on a slope with ball-bearing gravel. He lost traction in a turn—the point of the drill—and put his foot down at speed. His ankle rolled with an audible pop. Pain and nausea washed over him as he limped to a fence and propped himself up, trying not to pass out. As his ankle purpled and ballooned, he wept.
Nine months earlier, sailing over a downed log for a film, he’d clipped his rear wheel and crashed. That same ankle had rolled inward, dislocating his subtalar joint and breaking the tip of his fibula. Months of rehab had restored the joint and his confidence. And now he’d rolled it the opposite direction, creating a lifelong weakness.
The doctor told him it was a bad sprain and to stay off it. He launched into physical therapy and took measures to inoculate against self-doubt. Dr. Manning had told him that it takes three positive thoughts to counter a negative thought. Some days, he had to lean into the mirror and say it out loud: “You can do this, Braydon. You’ve got this.”
In May 2021, Nicole filmed his second trip to Moab. Braydon’s ankle was swollen and sore, but he couldn’t afford to stop training. During this visit, he dissected the Snotch with Kyle Mears. The crux of the crux was a momentum-killing bump between slabs as steep as an intermediate ski slope. Braydon called it the Nose. He told himself, I can do this. Kyle didn’t say what he thought.
On one failed attempt at the Snotch, he tumbled down a rock slab and felt a stabbing pain. Groaning, he picked himself up and gingerly weighted his foot. It held. He turned back to the Snotch and tried again. And again. And again. And again. Zero success. He went home, rehabbed his ankle, did drills, ate well, rode long, and prayed.
In August, Greg joined Braydon on his third trip to Moab. They spent four straight hours attacking the Snotch. They broke it into three segments that would enable him to climb every inch, though maybe not all in one go. He mastered the approach and the exit. But he still hadn’t conquered the middle stretch—the Nose. “It’s the point of no return,” Greg says. “Once he commits, stepping off is too sketchy. It’s narrow, and his foot wouldn’t reach the ground. He’d topple backward.”
It was a delicate dance between torque and traction. Braydon hated fiddling with any part of his bike; he liked to “set it and forget it.” Greg convinced him to adjust his front fork, slowing down the rebound and lowering the pressure. They let air out of his tires until they squished like marshmallows. They slammed the stem, lowering the handlebar and the rider’s center of gravity.
Braydon’s failed attempts at the Snotch now numbered in the hundreds. Yet his confidence had risen. Each failure was a data point that informed and fine-tuned his next attempt. When his rear tire finally crested the Nose with traction and momentum, he bailed. But his confidence soared. I’ve cracked the code!
In September, three weeks before the climb, he made his fourth and final training trip to Moab. With Kyle Mears coaching, he set up a GoPro and attacked the Snotch without a splinter of doubt. In the fourth hour, his rear wheel crested the final impossible incline. They hooted and hollered and ran to check the GoPro. Batteries dead. He didn’t get it on film.
But that didn’t matter. Braydon had conquered the Snotch. He cleaned it twice more—in segments—before he was satisfied. He had officially ridden every single inch of the Whole Enchilada.
Now he just had to do it all in one day.
On a Tuesday night in October—12 hours into the climb—Braydon’s father, Steve, waited in a pitch-dark parking lot somewhere off the Whole Enchilada. It was 7 p.m., 38 degrees, and raining. The day had not gone according to plan, and Braydon would be finishing—if that was even possible—in the dark. Steve had driven to town to buy headlamps.
Braydon was somewhere out there riding in shorts, a T-shirt, and a thin wind jacket. His 4-man film and support crew wasn’t dressed any warmer. As a former Scout master, Steve knew about hypothermia. As long as no one got hurt or stopped moving, they should be OK. “Please,” he prayed, “let them be OK.”
Under the waning crescent moon, Steve couldn’t make out any detail in the landscape around him. He couldn’t see them, but maybe they could see him. Steve turned on the headlights and intermittently honked the horn.
After what seemed like an eternity, a figure emerged from the inky woods. It was Alex Unbound, a crew member who had been carrying camera equipment on foot for many miles. Cramping and exhausted, Alex had decided to hike out, with only the light of his phone. When his phone battery died, he’d followed Steve’s lights.
“They’re all together,” Alex told Steve. “Braydon’s still going strong.”
Steve didn’t doubt his son’s ability. He worried about the weather. If the temperature dropped six degrees, that rain would turn into snow. They were approaching 11,000 feet.
If it snows, Steve thought, they’re done.
The day had begun with a watercolor sunrise. Feeling confident, Braydon set out with a crew of five. Kyle and Greg for tactical support. Filmmaker Tory Powers to capture video and stills. Alex to help schlep camera gear and film a second angle. Steve for moral support.
Braydon soared through the first mile like a finely tuned circus act, launching his bike up boulders that his father had to hike around. The first crazy climb was a feature Braydon nicknamed the Banger. To Steve, it didn’t even look like a trail, “just a bunch of layered rocks.” As his son levitated, Steve’s jaw went slack.
“Dad,” Braydon said, “that’s nothing.”
The real problems began at Mile 2, a technical climb Braydon called the Snaggle. It wasn’t tremendously steep or notoriously complex—just a series of intermediate moves that compounded into an awkward, off-camber, slippery sequence with no good line or flow. Braydon had cleaned it before, in 15 or 16 tries.
Now rocks bit at his pedals and snagged his wheels and robbed him of momentum. An off-camber gulley sucked him off course and into a fridge-sized boulder. A tight right-angle turn at the top felt like threading a needle with mittens.
On the first dozen tries, he calmly walked down, clipped in, and tried again. On the second dozen tries, he visualized. I can do this. On the third dozen tries, he kept his cool, but his crew began to worry. Greg knew the energy Braydon needed to save for the 25 miles ahead. Kyle thought about time, elevation, and weather. “He was so far off schedule,” Kyle says, “I was doubting.” The forecast called for storms.
After 40-something failures, Braydon let out a howl. This wasn’t part of the plan. An ounce of doubt can evaporate a ton of hard-earned confidence. He forced himself not to think of the Snotch or the endless miles ahead. If he didn’t get past this obstacle, right now, none of that would matter. Standing astride his bike, he crossed his forearms on the handlebar, put his head down, and visualized the moves.
“Come on Braydon,” he said. “You can do this.”
He was right. But it would take more than 50 attempts.
The next stretch—the “sea of ledges”—was a stairway to heaven that hurt like hell. Bunny-hopping fires every muscle in the body, an explosion of energy and mental skill. After hours of practicing bunny-hopping up the downhill drops at the bike park, the move had become automatic, precise, and efficient. Not a centimeter higher than necessary.
In Idaho, Nicole sat in her living room, holding their newborn and holding her breath. Part of her wished she could be there. Another part was glad to be free of the pressure to nail the shot. She wasn’t worried so much about Braydon. She was worried about mechanicals, weather, his ankle—the factors outside his control.
At one point, she called him. The Snaggle took longer than anticipated, he told her. “And I haven’t even gotten to the Snotch. But it’s all good.”
Five days earlier, Nicole had given birth to a healthy 7.5-pound daughter. Braydon watched Hallie enter the world and slept on a chair in the hospital. Two days later, they came home and saw Mae and Nova bend over their baby sister and whisper “I love you.” The next day, Braydon packed his gear and thought about priorities. This is stupid, he thought.
“I don’t need to do this,” he told Nicole. “I can push it off a year.”
Once snow fell, the upper reaches of the trail would be covered through June or July. Then it would be too hot to climb until October. Could he maintain his peak fitness—and focus—for another full year?
“You’ve trained so hard,” Nicole replied. “My mom’s here, we’re fine. Let’s get it over with.”
To Braydon, fear didn’t feel like weak knees, a pounding heart, shaky hands, or a fluttery stomach. To him, fear felt like a lack of preparation. Whenever he jumped a gap or did a flip, he did so with 95 percent confidence that he would land it. “I’m never just sending it,” he says. “I need to be around for my wife and girls.”
Six hours in, staring up at the Snotch, Braydon felt no fear. He felt he had done everything in his power to prepare for this moment. If he failed, he would accept that as a meaningful part of the journey. If he succeeded, it would be something he would carry within him forever to draw on when life got hard.
The plan was to climb the Snotch in three segments. Each would demand all the strength he could summon. Between segments, he would stop and refocus on the trail ahead. As he’d done in his pole-vaulting days, he began with a short and deliberate warm-up. He had ridden the first segment hundreds of times. He had visualized it three times as often. After three warm-up approaches, he felt ready to fully commit.
His neurons were primed to fire in the patterns he had established, moving his muscles in a choreography of orchestrated automation. Now he danced through the opening gauntlet with surgical precision. It set him up on just the right line to charge up the super-steep slabs and the Nose with calibrated momentum.
Hips to the handlebar, crouched like a panther, he pounced up the first steep slab, flowed over the Nose, lunged the bike, and felt the purchase of tire on stone. With all the torque he could muster, he powered up the second slab.
At the hairpin switchback he did the cycling equivalent of a three-point turn. He locked the front brake, let the rear wheel rise and balanced on his still front wheel, swinging his hips left to pivot the bike. He had to back-pedal in a brief “revert” to give himself enough space to finish the turn and explode into the narrow chunky chute.
Braydon had failed between 700 and 800 times before his first success on the Snotch. He’d succeeded thousands of times in his mind, but only three times in real life. And now, on the day it mattered most, he’d nailed the crux of the Snotch—in four tries.
But he still wasn’t done.
The third segment of the Snotch was like an off-camber petrified waterfall with a switchback in the middle. He had to bounce his front wheel off a rock to pirouette on his rear wheel. On the first try, he executed the sequence with near perfection, snagging his wheel on the very last ledge, with all the hard parts behind him. He put a foot down, so it didn’t count.
“Oh well,” he said. “Let’s get it again.”
It had taken around a dozen tries to decode this segment on a practice trip. But now it thwarted and mocked him like the underestimated Snaggle. Somewhere around the 20th try, he fell and tweaked his wrist.
Someone forced him to stop and sit down. He was a dusty-faced, helmet-haired, glassy-eyed mess. Lying back on an uncomfortable jumble of rocks, Braydon began to realize why his metaphysiological mojo had abandoned him. He had started worrying about the rest of the climb instead of focusing on the present.
On the 28th try, he completed the final stretch of the Snotch. Aside from quickly scarfing down a sandwich, he didn’t stop to celebrate. He still had half an enchilada to devour.
Things went downhill from there. Which in this case meant uphill.
The segment called Kokopelli was a jeep road with a mellow grade, and he tried to recover. But on the next stretch—Hazzard County, a not-too technical grind of a climb—Braydon bonked. And then his legs started to cramp. It started to rain. The temperature was falling along with the sun. If that rain turned to snow… Kyle gave up his own water and food and thought to himself: It’s over.
The final miles to the Burro Pass trailhead were unrelenting. Braydon’s body was depleted. As he climbed into the aspens, the trail was wet, steep, and covered with slick roots. Fatigue and thin air eroded his coordination. He had reached his utter limit, only able to pedal a few hundred feet at a time before putting a foot down to rest and collapse on his handlebar.
“You’ve got this, Braydon,” he said each time. Over and over and over. “You can do this.”
Around 8:30 p.m. Braydon felt a river of air blast his face. Wind coming over the mountain. Through the raindrops, his headlamp lit up a sign: the Burro Pass trailhead. The finish line.
“How do you feel right now?” Tory, the cameraman, asked him.
He’d expected to feel elation. A surge of victorious adrenaline. But after 13 hours in the saddle, after a year of training and setbacks, what he felt was tired. He didn’t have the energy for an enthusiastic victory celebration.
“Oh my gosh, dude,” Braydon said. “It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
But his prevailing emotion was gratitude. So many people had helped him on his journey. He hadn’t—and couldn’t have—done it alone.
They found a Mexican restaurant in town for a quiet celebratory dinner. Braydon ordered a burrito.
That night, the first snow of the year began to fall on the Whole Enchilada. Within 24 hours of Braydon’s finish, 18 inches covered the upper trail.
Going in, Braydon planned to make two 20-minute films. One about the training. Another showing the climb. But when he sat down to edit all the footage, he froze. It was too personal, too incongruous with humility to edit a hero’s journey about himself.
It was up to Nicole. With two little girls twirling in the living room, she handed the baby to Braydon, took a deep breath, and dug in.
They thought it would take four or five months, tops. Through a year and many revisions it evolved into a feature-length film. They titled it 8600FT, a nod to the number on Braydon’s Garmin watch at the end of the actual climb. (All those attempts on the Snaggle and Snotch had added an extra five miles and around 800 feet of elevation.)
“My hopes and dreams for this project is that it somehow helps somebody, in whatever way they need help,” Braydon said as the film was completed. “Here’s a literal example. Some great insights. Take what will help you.”
One day in October 2022, Braydon and Nicole sat down in a Moab theater called Star Hall. Three hundred people attended the sold-out premiere, including Cody’s mom and brother. Watching his story unfold in the dark before hundreds of friends and strangers, Braydon felt vulnerable. Even afraid. What if it all came off as humble-brag?
→ Watch: The Full-Length Documentary “8600FT”
When the lights came on, a man in his thirties walked up to Braydon with tears in his eyes.
“I’m climbing some of the biggest mountains I’ve ever faced,” the man told him. “That film was just what I needed.”
Braydon had known he wanted to inspire others, but the response was bigger than he had dared to dream. Other cities were asking for screenings. Canyon is planning to show the film abroad and donated a custom bike as a prize to help Braydon raise money—his goal is $30,000—for a crisis hotline. At each screening, 100 percent of ticket sales go to a local trail organization.
At his sold-out hometown showing in Boise’s Egyptian Theater, 750 people of all ages gasped and laughed and groaned and cheered as the story unfolded on the big screen. After the show, a 10-year-old girl asked Braydon, “How do you not get discouraged?”
He choked up as he searched for an answer.
Kim Cross is the NYT best-selling author of What Stands in a Storm, a narrative account of the biggest tornado outbreak on record. A national champion water skier, she has competed in more than 10 sports, some of them laughably obscure. She loves wheelies, dirt jumps, and riding in the snow in Idaho, where she coaches her son’s NICA mountain-bike team. Follow her at @kimhcross.
