Mark Woods: As father-son chase America's high points, Denali becomes more than a mountain

A year ago, when kids were returning to school, I thought about writing sort of a "how I spent my summer vacation" column about Mills Weinstein.

With all kinds of news happening at the time, I never got around to it. Which is maybe for the best. The story of what Mills and his father, Scott Weinstein, did last summer — and what it ended up meaning to both of them — makes a better Father's Day column.

Other than some landmark Father’s Days — like maybe the first as a father, or the first one after losing your father — the memories of the holiday can easily run together, with the years becoming more of a compilation than tied to one specific day.

That isn’t the case for the Weinsteins and Father's Day 2021.

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The father and son from Fleming Island can tell you exactly where they were, what they were doing on the side of the tallest mountain in North America, what the mix of cold air and intense sunlight felt like at the 14,000-foot base camp and, perhaps more significantly, what they felt like when they posed for a picture at “The Edge of the World,” a cliff dropping off thousands of feet behind them and the Denali summit about 6,000 feet above them.

They can tell you how close Mills, then just past his 12th birthday, would come to becoming the youngest person to reach the highest natural points in all 50 states.

They can tell the story of why they didn’t make it to the highest of the high points — and how, without that twist, a stranger might have died on Denali.

“Go ahead, Kid,” the father said to the son the other day. “You can tell the story.”

More rare than climbing Everest

You won’t hear Scott Weinstein call Mills by his name. Ever since the day he was born, his father has simply called him “The Kid.” And he often refers to Mills’ little brother, 6-year-old Myers, simply as “My.”

“We’ll be out somewhere and I call out — My, Kid, come here — and everybody looks at me like I don’t know my children’s names,” Scott Weinstein said with a laugh.

He of course knows the names he and his wife, Megan, chose for their boys. Even has them tattooed on his arms. And while his dad, Mike Weinstein — long involved in Jacksonville government and now head of Kids Hope Alliance — tried to convince him to start actually using Mills’ name, Scott stuck with “The Kid.”

The Kid doesn’t seem to mind — although he has become old enough that he can teasingly ask Dad if someday he’ll have to call him “The Man.”

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At 13, he still looks like a kid. He weighs under 100 pounds. But don’t be fooled. He has strength, physical and mental, beyond his years and weight. He’s comfortable climbing rock walls deep in America’s wilderness and speaking about it in public. He has Facebook and Instagram pages titled "Klimbing With The Kid."

He tells other kids: “Leave the normal, explore the possible.”

He knows that his parents have made it possible for his idea of the possible to include a shot at something fewer than 400 people have recorded doing — reaching the highest natural point in all 50 states.

Consider this: It's likely that more people will summit Mount Everest just this year.

From Florida's 'high' point to Alaska

Scott Weinstein got the idea of making it a goal when his wife’s sister gave him a book about America’s high points.

There is a club of Highpointers, with more than 10,000 members involved in this peakbagging pursuit. The vast majority never will reach all 50. But that’s not necessarily the point. It’s the journey of seeing places all across America.

For the Weinsteins, highpointing started out as a family journey. And even though this was about when The Kid was about 6, it isn’t as crazy as it might sound.

Many of the highest points are easy hikes. In some cases, the challenge is finding the actual high point. They recall being in Delaware, finding that state’s high point in a neighborhood, next to a sidewalk.

The lowest of the high points is in Florida: a hill in the Panhandle that’s 345 feet above sea level. The Bank of America Tower in Jacksonville is higher. But this is a pursuit of the highest natural places.

Some high points are odd. Connecticut’s, for instance, is part way up the slope of a mountain. The actual peak is in another state.

The high points in several states are on private land and require landowner permission. The one in Illinois is open just a few weekends a year to give highpointers access.

Some high points you can reach by car, although Mills wanted them to walk if possible. Not that this always was possible. In Nebraska you have to drive to the high point because it’s a buffalo farm and, as they explain, the people who own it don’t want you attacked by a buffalo.

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They bagged the highest point in North Carolina (Mount Mitchell) when Megan was several months pregnant with their youngest — and then the highest point in Virginia (Mount Rogers) with Scott carrying Myers in a pack, along with diapers and formula.

But eventually, they were left with the most challenging peaks — and that’s when Scott and Mills made it a father-son pursuit.

They climbed Mount Rainier (Washington), Mount Hood (Oregon) and Mount Whitney (California). It took them two attempts at Whitney, the highest point in the Lower 48.

“Safety first ... the mountain is always there,” Scott Weinstein said, a sentiment that would prove even more significant later.

By last summer, they were down to four high points — Montana, Wyoming, West Virginia and Alaska. They planned to summit Denali in Alaska first, then do Gannett Peak in Wyoming and Granite Peak in Montana, before finishing with a family summit of West Virginia’s highest point.

Scott and Mills had hoped to climb Denali in the summer of 2020. If they had been successful — if The Kid had reached the summit not long after his 11th birthday — he would’ve become the youngest person to climb America’s highest mountain. (The record was set by a 12-year-old boy from Alaska who summited Denali with his father, a climbing guide, on Father’s Day in 2016.)

The pandemic ended that goal, effectively closing the mountain that summer.

So they returned again last June, along with another Jacksonville climber, Andrew Bunn.

The Kid 'became a man that day'

Scott had made sure they were ready. And for him, being ready for something like this isn’t just a hobby.

He’s the lead instructor of WILDedu, a nonprofit that partners with organizations and takes kids who often haven’t left the city before on outdoor adventures. He has a pile of certifications, for everything from swiftwater rescue to wilderness EMT. He teaches rescue courses to fire departments and sheriff’s offices, not just locally but around the country.

Although if you ask him what he does, he mentions some of this but then says: “My No. 1 job is part-time, stay-at-home Dad.”

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He’s 42 years old, although he quips his X-rays say he’s much older.

When they were in Anchorage before starting the Denali climb, he tweaked something in his back.

He didn’t think much about it at the time. They began the climb. While it’s fairly routine for groups to do it in two weeks, they took a conservative approach. They packed and planned to do it in twice that.

They made it to the 14,000-foot base camp as planned. But bad weather forced them to stay there for 12 days. When they finally got a window of good weather, they made their way toward the 17,000-foot base camp, a trek that began with a climb up a 70-degree headwall and onto a ridge.

The forecast that day, while clear, called for a temperature well below zero. And that's without the wind chill. Mills remembers making a promise to himself that day.

“I said that I would never complain about being hot again,” he said. “I have since broken that promise many times, because we live in Florida.”

They made it to the next base camp, exhausted, ready to rest for a day and wait for another weather window that would allow them to try to reach the 20,310-foot summit. Scott decided he needed more than one day. He told Bunn, the other adult in their group, that if the weather was good, he should go and try to summit with a different group.

“So that next day Andrew left and Dad and I slept in,” Mills said.

When they woke up, they watched “Romancing the Stone,” the 1984 action-adventure comedy on an iPhone.

Mills remembers this part. He also remembers that he was near the door of the tent, trying to clear some snow, when his dad screamed and collapsed.

“I wasn’t sure if he was having a heart attack,” he said.

It wasn’t his father's heart. It was his back. He had been reorganizing items in the back of the tent. He had reached over to get his boots and this mundane twisting — seemingly less strenuous than thousands of steps and motions on this trip — had triggered a herniated disc.

They were the only two in base camp. Everyone else had headed to the summit and wouldn’t be coming back for many hours.

At this point, they both say, The Kid had to do pretty much everything.

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“When we walked into 14 Camp, he was a kid — he stood there like a frozen statue and I had to do everything,” his father said of the 14,000-foot base. “When I went down, he took over my role. So from a dad’s standpoint of being proud, he became a man that day.”

It took most of that day, but Bunn eventually returned to camp. Before he left, he had told the Weinsteins that he’d summit Denali again with them the next day. When he got back, he said he had good news and bad news. The good news was he had summited. The bad news was there was no way he was doing it again a day later.

The next day was perfect weather. If Scott’s back hadn’t gone out, he and Mills would’ve attempted to summit. Instead, the next day Scott was testing out his back, getting out of the tent, hunched over, barely even able to stand up straight, when he saw someone from another group suffering from severe altitude issues — high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) and high altitude cerebral edema (HACE).

Left untreated, there was a high risk of mortality. And they tactfully say this wasn’t being treated properly.

“This is what I train for, this is what I teach,” Scott said. “So if you believe God does things for a reason ..."

He sprang into action, as much as someone can spring while crawling. He had medicine for these situations. He knew where the National Park Service had oxygen stored nearby. He told someone to call for a helicopter.

The Kid looks at his dad a year later and sums it up like this: “You literally saved his life.”

The next day the helicopter returned, this time to take the father and son off the mountain. They remember how the pilot masterfully landed a few feet from them, how they climbed inside and how the pilot didn’t so much as lift the helicopter into the air as he rolled it off the side of the mountain.

Father's Day message

Within weeks, Scott’s back felt fine. So last summer they reached the other high points. And all that remains now is Denali.

“We’ll go back,” Scott said. “It’s unfinished business. I cost him the record, but we'll go back, maybe when he's 16.”

For now The Kid’s focus is on indoor climbing — and the national championships this summer.

But he has a picture of Denali hanging in his room. And if you ask him which high point was his favorite, it’s telling that he points to the one they haven’t made it to yet. At times, he was miserable during that climb. But it also was the most memorable of the 50, partly because of the challenge, partly because for 26 days he was with his father 24/7, sharing a tent and a minus-40-degree sleeping bag, trying to achieve something together.

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Scott Weinstein figures that’s the moral to the story, a message worthy of Father’s Day.

He knows that most fathers can’t take a month and go to Alaska with their kids. He knows that, even if they could, most fathers couldn’t or wouldn’t climb Denali. And he knows most kids aren’t like The Kid. But he also knows that all crave time devoted to them.

“It’s a project with your kid,” he said. “It’s that time together.”

It doesn’t have to involve reaching 50 high points. In fact, it turns out that not reaching the highest of high points became a different kind of highlight. The son got to watch his father in action, saving someone’s life. And the father says he saw his son become a man. Not that he’s going to stop calling him The Kid.

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Father-son pursuit of America's 50 high points, from Florida to Alaska