If you drove past the Hearnes Center this weekend and saw a line of people in full turnout gear filing in on a Saturday morning, that was the 10th annual Memorial Stair Climb — and it’s worth knowing about even if you missed it, because it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to support next year.
Here’s the idea: climbers make their way up 2,200 steps — roughly the height of the World Trade Center’s twin towers — to honor the 422 first responders who died on September 11, 2001. More than 300 people took part this year, a mix of firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and neighbors with no uniform at all who just wanted to be part of it.
The format is what makes it stick with you. Each climber wears a lanyard with the name and photo of one of the 422 — a specific person, not just a number. When they finish the climb, they ring a bell and read that person’s name out loud into a microphone. Multiply that by 300-plus climbers, and for a few hours the Hearnes Center becomes a place where every one of those 422 names gets spoken by someone who just carried their memory up the equivalent of a 110-story building.
It’s a small, physical way of keeping a promise a lot of communities made in the fall of 2001 and have had to work to keep ever since — that the responders who ran up when everyone else was running down wouldn’t become an anniversary headline and nothing else. Ten years running now for this particular climb means it’s become one of mid-Missouri’s steadier traditions, even though most of us only hear about it after the fact.
If you’re the kind of person who reads about something like this and thinks “I’d have signed up for that,” mark it down for next July — climbs like this one are typically open to the public, not just working first responders, and the training investment is mostly just “start walking stairs now instead of in June.” Watch local fire and police department pages and the Hearnes Center’s event calendar as next summer approaches for registration details.
Source: Inside Columbia.