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Former Ogden firefighter Kent Stanford completes his longtime goal of hiking to the highest point of each Utah county, traversing Gilbert Peak in Summit County on July 31, 2025.

Photo supplied

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In this undated photo, former Ogden firefighter Kent Stanford shows off his completed checklist of the highest peaks in each Utah county, having hiked them all over the course of multiple decades.

Photo supplied

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This summer, a retired Ogden City firefighter completed a decades-long goal of hiking the highest point in each of Utah’s 29 counties, reaching the 13,448-foot summit of Gilbert Peak in Summit County.

Now a resident of St. George — and formerly of Pleasant View — Kent Stanford officially checked off the final hike on his list at the tender age of 75 (and two knee replacements later). He completed the task on July 31 with his two sons, Carson and Brandon Stanford, by his side.

“It was a long hike. It was about six hours getting up there. We took our time, but it was steep, and it was really rocky, the big rocks and scree,” Stanford told the Standard-Examiner. “We just kept going and coming around, and it was beautiful looking down onto the lakes and all the areas that were down below. … When we got up there, the boys just got up ahead of me, and then they took their phones and took pictures of me coming up, and then they congratulated me. I kind of let out a ‘Wahoo!,’ like, I finally made it. It was pretty special to have them both be there with me.”

For Stanford, it was a full-circle moment; his love of hiking can be traced back to adventures with his own father.

“I started by just doing hikes around the Ogden area. My dad, he would take me on hikes. Ogden had three or four peaks that we hiked — Ben Lomond, Mount Ogden and Malan’s Peak,” Stanford said. “So, he got me interested in doing that, and I kind of just grew to love that and was always looking around.”

Stanford spent 36 years with Ogden Fire, working first as a firefighter and, later, as an EMT and driver. He called it a “rewarding” career path, noting that he met a lot of people along the way, and came to “expect the unexpected” every day. He worked in construction, too, but it was not uncommon for his thoughts to drift to the next trail, the next adventure, while he worked.

“Sometimes, when I’d be up working on the roof, I could look at all these mountains and think, ‘I wonder when I’m going to get up to that next peak.’ So, that kind of gave me a little bit of a goal to hit some of the peaks around there.”

Although he was already well on his way toward traversing the highest summits in each county, it became an actual mission when he picked up a copy of the book, “High in Utah: A Hiking Guide to the Tallest Peak in Each of the State’s Twenty-nine Counties,” by Michael R. Weibel and Dan Miller. Inside the book was a literal checklist of those peaks.

“As soon as I got the book, I just thought, ‘Well, that looks like a good goal,'” Stanford said.

So, one by one, he set about seeing what each county had to offer. Sometimes he had family and/or friends with him, other times he just grabbed a sleeping bag and a bit of food, hopped into his ’93 Toyota pickup and headed off for his wild blue yonders.

A noted outdoorsman, Stanford could usually reach peaks without too much trouble, even as he got older or previously when GPS devices weren’t readily available and he was forced to rely on maps and intuition. However, there have been times when he has been forced to improvise or lean more heavily into his experience.

“One time, when I went to Mount Nebo, I got kind of lost on the trail, so I had to freelance it,” Stanford said. “I got into it, I knew I had to get to the top, so I headed up an area that I thought would take me to the trail, and it was really, really steep. I had to be really careful, because if I was going to slip on that, I knew I was going to slide down the mountain a long, long ways and would probably get hurt, so I was careful and made it through. That was probably one of the hardest peaks.”

Stanford’s wife, Cyndy — a trail guide in her own right — told the Standard-Examiner that she continues to be impressed by her husband’s drive.

“There’s only been two or three of these ones in the book that he actually had anybody with him,” she said. “So, I’m quite impressed he had the gumption and the health to be able to do it.”

Gumption has never been in short supply with the Stanfords, though. In 2000, the couple joined other medical professionals, professors and students on a Weber State University-sponsored trek and humanitarian mission in the Himalayas.

“We took in 24 students, and there were two dentists and two doctors … we’d work for a day in different villages,” Cyndy Stanford said. “The dentists would pull or fix teeth, and then the doctors would take care of burns and things like that. And then the professors, they, with the students, were setting up satellite programs for the teachers over there in Nepal.”

Still, the experiences and natural beauty they encountered on the home front and as a family continues to stand apart from the rest. And with one tour of the state officially on the books, Kent Stanford is already toying with the notion of embarking on other journeys.

“One of my goals is to hike down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon,” he said. “We actually floated the Grand Canyon last year on a boat trip. So, I wanted to hike down from the south rim down to the bottom and then back up. Also, a neighbor had a friend that wrote a book, ‘Utah’s Low Points,’ So, I may try that, just for the heck of it.”