69 floors. Full gear. One of ours.
Most kids who wear plastic fire helmets around the house eventually move on to wanting to be astronauts or YouTubers. Owen was not one of those kids.
He grew up in North Portland, went to De La Salle North Catholic — a small school built specifically for underprivileged inner-city kids — and had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life from a distinctly young age.
The problem was everything between the plastic helmet and the real one.
Becoming a Lifeline
High school was rough. At a point where he really needed someone to show up for him, someone did. He decided ritght then that he wanted to make a career out of paying it back.
"If I can make a difference in even one person's life," he says, "the whole thing is worth it."
He'd always been drawn to blue-collar work, but he wanted something where showing up actually mattered to someone other than a timesheet. Emergency medicine checked every box — the science, the urgency, the human stakes of it.
Owen got his EMT certification, got a job over the river in the Beaverton area as a Local 1660 firefighter, and has been going full throttle for 13 months. Paramedic school starts in August. He is not slowing down.
69 Floors on Air
In early March, Owen is headed to Seattle to climb the Columbia Center — 69 floors, 1,356 steps — in full turnout gear while breathing off an SCBA pack.
That's roughly 60-75 pounds of equipment plus a mask feeding you air the entire way up. It's the largest on-air firefighter stair climb in the world, and it raises money for Blood Cancer United (formerly the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society), funding blood cancer research, free patient support, and advocacy for better healthcare policies.
This is Owen's first year. He actually got waitlisted back in September and had to wait months for a spot to open up. I'm noticing a trend about being determined to give back 🤔.
One of the firefighters in his department volunteers with Blood Cancer United and has a personal connection to the organization. That's how Owen heard about it. He didn't need convincing. When you've built your entire career around showing up for people, a fundraiser that asks you to suffer physically so someone else can access treatment isn't a hard sell.
Plus he knows firsthand about strength in numbers — when his teammates got excited about it, he got excited about it. That kind of energy isn't just contagious, it's fuel.
The Gym Connection
Owen has been a West Coast Fitness member since 2021 — longer than he's been a firefighter. The way he ended up here is one of those small-world stories that only makes sense in retrospect.
Back when Owen was at De La Salle, our owner Jay used to donate equipment to the school. Owen trained on that gear as a kid. Years later, during the pandemic, he was looking for a gym and remembered the equipment he was most comfortable with, and followed it home to West Coast Fitness. Years later, he's still here.
We asked him what keeps him coming back, and his answer was so on-brand for this gym it hurt: "It's not just thousands of random people all the time. The familiar faces make it feel comfortable." For someone who spends his shifts responding to the most chaotic moments of strangers' lives, having a place that feels steady and familiar is more valuable than we know.
He started here because of the kindness of someone he didn't even know. He stayed because the gym felt like somewhere he belonged. Now he's hauling 70 pounds of gear up a skyscraper for an organization that keeps people alive — because a fellow firefighter introduced him to a cause worth climbing for, and Owen has never once needed to be asked twice.
Support Owen's Climb
Owen's team goal is $30,000.
Every dollar goes to Blood Cancer United for research, patient support, and healthcare advocacy.
Any amount helps. Sharing the link helps too.
And if you see Owen at the gym, congratulate him on voluntarily choosing to climb 69 flights of stairs in full gear while breathing through a mask — and then maybe give him a thanks for his service. It doesn't take much to be kind, but when someone makes it their life, that's worth something.
We'll stick to the stairmaster,
Your West Coast Fitness Family
P.S.: Are you doing something awesome too? We'd love to hear it. Shoot us an email.
