Over the weekend, more than 300 people climbed 2,200 steps at the Hearnes Center in Columbia — roughly the height of the World Trade Center’s twin towers — for the tenth running of the Memorial Stair Climb, a tribute to the 422 first responders who died trying to save others on September 11, 2001.
The climbers weren’t just firefighters and cops and EMTs, though there were plenty of those in the crowd. Community members climbed too, each one wearing a lanyard with a single name and photograph — one of the 422 — carried the whole way up. At the top, every climber rang a ceremonial bell and read their person’s name aloud into a microphone, so that by the end of the day, all 422 names had been spoken, one at a time, by someone who’d just climbed a skyscraper’s worth of stairs to say it.
It’s the kind of ritual that sounds almost too on-the-nose written down — stairs, a bell, a name — and then it isn’t, once you picture 300 people actually doing it, floor after floor, in a building with no view and no reward at the top except the next name to call out.
Ten years running now means this has become one of those quiet fixtures on the Boone County calendar, the sort of thing that doesn’t make headlines outside a short recap but keeps showing up every year anyway, carried by people willing to put in the physical work of remembering rather than just the emotional kind. It’s worth noting alongside the water-rescue training story making the rounds this week (see today’s Rundown) — a reminder that the people who show up when the river floods or the building burns are often the same people spending a Saturday climbing stairs for strangers who never got the chance to grow old.
There’s no ticket or sign-up link to pass along this time — by the nature of the event, this year’s climb has already happened. But if the Memorial Stair Climb is new to you, it’s worth keeping an eye out for next year’s date, and worth a moment now just knowing it happened, again, ten years running, right up the road in Columbia.
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