Mar 3, 2025 Updated Mar 3, 2025
Featured in The Gazette
Courtesy of Drew Petersen, “Feel It All”
TELLURIDE • “I want to be dead. I don’t want to be alive.”
Those words scroll across the screen as filmmaker and pro skier Drew Petersen runs across a Colorado mountain ridge in the background.
“I was literally trying to find a way to survive,” Petersen says of his training for the Leadville Trail 100 Run. “Today, to see tomorrow. Then I knew if I could do that, then yeah, I could do anything. I can climb any mountain, I can ski any line. And I can run 100 miles.”
In the last few years, Petersen has been on a “really rough, really deep mental health journey.” Running the Leadville 100 race became a goal that was something of a lifeline, “one I held onto when I was really depressed and when I was suicidal.”
Participating in the endurance race also made him realize he is far from alone in facing mental illness in mountain towns, and set him on a path to help others suffering in silence. He’s been traveling around the Mountain West showing his film, “Feel It All,” trying to change the culture of mental health.
His message at a recent standing-room-only showing of the film in the Sheridan Opera House at Telluride: Mountain towns are facing a mental health emergency.
The Paradise Paradox
Mountain and rural communities, ski towns specifically, have significantly higher rates of suicide compared to the national average, according to Lilian Tenney of the Colorado School for Public Health.
The highest rates of suicide in the country are all in the Rocky Mountain states, earning them the moniker the Suicide Belt.
Destinations such as Telluride and Aspen have up to two to three times as many suicides as the national average, Tenney said.
With the allure of the West’s landscapes and outdoor lifestyles often comes a host of hidden realities including isolation, lack of mental health care, a hard partying culture that can exacerbate mental illness, and financial stressors because such places have become so expensive to live in, Tenney told me. She has seen the change in mountain towns firsthand having grown up in Sun Valley. She’s now director of outreach and programs at the Center for Health, Work & Environment.
The worker bees in these communities often face a tough life course, said Tenney. “Similar to the professional skier — the transient populations are often young and attracted to extreme sports. The “high” wears off after time. Skiing doesn’t pay the bills. And the thrill seeker gets behind in earning and often starts to question their purpose if they can’t do what they’ve always loved to do as a result of injury or mental health. From there it can be a downward spiral.”
A culture of rugged individualism doesn’t help. The elite athletes in these towns are used to toughing it out physically, so they believe they can tough it out mentally as well.
“I think that really the most dangerous words in the English language are: ‘I got this,’” said Paddy O’Connell, a former Telluride ski instructor who has gone through his own battles with mental health, alcohol and addiction. He also spoke movingly of his recovery at the Telluride event.
“People move to the mountains to escape their problems and just bring them with them,” said Megan Wise, the regional health connector for the Tricounty Health Network in San Miguel County.
Living in a mountain town in the 2020s, Wise said, “is like living in a gang neighborhood, so many people have experienced trauma. So many people have had people close to them die.”
“Is this mountain sport culture self selecting for a personality that lives on the edge and pushes themselves?” asks clinical psychologist Kelsey French. “Are they in competition with themselves deep in their psyche? I’d say so.”
“They may be waiting tables, but it is so they can have the opportunity to test their skills, seek that rush and feel alive as they stand at the line of, well, danger and death.”
O’Connell knows the truth of this from personal experience. “Pushing it in the mountains became less about achieving goals and more about self harm,” he said.
“I was trying to get to a point where the decision would be made for me, rather than me make the decision,” he said. The decision to live or die, he meant.
National Geographic writer Kelly McMillan coined a term for the seemingly paradoxical mental health struggles of those living in “paradise places,” calling it the “Paradise Paradox.”
She found that the transient nature of resort communities means support systems are shallow, and people have to regularly rebuild them.
“Residents lack intergenerational relationships and deep social attachments, which are protective against suicide,” McMillan wrote.
Getting better, Petersen found, is a lot like running a 100-mile footrace.
The starting line
“Feel it All” begins in downtown Leadville, the highest city in North America at 10,200 feet. It’s 4 a.m., and 750 runners take off down 6th Avenue, “a mess of headlamps.”
The ultramarathon runs out to the base of the Sahwatch Range and follows the base of Mount Massive and Mount Elbert and then climbs up 12,600-foot Hope Pass, where you turn around and run the whole thing again back the way you came, finishing back in Leadville. One hundred miles.
Mile 35 at Twin Lakes is when Petersen hit the first wall.
“I was pretty messed up. Quads, hamstrings, calves, hips. All of it.”
The breaking point
The moment brought to mind all the aches and pains of a horrific accident he went through in 2018 skiing Mount Hood, when he broke his clavicle, sustained a concussion, and nearly slid off the mountain.
“I just fully broke down that day,” Petersen says. “That day I asked my mom and my brother to hold me accountable to finding help. That literal metaphorical breaking point of my collarbone was when the path changed.”
It took years of therapy to pull back every defense mechanism that he had built up over his life. Talking about his suicidal thoughts aloud pulled his demons into a place where he could find ways to cope better.
“When I was grappling with the fact that I was supposed to be dead, I needed something to direct my energy towards,” he said. “So running became that complete whole focus.”
But he said even though “practicing” helps shorten the dark moments, they sill never go away.
Late at night during training, the suicidal thoughts came rushing back when Petersen got to the top of a mountain.
“I was standing that night on that summit, and I just looked over the cliff, and I just had the thought go through my head, I should jump,” Petersen said. “ It’s midnight, if people find my body they’ll just think it was an accident. I was really terrified of my own mind. I immediately turned around and I ran off that summit the other way.”
North side of Hope
The most infamous part of the Leadville 100 is Hope Pass, where you climb up 3,000 vertical feet, then down 3,000 vertical feet, then you turn around and do it again.
Petersen knew the mountain well because he’d skied Mount Hope the year before. That familiarity reenergized him. “The mountains resurrected me. I looked up at the couloir and said, ‘This is why I’m doing it.’ And then I sang a country song.”
He passed 80 people on the north side of Hope.
“I just tried to remind myself that no matter how bad things get, it’s going to get good again. It might take a mile, it might take 5 miles, it might take 30 miles. The only way you get there is to keep going forward.”
Finish line
Pushing through works for mental health, too. So does growing an intensely loyal support group.
“I think something that’s really cool about Leadville, when you get into town and you come off this dirt road, pass the middle school and back on to 6th Avenue, which is the road you finish on, and you got about three-quarters of a mile left, and there’s one hill before you can actually see town and see the finish line,” said Petersen. “You’re allowed to have as many people as you want run with you.”
Near the end of the movie, his crew and his friends all run across the finish together in a happy knot of humanity, a takes-a-village moment of fellowship, accomplishment and support.
Though it’s pitch dark out still, the finish line is filled with light, end-of-tunnel kind of light.
“This isn’t just a story about running the race,” he said in Telluride after the showing.
“It’s a story about the strength and resilience I found in that goal, and in the process of it.”
“There’s definitely no finish line with me, for mental illness,” he adds. “There’s no cure for my mental illness. But there’s also no stopping this path and this commitment of personal growth,” Petersen said
He hopes to inspire those experiencing mental illness to seek help and start a dialogue about mental health and suicide.
“The solution starts with talking about it,” Petersen said.
“Skiing and running can be therapeutic. But skiing and running are no substitute for real therapy,” he notes. “My toolkit is everything I do in my fully renovated lifestyle.” He puts a lot of emphasis on his sleep, mindfulness, meditation, gratitude practice, journaling, sobriety, psychiatric medication, and continued therapy.
“And now that has opened up skiing and running to be fun,” he adds.
French encourages people in mountain towns to reach out to each other more. “Encourage each other to care about themselves and each other. Encourage talking about it, like only they can fully understand each other because it is such a niche. Encourage conceptual meaning-of-life conversations. High and deep. Just like the mountains and powder they love.”
Tenney agrees. “These communities have the best potential to band together to create the support networks for individuals to prevent this pattern.”
Fixing the problem
Many of them have started down that path.
“We have a new initiative called the Colorado Recovery Friendly Workplace Initiative that was really based in large part on the voice of employers in these mountain communities,” said Tenney of the Center for Health, Work & Environment.
“So right now we have eight employers in Steamboat [Springs] that are champions for our Recovery Friendly Workplace Initiative, and they’ve just been tremendous.”
She believes there’s been a shift in talking about the stigma of mental health in mountains towns. “There is this push within the mountain community, especially ski resorts, to provide better access to mental health care.”
Alterra Mountain Co., which owns 12 ski resorts including in Steamboat Springs and Winter Park, has developed a “resilience team” that has placed over 60 “well-being champions” at its resorts.
Vail Valley may be a model for all other mountain towns. Eagle County passed a marijuana tax to fund behavioral health care, placed clinics in all schools in Vail Valley, completed a $100 million “It Takes a Valley” behavioral health fundraising challenge, and plans to open the Precourt Healing Center, an inpatient psychiatric hospital with 78 beds, in May.
At the UCHealth-sponsored event in Telluride, groups like TriCounty Health, SOAR and High Camp Hut had a presence offering support for mental wellness, and two counselors were in the audience to talk to anyone who needed to talk. Telluride also has established a fund to pay for six free counseling sessions for anyone who wants it.
You get the sense that Petersen is one of the leaders of this effort now, making himself whole in part by helping others become whole.
“By being in this privileged position, I get to see how normal all this is,” Petersen said in Telluride. “Literally, like just in the past year, I have met thousands, at least a thousand people face to face who tell me about their experience and how they feel less alone because of me. And coupled with that are literally thousands of messages online.
“Every single one of those people needs to know about the thousands more.”
Vince Bzdek, executive editor of The Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, writes a weekly news column that appears on Sunday.
