“Those are real mountains,” he thought, as recounted by Exum Mountain Guides historian Kim Geil. “We want to climb those.”

He did, and July 25 will mark 100 years since Petzoldt first climbed the Grand Teton, in cowboy boots. The feat — achieved at great peril — impacted not only Teton mountaineering but American climbing, as it led to him founding Exum Mountain Guides and the National Outdoor Leadership School.

Geil is founder of the Exum History Project and has been working on collecting stories of the guides for eight years. She has interviewed 40 to 50 guides and possesses hours upon hours of oral history recordings and is in the process of putting together a book about the early history of the guide service. Among the most intriguing stories she has is that of Petzoldt’s first climb.

In 1924, Petzoldt arrived with Herron and decided that they were to climb the Grand after one seemingly cursory glance. He wasn’t yet a climber, but the grandiose peaks were irresistible.

“He didn’t really have a lot of experience,” Geil said. “He just had a lot of … I don’t know what you call it.”

Guts? Confidence? Naivete? Probably a bit of all three.

Petzoldt met up with Billy Owen, who already had summited the Grand, and he traced a route to follow. He and Herron did not follow that route, “And that’s how they nearly got themselves killed,” Geil said.

After camping near Delta Lake, they decided to go up the East Ridge because it looked easier. It turned out that the climb was a bit more difficult than anticipated, and the pair decided to take a break for the night, as it was getting dark. And then the storm came.

Lightning, thunder, rain. The storm stopped for a bit, and then it came back, this time with snow. According to Geil, Petzoldt joked that the only reason they didn’t die of hypothermia was because it wasn’t in the dictionary yet. The two teenagers huddled together with no jackets or food — which were both down at their camp — and ultimately survived the night. If that wasn’t enough, they slid down an unknown icy chute in the early morning in an attempt to get back to camp only to realize that there was no way out. “Now they were really sure they were going to die,” said Geil.

To get back up, Petzoldt and Herron painstakingly chipped away handholds and footholds with a pocketknife and made their way up and back down to camp. After sleeping on the idea for one more night, the two decided they couldn’t go back down until they summited the peak, so the morning after, they followed Owen’s route, and on July 25, 1924, they stood atop the 13,770-foot summit.

“It changed Paul’s life,” Geil said. “It set him on the path of becoming a mountain climbing guide, and this has become basically the home of American Alpinism and mountaineering, and really, he was the start of it. And that climb is what led to so much of what we associate with the Tetons today.”

Petzoldt took Owens and Geraldine Lucas — the first Jackson woman to summit the Grand — up the peak later that year. The following summer, a couple of gentlemen approached him to take them up, and after the $100 exchange, it became official: Petzoldt was a mountain guide.

In 1930, the young climber established the Petzoldt School of American Mountaineering — now Exum Mountain Guides, named after his partner, Glenn Exum, who Petzoldt had met that year and shared a cabin with. Petzoldt took Exum up the Grand in 1930, and then once more the next year, which is when Exum first ascended the Exum Ridge. Many people assume that it was Exum who founded the mountain guiding school, but according to Geil, “it was Paul who did it all first and then brought Glenn in.”

The two ran the school together for a long time, changed the name to the Petzoldt-Exum School of American Mountaineering, and then to the Exum-Petzoldt School, and then after a falling out in the ‘50s, it became the Exum School of American Mountaineering.

In 1965, Petzoldt founded one of the most significant wilderness education organizations in the world, National Outdoor Leadership School, or NOLS, which now serves thousands of students each year.

“I think we can thank Paul for really introducing mountain guiding as a profession,” Geil said. “He was the first one to do it. The school that he and then Glenn later built together attracted some of the best mountaineers. Anybody who was anybody who was climbing wanted to come to the Tetons. It became the center of American mountaineering and started this tradition of getting people into the outdoors, into the mountains.”

It’s no secret that there is an impressive youth population here, accomplishing ridiculous athletic feats at a younger age each year, but one must not forget who the original crazy teenager was.

The one that got it all started.