STATELINE, Nev. – Denny Waters is entering his next lap around the sun with the accomplishment of skiing over 50,000 vertical feet at Heavenly Ski Resort in just under six hours. He did this on April 3, the day following his 72nd birthday. The vertical feet conquered that day equates to over 1.5 Mount Everests.

“In my race days, my best event was downhill racing,” he said.

Waters achieved the stunt while on a ski trip in the south Tahoe region, which is where his ski career had started in the early seventies on the Heavenly Valley Ski Racing Team, making the junior national team in 1971. Attending South Tahoe High School at the time, he was awarded Outstanding Blue Angel two years in a row on Heavenly’s ski team, an honor that not only highlights ski capabilities, but also inspiration, and leadership. He went on to race for the University of Nevada, Reno’s ski team in the mid-seventies.

It was an impressive feat, considering he had only skied five times before his family moved to South Lake Tahoe in 1968. Five seasons later, he was ranked 20th in the U.S. at downhill ski racing for a short while. Waters got to embrace the nostalgia by renting a place for 25 days off Daggett Pass, just a shuttle away from Boulder Lodge.

On his last day of skiing on this trip, Waters approached the mountain he had once cut his teeth on. “I knew the Stagecoach run was going to be fast and smooth,” he said, “so I had a pair of skis all sharpened up for the harder snow.”

By his third run, he decided to keep going non-stop. He brought his watch, which records both ascent and descent separately to track his progress. After just one hour, he had already hit close to 10,000 vertical feet of descent.

“So I just kept going,” he said, eating his peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the lift and having brought water with him.

There were only a few people in Stagecoach’s lift line each wait and many times, he reports, there were none.

“So, conditions were perfect for it,” he expressed.

At around 2 p.m., Waters started to feel a small ache in his right leg and his skis started to rattle while tucking the flats.

“I thought it a good time to quit, at 50k,” he said, taking one last ride to Boulder Lodge to get back to his vacation rental. His ski day total descent was 51,821 feet at 2:55 p.m. Before his final run to Boulder Lodge, he estimates he skied about 34 laps on Stagecoach between 9 a.m. and 2:35 p.m, totaling 50,003 feet.

During his entire stay visiting the location where his ski roots began, Waters skied over a half a million vertical feet in 20 days, including the total from this final day.

“Don’t give up on your physical condition,” he said. “It’s the best thing to still have, it seems, ha!”