Ton took on the "Inclinathon" challenge — going up and down the Incline's 2,744 steps thirteen times, over around 26 miles, just short of the length of a marathon — on January 17. She finished the climb in eleven hours and 22 minutes. That's the fastest known time for any female hiker and the second-fastest time overall, topped only by Wade Gardner, who did it in ten hours and 34 minutes in 2015.
Ton, age 26, smashed the previous women's Inclinathon record by four hours and 21 minutes. In doing so, she also set new records for the fastest women's double lap, triple lap and quadruple lap, according to the Incline's Facebook page.
"I knew that I had it in me, but it's no joke," Ton says. "It was a super-spontaneous last-minute decision. ... The blissful ignorance definitely helped."
Erin Ton (in yellow) in the middle of her record-breaking hike of the Manitou Incline.
Courtesy of Andrew Swendsen
"It really made me appreciate all I had taken for granted growing up here," she says. "I've been playing in the mountains ever since."
When she returned to Colorado in 2020, Ton planned to take a gap year and then go to law school. But after getting her first speed record on Mount Morrison in March 2021, Ton quickly fell for the competition. Now she's a sponsored mountain endurance athlete with 39 speed records, according to the Fastest Known Time website. Nineteen of her records are for Colorado trails and mountains, while others reach as far as Hawaii and Mexico.
Ton didn't go to the Incline intending to set any records, she says. It was just meant to be a training exercise for her upcoming climb of the 18,000-foot volcano Pico de Orizaba in Mexico (where she broke the women's climbing record on February 21). But even with years of climbing experience and dozens of records under her belt, Ton says the Incline lives up to its reputation as a particularly difficult hike.
"I was a bit naive going into it," she says. "I've climbed all the 14ers in Colorado, a lot of the 13ers. This is what I'm good at. But because it's just 2,000 feet up of pure stairs, it impacts your body in a very different way. It wrecked my quads for two to three days after in a way that I've never felt before."
Ton used trekking poles for the first eleven laps, but opted to crawl up the steepest areas with her hands for the final two laps. She says the mental battle was the hardest part, having to "dig deep" once the pain in her quads became apparent after the eighth lap. But during the toughest moments, she says, the support from other hikers kept her going.
A passionate community of hikers revolves around the Incline, with some locals proudly climbing the steps every single day (the record for most ascents in one year is 1,825, set by Greg Cummings in 2020). Ton says word of her marathon attempt spread among these regulars, who cheered her on whenever she passed them on the steps. This sense of community made the Incline stand out from any other hike she's done.
"I don’t think I’d be able to finish it or finish it as fast without the people out there cheering me on," Ton says. "That's what makes this record so special to me, and that's what I'm going to take away the most.”
Now, Ton is training for her next big projects: Nolan's 14 — a 100-mile route over fourteen summits of 14,000 feet in Colorado's Sawatch Mountain Range — and the Colorado Trail, a 500-mile trail stretching from Denver to Durango. Ton says she hopes to break speed records for both this summer. (Last summer, Ton made national headlines when she announced she'd climbed all of Colorado's 14ers in a record fourteen days, ten hours — but it turned out she'd skipped the off-limits Culebra for political reasons, which made her record unofficial, and controversial.)
As for the Incline, she's open to giving it another shot. Ton says she'd like to try for the women's single lap speed record, as she now holds the double, triple and quadruple lap records. She notes that she did the Inclinathon while recovering from foot surgery the month before, and only two days after she climbed 21,000 feet on a StairMaster. So she might return to break her own Inclinathon record one day:
"I still think I can do it much faster."
