A Tacoma personal trainer has just done something fewer than 20 women have ever accomplished: she climbed all 100 of Washington's highest peaks. Kelly Selzler capped off her yearslong quest atop the notoriously dangerous Mox Peaks in the Chilliwacks this past July, finishing what's known among Pacific Northwest climbers as the Bulger List.
Selzler is now the 108th person overall, and just the 17th woman, to complete the full roster, according to The News Tribune. The list itself has no official governing body, but Milda Toutvydas is the person climbers turn to for verifying completions. Selzler works full-time as a personal trainer and is raising two children, a balancing act that makes her multi-year pursuit stand in sharp contrast to the handful of elite athletes who have blitzed the list in a matter of weeks.
A List With No Trails and No Official Blessing
The Bulger List was never an official list at all. It was put together in the 1970s by an informal group of Washington climbers who called themselves the Bulgers, a name pulled from a line in the 19th-century Australian poem “Bastard of the Bush,” according to the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. Washington climber Russ Kroeker, nicknamed “Koala,” became the first person to finish the whole thing when he summited Sinister Peak on October 4, 1980, per Country Highpoints.
Of the 100 summits, only three, Mount St. Helens, Windy Peak, and Remmel Mountain, have official maintained trails to their tops. The other 97 peaks demand long approaches, bushwhacking, crevassed glacier travel, and steep rock pitches, the kind of serious mountaineering skill that keeps the list an obscure, insider benchmark rather than a mainstream bucket-list item.
Selzler's Path Started With Mount Si
Selzler first heard about the Bulger List in 2020, but her connection to Washington's mountains stretches back much further, to a trip she took to the state with her father at age 17. Her hiking journey began on Mount Si before ballooning into full-blown peak bagging, a pursuit she credits Brenda Gordon with introducing her to, and from whom she also learned how to use crampons, per The News Tribune's report.
When Selzler picked the list back up in earnest, she had already knocked out about 10 of the 100 peaks, she told the paper. Her children were 14 and 6 at the time she started the full pursuit, and her husband has supported her mountaineering throughout, even joining her on a few of the Bulger summits himself.
Mount Rainier and a Near-Miss With an Avalanche
Among her favorite climbs, Selzler ranks Mount Rainier first. In 2022, she climbed the mountain via the Kautz Glacier route in a 23-hour push and descended via Disappointment Cleaver. She ranks Forbidden Peak second, a climb she and her partners completed without ropes using the East Ledges route, and Dome and Sinister Peaks third.
That Dome and Sinister trip wasn't easy. Selzler had a failed attempt on the pair of peaks in May 2025 after nearly running into an enormous avalanche. She returned to finish them over the Fourth of July weekend this year. Another grueling stretch came on Snowfield Peak, which sits at 8,351 feet in the North Cascades. Selzler first climbed it in 2022, but on a later push she and her climbing partner completed the peak in 27 hours and went without food for the final six hours of the journey.
Saving the Scariest Peak for Last
For her 100th and final peak, Selzler chose the Mox Peaks, a fitting, dramatic finish given the mountain's reputation. Southeast Mox Peak, also called Southeast Twin Spire or “Hard Mox,” is considered the hardest peak on the entire Bulger List, per Peakbagger.com, thanks to loose, crumbling rock and heavy exposure on its 500-foot summit tower. Selzler completed the Mox Peaks in July, closing out her Bulger List journey in North Cascades National Park's remote Chilliwack region.
The scale of that backcountry is hard to overstate. The North Cascades National Park Service Complex holds more than 300 glaciers, the largest concentration in the contiguous United States, and over 93 percent of the park is protected as designated wilderness, according to the National Park Service.
Modern Surveys Complicate an Old List
Even as Selzler and other climbers chase the historic roster, the ground beneath the Bulger List has technically shifted. Selzler noted that LiDAR surveys have changed the ranking of Washington's highest peaks, a nod to work done since 2022 by climber and engineer Eric Gilbertson, whose high-precision GNSS and LiDAR measurements have identified elevation and prominence updates that alter the true geographic list of the state's 100 highest summits. The historical Bulger List remains frozen for legacy recognition regardless, meaning it stays the standard that climbers like Selzler and the organizations that celebrate them continue to use.
That celebration comes this November, when The Mountaineers will host a party for Selzler in Seattle, and she is set to give a presentation sometime this year. Founded in Seattle in 1906, The Mountaineers is an outdoor recreation, education, and conservation nonprofit with more than 12,000 active members across Western Washington, according to the Outdoor Alliance.
Selzler, who was born in Ohio, said finishing the list felt empowering. She said she hopes the achievement teaches her own children something about doing difficult things. For context on just how varied the approach to this challenge can be, Oregon physical education teacher Jason Hardrath set the fastest known time for the Bulger List in August 2021, climbing all 100 peaks in 50 days, 23 hours, and 43 minutes, a blistering pace that stands in stark contrast to the years Selzler spent working the list around a full-time job and raising a family, according to Outside.
