Ultrarunner and Team USA athlete Michelino Sunseri, 33, sprinted down the Grand Teton, chasing a speed record last September — a feat that unexpectedly landed him in federal court for “cutting a switchback,” and ended with a presidential pardon from Donald J. Trump.
On the morning of Sept. 2, 2024, Sunseri ate a Snickers bar, drank a Red Bull and set off to secure the “fastest known time” record from top to bottom of the Grand Teton.
The Grand, the jewel peak in Grand Teton National Park which juts 13,775 feet into the Western Wyoming air, has an elevation gain of around 7,000 feet.
Sunseri, who had lived in Driggs, Idaho, for about five years at that point, had made the climb 44 times in preparation.
On the way up, the athlete hit every pacing target and was “gaining more and more energy as (he) went on,” he recently told the Deseret News.
The top of the Grand was icy. A storm the week before had dropped six inches of snow on the lower saddle, and ice at the top made the final ascent treacherous.
“It was a bit nerve-wracking, and I lost a little bit of time being careful, so I got to the very, very tippy top about a minute or so behind schedule,” he said.
Then Sunseri went tearing back down the mountain. “I don’t think there’s a world where I could ever run down it that fast ever again,” because there was so much loose rock, he said.
Sunseri descended from the summit to the lower saddle in 14 minutes. He looked at his watch, and saw he was ahead of record pace. At the very last checkpoint, called Boulder Fields, Sunseri had decided to take the Old Climber’s Trail, which had technically been closed by the National Park Service.
The trail is a quarter of a mile long and is marked by two signs. One at the top says, “Shortcutting causes erosion,” and the other at the bottom says, “Closed for regrowth.”
Since six of the seven previous record holders had taken the Old Climber’s Trail without a problem, and since Sunseri had used the trail in the past, he thought everything would be fine. He spent just two minutes on the section.
By the time Sunseri’s shoes hit the bottom of the route, he had beaten the speed record by two minutes and 12 seconds. From peak to base, it had taken him two hours, 50 minutes and 50 seconds.
“It was surreal. I honestly never thought that I could run that time, so I was pretty elated and jazzed when I did,” he said.
Sunseri had put in years going up and down the Grand, figuring out exactly which trails to take. “A lot of the route is just a braided network of trails,” he said. “There are trails that go left, right, straight up and all over, so you have to get a really, really good mental map, and I felt like I executed it perfectly, and I didn’t think I could.”
“Everything came together that day, and I had some good friends there at the finish and up on the mountain, who were all cheering and were super stoked, and it was a really cool experience,” he said.
The National Park Service told Sunseri they were pressing charges
Sunseri reached out to Fastest Known Time, a private website owned by Outside Inc., which tracks speed records on mountain routes all over the globe.
Fastest Known Time told him they weren’t sure they could accept his record, “because a group of locals had reached out and said you cut a switchback.” They also said the National Park Service had asked them not to ratify his score.
Sunseri reached out to the park service directly and told them what he heard. He asked if there was a way to rectify the issue without getting the court system involved. He even volunteered to help officially close the Old Climber’s Trail.
“I got a call back a couple of weeks later, and during that phone call, they essentially told me they were going to press charges,” he told the Deseret News.
The National Park Service had formally charged Sunseri with a “violation of cutting a switchback,” specifically citing 36 CFR 21(b) of the Code of Federal Regulations.
Sunseri said he spoke by phone with the head district ranger (of the Jenny Lake Rangers) with the goal of finding a positive solution, like community service. “He informed me, ‘No, we’re actually going to be citing you, and our plan is to bring you in front of a judge and have the court system punish you.’”
Sunseri expressed frustration about the charges. He reasoned, “If they actually didn’t want people on this trail, I think at some point in the last 20 years, they would have done any type of trail work whatsoever.”
During the trial, another professional trail runner with dozens of FKTs, Kelly Halpin, testified that she had seen a couple of logs laid across the entrance of Old Climber’s Trail at one point, but that it’s not uncommon for climbers and mountaineers to use the route. She said she has been on the trail about five times.
The National Park Service declined a Deseret News request for comment on the lawsuit.
Sunseri gets a lawyer, and the case progresses
In late October 2024, the federal prosecutor told Sunseri the best deal they could offer was a five-year ban from the Tetons, a fine and a federal criminal record with a class B misdemeanor.
Sunseri’s friend Alex Rienzie, who had graduated from Harvard Law School, told him he would step in as his lawyer pro bono. Though he’d never practiced law before, Rienzie started reaching out to different advocacy groups who might think the case was “crazy,” and a lot of them did, including the Pacific Legal Foundation.
The week before the trial, which was scheduled for May 20–21, 2025, Sunseri was offered 1,000 hours of community service, which is 25 weeks of working full time. He didn’t take it.
The two-day trial out of a movie
When Sunseri walked into court for his two-day trial in May, there were over 20 federal employees there, accompanied by six armed guards with assault rifles and body armor.
Someone in the courtroom who had worked as a prosecutor in Chicago for decades told Sunseri, “‘Son, I don’t know who you pissed off, but I have never seen something like this.’”
“You would think I killed somebody,” Sunseri said. “Like, it was insane.”
With how intense the law enforcement presence was in the courtroom, Sunseri told the Deseret News he had to keep himself from laughing during the trial, “because it just felt so stupid.”
“Like we’re literally talking about cutting switchbacks in a federal courtroom,” he said. “The part that I still don’t understand is the trail that I took is not technically cutting a switchback. It’s literally a trail. So the nomenclature and the wording of it all — like it was just absolutely silly, so I just kept having to look away and be like, ‘Is this real?’”
The National Park Service attorneys brought witnesses and special investigators to the case. They even subpoenaed Sunseri’s social media accounts and read through his direct messages.
The prosecution “went through my personal messages and read them out loud to people in the courtroom,” he said.
“The craziest part is they had rangers doing all this. Like why are National Park Service rangers going through people’s Instagram messages? Shouldn’t National Park rangers be attending to the park?”
Sunseri said he believes they subpoenaed his social media accounts to prove that he said he took the Old Climber’s Trail. “Which is like, duh, of course. It’s on my Strava; you don’t need to go through my messages,” he said.
FOIA records show NPS withdrawing support for charges
A day before the trial began, the National Park Service withdrew its support for the athlete’s criminal charges, Sunseri’s legal team found out from an FOIA request.
The NPS wrote to prosecutors on May 19, “We believe that the previously offered punishment, a five-year ban and fine, is an over-criminalization based on the gravity of the offense. Therefore, we withdraw our support.” The decision referenced President Donald Trump’s May 9 executive order, which addressed over-criminalization in federal regulations.
The request also shows a deputy solicitor saying, “It is my understanding that NPS has informed all parties involved that they (the NPS) are no longer in support of this action (Sunseri’s criminal charges).”
However, neither Sunseri nor his legal team were alerted about the NPS’s change in position.
After spending the summer in Salt Lake City, running the Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Linkup, Sunseri received word that the judge had found him guilty of shortcutting a switchback. She announced it on the one-year anniversary of his record run.
The judge set his sentencing for Oct. 1, but Sunseri asked to push it back, since he was competing for Team USA in the World Mountain Running Championships in Spain.
“We always found that ironic,” he said. “Getting prosecuted by the U.S. government, but also racing for Team USA.”
Sunseri said the impending verdict was weighing on him. “What do I do moving forward?” he asked. “How does this affect my ability to be sponsored? My ability to live anywhere? Where am I going to live? Where am I going to move?”
U.S. attorney and President Trump get involved
Darin Smith, who was appointed as U.S. Attorney for the District of Wyoming mid-August, caught wind of Sunseri’s case. “He reached out, offering a deal to just do some community service, and we’d vacate the sentencing,” Sunseri said.
“I thought I’d just get 60 hours of community service, take an educational course, and then get the whole thing wiped off my record,” Sunseri said. His next hearing was set for Nov. 18.
But on Monday morning, Sunseri woke up to missed phone calls from Rienzie.
“I ignored them and sent a text back like, ‘Hey dude, I’ll call you in a second,’ and he’s like, ‘Call me ASAP.’ And he called me a couple more times.”
Rienzie asked if he’d heard from anyone that morning, and Sunseri said he hadn’t. Rienzie told him to sit down and told him to look at an email he just sent him.
“I go and open it, and I’m looking at it, and sure enough, it’s a signed pardon from President Donald J. Trump,” Sunseri said.
“I was like, ‘dude, what is this?’” And Rienzie said, “You have just been pardoned by Donald J. Trump.”
Sunseri laughed as he said, “I was like, ‘You’re totally (expletive) with me right now. Like this is AI, like you created this. This is ChatGPT, like this is not real.’”
“And then we just started busting up laughing because this whole thing has been so comical from the start,” he said.
Where does Michelino Sunseri go from here?
Shortly before getting pardoned by Trump, Sunseri and Rienzie had gone to D.C. to try and raise awareness for what was going on. However, because of the government shutdown, they were only able to meet with some congressional staffers from Wyoming.
Moving forward from the whole saga, Sunseri said he plans on advocating for legislation to prevent the same thing from happening to other people.
Sunseri’s case has already had an effect on legislation. It was referenced in the Mens Rea Reform Act of 2025, which would require prosecutors to prove defendants “knowingly” met each element of their offenses.
The court systems have become “so over-criminalized,” he said. “At no point in time should shortcutting a switchback have a penalty of up to six months in jail or a $5,000 fine.”
Sunseri believes the root of the issue is that unelected federal bureaucrats are writing laws into codes that nobody knows about.
“That’s not how the country is supposed to work,” he said.
“If I didn’t have the support that I had through Alex and the Pacific Legal Foundation, I would have gotten totally railed by the federal government,” he said. “And the problem is that they do this to so many more people than just to me.”
He, Rienzie and another friend named Connor Burkesmith are also working on a self-funded, feature-length documentary about their experience, and they’re hoping to have it air next spring.
Correction: Michelino Sunseri lived in Driggs, Idaho, for five years. A previous version of this article said the runner lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Also, Kelly Halpin testifed she had been on the trail in question five times. A previous version of this story gave a different number.