The Fourteeners

Bill Mateja began with the “Beast of the Front Range,” a peak so pitiless, more than 70 have died trying to climb it. 

“Maybe because I didn’t know any better,” says the Sheppard Mullin partner. 

Since then, he’s added 50 more of Colorado’s 58 fourteeners—peaks cresting above 14,000 feet in elevation.

Not odd, perhaps, for an attorney in Dallas, a place as flat as a frying pan, to seek out such adventures. What’s odd is that he’s afraid of heights.  

 “I can’t go up to the top of a fourteener and get right up to the edge and stand there and look out, because that just freaks me out,” he says. “The secret to doing this is just not to look down.”

Mateja, an Oklahoma City native, got his first taste of mountains as a Boy Scout, on trips to the Philmont Scout Ranch in the Sangre de Cristos of northern New Mexico. It wasn’t until 1988, at a NITA advanced trial advocacy seminar in Boulder, that he tackled the “Beast,” aka Longs Peak in the Colorado Rockies. 

Summiting Longs (elev. 14,259 feet) involves a 10- to 15-hour round trip over loose rock, narrow ledges, sheer faces and cliffs. It’s slippery and icy—even in August. 

For Mateja, the worst came after. He drank some contaminated water on the mountain and wound up in the hospital.

He got back to the law and quit climbing the fourteeners—but a decade or so later, the law led him back to them. By then, he was an assistant U.S. attorney in Lubbock, keeping his hiking and climbing skills honed on trips to New Mexico. Then, sometime in the late ’90s, a work trip took him to Wyoming. 

He stopped on the drive up and climbed five fourteeners. Then on the way back, he did two more. 

“After I had done those seven peaks on that trip, I really got hooked on it,” he says.

There have been a few scary moments, including the time a rock the size of his head came hurtling down as he squeezed through a narrow gap known as the Hourglass on Little Bear Peak. But the scariest moment, he says, was the time he was climbing alone and had to make a 20-foot untethered jump on a traverse between Blanca Peak and Ellingwood Point. 

“If you veered off, then you might’ve gone down the side,” he says. “It was pretty harrowing.”

Generally, though, it’s good fun, with good friends—several of whom have banded together into his Will Climb for Beer group. 

And, he says, there’s a connection between climbing and the courtroom.

“There is an intensity and there is a focus. So when you’re climbing the really hard fourteeners, you’re thinking a couple moves ahead, because you’re thinking, ‘If I put my hand right here, where’s my foot going to go and where’s my hand?’ But you’re also trying to look way up ahead, too,” he says. “It’s the same way with trial work. Good trial lawyers are thinking a couple moves ahead.”