From traumatic brain injury, Colorado woman grew into 14er master

COLORADO SPRINGS – Stephanie DiCenso had skull fractures, a broken jaw and eye socket, nerve damage, internal bleeding and brain swelling.

The neurosurgeon told her parents, "If she doesn't die, she'll be a vegetable."

But Rose DiCenso only recalls her daughter crying about it all on one occasion. It was when the nurses would give Stephanie something to read and then ask her questions.

"Simple questions," her mother says, "and she couldn't answer. That just broke her heart."

Short-term memory loss was another harsh result of what happened that May day in 2001.

DiCenso was 19, leading a horseback tour through the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. It's not known why Boots, the buckskin mare, suddenly reared up. But when she did, she sent Stephanie crashing to the ground. The horse tumbled, too — landing on the rider.

DiCenso doesn't remember what happened. She just remembers one thought piercing the confusion in her mind: "I'm gonna get outta here."

Colorado's highest mountains, the relentlessly steep slopes that crush lesser souls, became her happy place. They remain so, as do horses.

"There's a lot of people that take a hard fall, and some of them don't come back," says Travis Templeton, a friend and fellow equestrian. "But some of them hop back on and keep going because they have that drive. She's one of those that keeps on going."

DiCenso shrugs. "Maybe it's just better that I don't remember anything versus having that memory."

A hiking partner, Amber Hansen, has heard DiCenso mention lasting side effects on their grueling way up 14,000-foot peaks. DiCenso wouldn't linger on the accident. But it made Hansen think about what the summits meant to her companion.

"It's almost like, with every adventure, you have another story to tell," she says. "It almost becomes the ability to write the next chapter of your story."

This marked the beginning of a mission — she's now scaled 38 unique fourteeners with a total 63 summits — and a new identity.

She started a blog called Colorado14erGirl, filling it with stories and pictures.

She's written of such tribulations as the stomachache that kept her up all night at camp near Mount Lindsey. Still, she managed to finish what would be her most technical fourteener to date.

In the days after climbing Shavano and Tabeguache, she wrote of climbing up a haystack, falling and twisting her ankle. "Nearly a month passed before I could fit into my cowboy boots again," she posted, along with a picture of the puffy, purple foot.

"Onward and upward," she continued, recounting the painful ascent of Castle Peak. "No matter what hurts you, just work through it. Your attitude will determine your altitude."

She didn't stay there long, though.

She's got more mountains to climb. Her mom understands.

"For her, I think it's just a way to be strong and be in control," she says.

And ahead are more adventures, stories and pictures.