PHOENIX — A Valley man set out to hike Piestewa Peak 30 times in honor of a friend facing a much bigger challenge.
Reaching the summit of Piestewa Peak isn’t necessarily easy. City signs at the trailhead warn the hike is extremely challenging. Depending on where you start your hike, the top is typically two miles away with a 2,600-foot elevation change.
GJ Castillo asked himself, “What kinds of physical challenge can I do that would be scary?”
He decided to hike Piestwa Peak 30 times in a row.
He started at 7:30 in the morning on March 2 and finished at 9:30 at night on March 4.
Just once during those three days, his exhaustion reached a point that he took a two-hour nap in a friend’s car in a parking lot. His supporters started to notice the fatigue in his body language.
"You know, everything hurts," he said in a short video he posted during his 19th trip to the top.
His friend, Mico Vasquez, was Castillo's motivation for those three days.
“I was afraid for him because this mountain is tough,” said Vasquez.
Vasquez is a husband and father of two boys. He and Castillo are coworkers. The two used to play basketball in grade school and knew of each other as acquaintances.
These days, Vasquez sometimes has to repeat himself when talking with others as he’s been battling tongue cancer over the past couple of years. He pulled up the sleeve on his left hand to show the skin graft used to repair what cancer took from his mouth.
“Every time he came down from the mountain, I was here,” said Vasquez.
Castillo says hiking Piestewa 30 times is a walk in the park compared to what Vasquez is battling physically, financially, and emotionally.
“I wanted to pick Piestwa Peak, I wanted to pick 30 because just like cancer can be intimidating, just like a lot of other challenges that people go through can be intimidating as well,” said Castillo.
In the more than 70 miles he hiked across three days, Castillo shared videos each time he reached the trail's peak. Any person he passed, he told about the man at the base of the mountain motivating him to keep going. Castillo says he was able to raise just under $20,000 to help with Vasquez's mounting medical bills.
Both Castillo and Vasquez know doing something hard or scary - is worth doing.
“If I can help one person to keep fighting, that’s a blessing,” said Vasquez.