36 miles, 21 peaks, 35 hours – at 15 years old. How a Brighton sophomore set a Utah endurance record.

Jesse Zurinskas, 15, was feeling the pressure from some of his older friends. They wanted him to try something new, something that could be dangerous. It was something he’d often thought about but never felt ready for.

Last month, though, they told him it was now or never.

“My friend sent a screenshot in,” said Zurinskas, a sophomore at Brighton High, “and it was like, ‘It’s up to you now.’”

What Zurinskas’ friends wanted him to try was the Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Linkup. Or the WURL, as it’s better known among extreme endurance athletes. The roughly 36-mile hiking-and-scrambling trek around Little Cottonwood Canyon summits 21 named peaks and climbs some 18,000 vertical feet — equal to ascending Mount Olympus more than four times. The fastest finish time is just over 14 hours. The slowest? Almost two days.

If Zurinskas could complete the route, he would go down as the youngest to ever do it.

“If you live here locally, and you’re sort of a climber and sort of an endurance athlete, then eventually you have to do it,” said Jared Campbell, the Utah ultrarunner who pioneered the route in 2004. “It’s this rite of passage.”

Athletes tend to veer into endurance sports later in life, and tend to perform better at them as they age as well. Zurinskas, who learned of the WURL from a buddy last fall, thought he would have at least another year — if not half a lifetime — to prepare his body and mind for the route. He also thought he’d have a pack of friends to navigate it with.

That plan was laid to waste last month, though, by the appearance of a single line in Campbell’s log of WURL completions:

7/12/2025 – Maverick Dustin – 37h 33m – Strava – (16yr old)

Dustin had just become the WURL’s youngest finisher, replacing then-17-year-old Drew Petersen, who completed the route in 2024. In the same fell swoop, the Spanish Fork teen effectively took the record off the table for Zurinskas’ WURL training buddies, all of whom are 16 or older.

“They said it was up to me now,” said Zurinskas, who had been summiting Wasatch Range peaks all summer with either his friends or his father. “And that’s when I was like, ‘All right, I’ve actually got to start getting serious about it.’”

Campbell, who holds the record for the most finishes in the grueling Barkley Marathon, was a year removed from his first 100-mile run when he realized a sufficiently determined person could get from one side of Little Cottonwood Canyon to the other by sticking to the ridgeline. In August 2004, he completed the WURL in 21:30:00, and an ultrarunning phenomenon was born.

Hundreds of people have completed it since—so many that Campbell no longer tracks them all on his blog. Among them are climber Alex Honnold and professional skier Mali Noyes, whose attempt was captured in the documentary “Rite of Passage.”

The WURL is not a project that can be done on a whim, though. There’s the raw fitness needed to scramble up and down the peaks, some of which have trails and some of which require wayfinding. Then, there’s the matter of food and water. Most athletes line up crews who are willing to hike up to checkpoints to bring them anything from McDonalds to salted potatoes and water. Others, like Zurinskas, hike sections of the path days before their attempt to stash their rations under a rock or ledge — and pray neither a pika nor another hiker runs off with it.

At 5:15 a.m. on Aug. 9, Zurinskas wearing a black backpack loaded with water, electrolytes and energy gels, stepped onto the Ferguson Canyon Trail. The 6-mile, 7,000-foot climb up Twin Peaks — the third tallest peak in the Wasatch Range — would be his first test.

“It’s a terrible way to start the WURL,” Zurinskas said, “because it’s, literally, the very first section of it, and you’re just already, like, already it’s hard.”

Joined by the friend who first introduced Zurinskas to the WURL, they headed east along the ridge toward Mount Superior (elevation 11,045 feet) and their first food drop at Cardiff Pass. This is considered the most technical part of the ridge due to the steep climbs and loose rock. And Zurinskas was attempting it in the predawn light, sight unseen. He’d tried to climb it once before, he said, but he and his friend had turned back after running out of water.

“We knew maybe if we did it again, we’d realize that it might just be too hard,” Zurinskas said. “So we decided to go for it, and it actually went well. We got to Cardiff in a pretty fast time, faster than I was expecting.”

In addition to his age record, Zurinskas had set his sights on beating the 16-year-old Dustin’s time. As the hours wore on, though, his pace slowed. Picking his way around boulders was both mentally and physically exhausting. Plus, the ascents and descents of the ridge had nothing on his emotions.

Zurinskas hit one of those psychological valleys atop Hidden Peak, near the upper terminal of the Snowbird Aerial Tram. It was starting to get dark and cold and his friend needed to go home. With 15 miles to go, Zurinskas thought that didn’t sound like such a bad idea.

The teen’s saving grace was his 33-year-old brother, Eddie Gerritsen. Gerritsen had ridden the tram up to check in on his brother and capture a few photos. He was coming off an injury and “never hikes,” Zurinskas said. He was in no way prepared for a nighttime mountain expedition. Zurinskas talked him into joining him anyway.

“It was definitely perfect,” Zurinskas said, “because I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do the night section by myself.”

He wouldn’t have made it past the cowboys.

As the hours wore on and the moon played peekaboo behind the peaks and cliffs, Zurinskas began to hallucinate. He said he saw figures hiding in the shadows. Sometimes they were cowboys. Other times they were skeletons.

When they finally stumbled up to Pfeifferhorn (elevation 11,256 feet), Zurinskas’ dad, Chad, was waiting for them.

Chad had wanted to attempt the entire WURL with his son, but a few training runs revealed him to be more of a liability than an asset. Still, the adventurer and ski bum — for whom “Chad’s Gap,” a backcountry jump between two mining pilings near Alta Ski Area, is named — didn’t want to miss out on the experience.

“I couldn’t have stayed in the valley getting texts,” Chad said. “I wanted to be on this adventure with him.”

He expected to link up with his son around midnight. When Zurinskas and Gerritsen finally shuffled up, it was just after 3:30 a.m. and it was cold and windy.

Zurinskas barely gave his father a nod, then asked where his supply stash was. The kid was hungry and he needed to lie down. Chad pointed to a rock alongside the path that Zurinskas could lean his head on. He then took off his son’s shoes and zipped his puffy jacket around him like a mummy bag.

“I gave him 10-15 minutes,” Chad said. “I thought it was important we get back on task.”

The sun started to rise as Zurinskas lumbered toward Lone Peak. His spirits didn’t lift with it.

With 10 miles left, though, finishing the WURL seemed slightly more appealing than hiking five miles back down to the valley.

The trio picked its way, single file, through the precariously stacked boulders teetering on the slope between the Lone Peak summit and an area known as “the Notch.” By then, Zurinskas recognized he had no choice but to finish. The fastest way off the mountain was the route he was on. Yet, even then, his mood didn’t lighten.

“I was over it,” he said. “I just hiked the whole night, doing, like, hard scrambling. Why am I still up here? Yesterday I was hiking at the same time. Why am I still hiking?”

By the time he reached the Bells Canyon trail, five miles from the end of his ordeal, Zurinskas just wanted it to be over. He started to run.

When he reached the parking lot that stands as the official WURL finish, his mom and some of his friends met him with cold drinks and pizza. After 35 hours, 32 minutes, his ordeal was done. Zurinskas had, Campbell later confirmed, become the youngest person to ever complete the WURL

At least for now.

Chad said he had some safety concerns when Zurinskas told him that he and his buddies were training for the WURL. But if this is the kind of pressure his 15-year-old is going to get from his friends, he’ll take it.

“It’s got to give him a lot of confidence in approaching other things in life,” Chad said. “He proved he can obtain a goal and stick with it. Hopefully, in whatever he decides to do, he will carry that pattern.

“I’m looking forward to seeing what he can do.”