For the second time in less than a week, the women’s unsupported fastest known time (FKT) on Grand Teton has been broken. On August 19, Jazmine Lowther ran from the Lupine Meadows Trailhead to the summit of the peak and back in 4 hours and 6 minutes. Three days later, on August 22, Jane Maus shaved 21 minutes off that time, setting a new FKT at 3 hours and 45 minutes.
The route is one of the most coveted FKTs among elite mountain athletes, covering 14.5 miles with 7,100 vertical feet of elevation gain. By almost any measure, it’s a massive objective, made even more challenging by the class 5 scrambling necessary to reach the summit. But that kind of terrain is Maus’s specialty.
Still, the 30-year-old La Sportiva athlete told GearJunkie that she’d only attempted the peak five times prior to her August 22 attempt. And she’d never run it faster than 4 hours and 27 minutes, which she said felt very challenging. So when Maus saw that Lowther completed the route in 4 hours and 6 minutes, her conviction was rattled.
“I really lost confidence after that,” she said. “I was stoked for her because that’s an insanely fast time. But it changed my view. I was like, ‘I don’t think this is in the books for me this month.’”
On August 22, when she set out from the Lupine Meadows trailhead at a run, she said she was only about 10% confident she’d break Lowther’s time. But that didn’t mean she was going to give it anything less than 100% effort.
“I just thought, ‘I’m going to try to run the FKT today, whatever happens,’” Maus said. “I really had nothing to lose; I was like, ‘I’ll just run as hard as I can.’”
Grand Teton Women’s Unsupported FKT
Maus is originally from Park City, Utah, but moved to Boulder, Colo., in 2024. In the last year, she’s spent a lot of time running and scrambling among the Flatirons. She said she’s done sport climbing in gyms, but her true specialty is moving quickly over steep, rocky terrain.
“I’m not a traditional rock climber. More like, scrambling that pairs nicely with running. That’s really my bread and butter,” she said. And those skills came in very useful on the Grand.
From the moment she took off on August 22, Maus said everything just went smoothly. She ran all of her paces faster than she’d done before. When she arrived at the Meadows section, her legs were burning, she said, but she pushed through and made it to the lower saddle.
“I had a really nice line from the lower saddle to the upper saddle. So I started to get more confidence there and started feeling like my legs were coming back,” she said. “I got to the summit faster than I had ever gotten to the summit before. So I knew I had some time on my side.”
Still, her FKT depended on a speedy descent, which, she admitted, has never been her strong suit. So she shut off her brain, focused on the goal, and took off back down the mountain. Asked if she was tempted to cut that infamous first switchback on the descent, she laughed.
“Zero percent chance,” she said. “I’ve learned that that is not an option. It never crossed my mind.”
Maus said the last mile was surreal. She knew she had the FKT. In fact, she got back to the trailhead so much faster than she’d expected that she beat her partner there. He was picking her up and had timed it to arrive around the 4-hour mark. Maus finished 15 minutes before he got there.
“It was kind of a bummer, but it was also exciting,” she said. “I ran faster than either of us had predicted my fastest time would have been.”
What’s Next for Maus?
This Grand Teton FKT is just the latest accomplishment for Maus, who earned a place on the U.S. World Mountain Running Team in June, when she finished fourth at the Broken Arrow 46K in Squaw Valley. She said she’s taken some time to soak in the accomplishment and recover from this attempt.
But, she’s already looking toward her next races and objectives.
“Tomorrow [August 30] I’m doing the Grand Targhee Cirque Series race, because those are fun,” she said. “And then objective-wise, I kind of had the WURL [Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Linkup] on my radar for this year … and then I think getting the Longs Peak FKT would be a cool objective over the next year.”
Truly, there’s no rest for the wicked.
If you want to keep up with Maus’s future endeavors, you can follow her on Instagram. You can also keep an eye on future Grand Teton FKTs on fastestknowntime.com.
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