Glenwood Man Climbs Mount Sopris to Save Florida Theatre

Glenwood Springs —The wind off the Roaring Fork Valley hits different when you’re up high. It doesn’t just blow; it scours. On a Thursday morning, with the sun still climbing over the San Juan Mountains, David Optekar laced up his boots and began the ascent of Mount Sopris. The air was thin, crisp, and smelled of pine needles crushed underfoot and the faint, metallic tang of early snow. For a moment, the only sound was his own breathing and the crunch of gravel shifting beneath him.

Optekar is returning to the mountain he once called home not for glory, but for a cause. Nearly five decades after thinking he had conquered the peak, the former Glenwood Springs resident is making a final push to raise $25,930 for the Florida Children’s Theatre. The organization recently lost more than $134,000 in state funding, a blow that threatens the very programs he has come to cherish. The climb is a physical act of support, a way to channel his energy into keeping the lights on for young performers in Florida.

But there is a personal stake here, too. A quiet, lingering embarrassment that has sat in Optekar’s chest for years.

In 1976, fresh from college and heartbroken by a letter from his girlfriend, Optekar moved to Glenwood Springs. A friend with a practical mind offered him a lifeline: learn ten drinks, and he’d get a job at the Red Garter Room in the Hotel Colorado. He stayed for twelve years, eventually opening a real estate business and working on a farm in New Castle. It was during this time, in 1979, that he first climbed Mount Sopris. He did it with ease, alongside his friend’s Chesapeake Bay retriever, Baron. “This isn’t too bad,” he recalled thinking to himself at the time.

He believed that was the top. He believed it for nearly fifty years.

It wasn’t until he moved to Florida and stared at a topographic map that the truth emerged. Mount Sopris has two false summits. Optekar had only made it to the first. He hadn’t actually reached the peak he had spent years looking at from the valley floor. “It was quite embarrassing,” he said, a note of genuine surprise still in his voice even now.

That realization sat dormant until two years ago, when his wife and daughter began nudging him toward the arts. They bought him a voice lesson, then encouraged his instructor to push him into an audition. He landed the role of the minister in Footloose at the Florida Children’s Theater, a self-righteous character who “didn’t want nothing to do with sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.” He loved it. The joy of the role was secondary to what he saw backstage: the profound impact the arts have on young people’s development.

Now, standing on the slopes of Sopris, he is trading his script for a summit. The climb is hard work, the kind that strips away pretense and leaves only effort and intent. He isn’t doing this for a trophy or a headline. He’s doing it because he knows what it means to be supported, and because he wants to ensure that support continues for the next generation of artists.

The mountain doesn’t care about his past mistakes or his current goals. It just stands there, white and indifferent against the blue sky. As Optekar pushes higher, the valley below shrinks into a patchwork of green and brown, the highway a thin gray ribbon winding through the trees. The wind picks up, biting at his exposed cheeks, reminding him that this is a real place, with real weather and real weight. He looks up at the second summit, the one he missed in 1979, and starts walking.