Fellow Aspen first responders were momentarily shocked by Ferrara’s news. PTSD was supposed to happen to soldiers, a malady incurred on jittery battlefields far from home, not in a Xanadu dedicated to strenuous good fun. But Ferrara had long suspected he had PTSD and wasn’t surprised. “Of course he got PTSD,” says Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy Alex Burchetta. “Mike always did it big. He climbed the biggest mountains. And when he was on duty, he seemed to get the biggest calls. Injury, trauma, death—for 30 years, that pager was on 24/7, and he couldn’t get a reprieve. You’d have to be naive to think that he’d be impervious to it.”

By Hampton Sides, Outside Magazine