The last time I saw Gaby it was mid-June and she was trying to erect a tent in a gymnasium at the Tennyson Center for Children. She was one of the 10 kids I wrote about who decided to climb Mount Elbert this summer. At 15, she was the oldest of the group and the only one I had ever seen before, a few months earlier, at a gang prevention meeting.

I wasn't sure, at first, if she was a girl or a very pretty boy. She wears her hair cropped close to her scalp. She is petite and favors boys' clothing, the baggier the better. I ask her if she dresses like this because she feels safer presenting herself as a boy, and she gives a little laugh, dimples flashing, and says, nah, it's comfortable.

Of the 10 would-be climbers, the super-organized Belarussian, the cherub with the temper, the teen who believed making the climb would prove good still resided within him, Gaby was the one who told me that kids like her don't climb mountains. Kids like her, apparently, cut school and get drunk at friends' houses and steal cars until they are caught and sent to juvie. Which is what Gaby did from the time she was 12 years old.

It's one of those messy family stories. Mom gets into drugs. Parents divorce. Dad gets remarried. Gaby's grandfather recently took in Gaby and three of her four sisters. "Trying to help out," he tells me, and Gaby says he does.

Gaby hasn't seen her mom for seven years - mom's in jail now - and she tells me she misses and loves her, but "no offense, I don't want to be like my mom. I want to go to college." I think to myself that her mom, if she has any mom left in her, would not be offended.

Like I said, Gaby is now 15 and familiar with several varieties of youth detention, yet she still possesses something which could be described as hunger or light. It's a quality that inspires hope. This is not something I can say of all 15-year-olds I have met who lug around such backgrounds, these kids so sharp and impenetrable they make me think of obsidian, born in heat and hardened by cold.

Too many have come to think they will never amount to anything. It no longer surprises me to learn that the people who brought them into this world were the first to make them believe this, but it still makes me angry and so I found myself nodding when Ian Long, a Tennyson Center counselor, sat Gaby and the other kids down after the tent exercise and said:

"We're taught that we can't do things in life, but it's what you choose to believe that often gets you to where you want to be. You've been told things in your life. Either that you're no good or you're a behavioral problem and you're not going to succeed. That's what you've been taught. Don't listen to the boundaries that have been set up for you. The percentages, the odds, they're not that important. It's not easy, but if you want to do it, you can."

The kids set off for Mount Elbert at the end of July. Of the 10 children who first gathered early this summer, only six made the trip. On the first night, one of them was taken back to Denver, which left Gaby and four others. They set off just before 5 a.m. on July 31, center staffer James Snyder told me.

"Gaby just took off," he said. "She literally pulled me up the mountain."

Up until then, in all the practice hikes, he had never seen Gaby push herself; he had never seen her struggle. This time, she refused to stop. She kept climbing, hitting the first false peak, then the second and the third.

"I've never done anything that hard," she told me Sunday. "Never. I was forcing myself. I really wanted to sit down, but I kept going. I kept telling myself, 'don't give up.' I kept saying, 'I know I can do it.' "

Gaby hit the summit of Mount Elbert, elevation 14,433 feet, Colorado's highest Fourteener, second-highest mountain in the lower 48 states, in three hours and 15 minutes.

She smashed the previous record of the Tennyson Center climbers, established about five years ago, by one hour and 20 minutes. Only one of her fellow climbers chose to push past the tree line and try for the summit. He was three hours behind her.

"She never complained. She just stayed focused on climbing up the mountain," Snyder says. "She's an absolutely amazing girl."

Gaby starts school Wednesday. She's separating herself from her previous life and going to a new school. She'll be a freshman, a pivotal year for a student who has strayed from the path too many times already.

"I want to graduate," she tells me. "And I know I can make it. I made it this far already."

She called her grandpa after she reached the summit of Mount Elbert. She could hardly breathe.

"I made it," she told him.

"What?" he asked.

"I made it," she said. "I'm at the top."

Catch your breath, he told her.

And while she did, he told her to take a good look around her. So, she turned in a slow circle, taking in the trees and the lakes and the mountain tops.

It's not so hard to picture, is it. A girl and the world at her feet.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

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