Rainer Hertrich ran out of powder days. But he will always have motorcycles and a boat.
Hertrich, 63, drew national attention when the longtime Summit County resident skied 2,993 consecutive days from Nov. 1, 2003, to Jan 10, 2012. During his record streak of endless winter, which stopped due to a cardiac arrhythmia, Hertrich skied 98.45 million vertical feet.
But in the decade-plus since, Hertrich’s ski-bum lifestyle came crashing down. His left foot was amputated in 2016 due to a staph infection. His right foot was damaged in a motorcycle accident that crushed his ankle, plus another staph infection unrelated to that crash.
As a result, he hasn’t skied in roughly three years. And he’s in the process of putting his slopeside condo on the market, which will mark the end of a 44-year run as a Copper Mountain mainstay.
Hence the boat, and a love of adventure motorcycles that grows stronger than ever.
“Since I was a kid, when I learned how to sail, kayak and water ski, I’ve had an infatuation with boats and sailing,” Hertrich said. “I have another place in Lake Havasu now, with two Sea-Doos, and I recently acquired a 25-foot sailboat there.
“So that’s my new fix. I don’t want to lay around and look at the snow when I can’t really ski anymore. So my plan is to spend a lot of time on the lake and ride a lot on my bikes. And I’ll probably make my way back to Hawaii, do a bunch of scuba diving. I’m still getting outside, chasing adventure. It just looks different now.”
Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, but raised in Boulder and Estes Park, Hertrich was adventure-obsessed from a young age.
He made his career as a snow groomer at Copper, and had an epiphany while sitting at a bar in Jackson Hole, Wyo., in 2002. He noticed a plaque on the wall recognizing a club of people who had skied 6 million vertical feet in a season. It got him calculating that he could achieve that feat, too, and possibly surpass it.
Soon enough, the streak was born. Hertrich aimed to ski 33,000 vertical feet each day, which would put him at roughly 1 million vertical feet each month. He did 4 million that first year, then 6 million the next, then 7 million in 2004.
While chasing the streak and accumulating vertical feet, Hertrich spent the winter/spring at Copper and the summers skiing at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Government Camp, Ore., where he also picked up a job as a groomer. When the season ended there around Labor Day, he headed to South America for a month or two to continue his streak.
“I don’t know how he did it, honestly, because he’d go hard all day skiing and then he’d come in and groom for 8 to 10 hours a night going hard there as well,” recalled Jeremy Caves, the slope maintenance supervisor at Copper who worked with Hertrich at the resort.
“Because of that, he has quite the legacy around here that will never be forgotten. He hasn’t groomed with us for about 10 years now, but we still talk of him, and there’s ‘Reiner The Legend’ stories that pop up all the time.”
One of those involved a headlamp-equipped Hertrich skiing down a black diamond run in the dark to rescue a co-worker whose snowcat was stuck in deep powder. It was common for Hertrich to take on dangerous tasks on the upper mountain. In the wee hours of the morning, after his own shift ended, Hertrich got the vehicle unstuck and drove it to an old logging road, which he used to bring it back to the central part of the mountain.
“Then he went home and got some sleep, got up a few hours later and hit the mountain again to ski,” Caves said.
Hertrich took that same relentless approach to his streak, which was made possible by carefully planned logistics that allowed him to go from Colorado to Oregon to South America and never miss a day on the snow.
He’d recruit friends to drive his motorcycle from Copper to Oregon, so he could fly there and be able to ski at Timberline the same day of his travel. To make the trip to South America work, Hertrich would hit the slopes on his telemarks on Mount Hood just after midnight before heading to the airport for a morning flight.
“I would groom one path up the mountain right after the clock hit a new day, and I’d let Rainer ski down,” said Jake Ingle, the slope maintenance director at Steamboat Springs who worked with Hertrich at both Timberline and Copper. “So he would get his skiing in for that day, and that would give him almost 48 hours to travel to South America to find snow.”
Amid the streak, Hertrich skied through injuries like broken ribs and a separated shoulder, and also in extreme weather that even the most diehard shredder would shirk. He lived in a tent for most of his tenure in Oregon to save money. He sacrificed relationships for a mission that consumed him, and that he was too stubborn to give up.
Even in the rare instances where he did pick people over powder, he made it work to keep his streak alive. When he went to a family reunion one day in Whidbey Island, Wash., he bought about a hundred bags of ice that he spread over a small dune so he could ski.
“One year, I met him at Timberline after driving his motorcycle up to him, and skied with him for a little bit one day,” recalled Rich Rapp, Hertrich’s longtime Copper neighbor. “It was sideways ice-raining, just absolutely freezing and miserable.
“I was like ‘(Screw) this, I’m going to the bar.’ But he stayed out there for hours. He pushed through a lot of tough, horrible conditions to keep putting in the vertical and not just put in a run or two.”
When Hertrich’s streak finally ended on doctor’s orders, he was a week short of 3,000 days and about six weeks short of 100 million vertical feet. Hertrich called it “the most devastating day of my life at the time.”
“But I’m proud that I stuck it out that long,” said Hertrich, who eventually wrote a book about his record. “Every year during the streak, I learned a new lesson. (It was paid for) by my jobs at Copper and Timberline, and whatever I was able to save up. If I started going broke, or if I got hurt, I told myself I was done. And in the end, it was the second one that got me, though I never would’ve guessed it would’ve been my heart.”
Now, Hertrich is ready for a change of scenery.
He says it’s “torture” to see the snow piling up outside his condo. The difficulty of getting his boots on — one on his prosthetic left foot, and the other on his deformed right foot — has kept him off the slopes.
So Hertrich bought a fixer-upper in Buena Vista about an hour south. Over the past six months, he’s been working on his house there, which has a couple of outbuildings and plenty of space to store his six adventure motorcycles. Come spring, his house at Lake Havasu will be calling his name, too, and Hertrich is eager to get out on his boat that he’s restoring.
There’s no more shredding for Hertrich, whom Ingle calls the “Ironman of skiing.” But there is still plenty of adventure in his blood.
“He’s going to be doing something fun in this next chapter, whether it be boating on Lake Havasu, fishing, camping,” Ingle said. “I have no doubt he will keep taking advantage of what’s around him in nature and making the most out of life. Because that’s what he’s always done, and he can’t stop now.”
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