7 DECEMBER 4-10, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Dante Liberato is 75 miles into his fi rst 100- mile footrace when he starts hoping for a moose attack. His knees are screaming, his stomach is turning mutinous, but the idea of drop- ping out feels worse than death. He doesn’t want to be a DNF (Did Not Finish) on the results page for the Silverheels 100 Trail Run through a stretch of the Front Range. He wants an act of God. Instead, he gets a little brown bottle. At an aid station, one of his mentors holds up a tincture. “This will help your knee. This will help your stomach,” he tells Liberato. It’s LSD. Liberato hesitates, then opens his mouth. The mentor squeezes. Back on the trail, climbing toward the high point of the race, headlamp cutting through the dark, thin air, Liberato watches the other runners falling apart — zombies stumbling, shells of the people he saw at the start. He feels the opposite: Every step seems easier, better than the last. His mind gets lighter. Conversa- tion with his pacers fl ows. He laughs. By the fi nal three miles, he doesn’t want the race to end. He thinks about blowing past the fi nish line and running straight to the hotel. Instead, another idea begins to take hold: running from Manitou Springs all the way to Moab, using psychedelics the whole way to see how far this strange new edge can take him. Liberato doesn’t know it yet, but that late- night dose in 2024 will end up changing everything: his sport, his work and the kind of community he’s trying to build in Colorado. From Air Bases to Cage Fights Long before the desert ultramarathons and LSD experiments, Liberato was a military kid who didn’t want to be tough. His father fl ew F-16s. The family bounced from base to base every couple of years, classic military-brat style. When the next deployment came, Colorado Springs became home by accident, and then by default. Lib- erato was eight when they moved there in the mid-2000s and became anchored for the fi rst time. But he was clear on one thing: He was a mama’s boy. His dad viewed this as a problem, and the solution was taekwondo. “As soon as we got here, he put me in martial arts,” Liberato recalls. He hated that, too, but he stuck it out long enough to earn a black belt. Then he saw his fi rst UFC fi ght. The goofy taekwondo uniform could go. At the age of ten, he started asking his dad how to become a UFC fi ghter. There wasn’t much of a mixed martial arts scene in Colorado Springs at the time, so he stitched his own together: wrestling, kickbox- ing, Muay Thai, boxing, jiu-jitsu. Liberato ping- ponged between gyms because there was no one-stop fi ght shop, but the results still came. He made Colorado’s state wrestling team. His parents had kept him out of heavy striking until his early teens to “save his brain,” but by the time they relented, Lib- erato was already all-in. Two days after his eighteenth birthday, he signed his fi rst amateur cage-fi ght contract. That was sup- posed to be the beginning. But as Liberato walked toward the cage under bright lights, his heart was some- where else. Therapy, MDMA and Letting Go of the Dream While his dad was deployed, Liberato’s mom loved to take him hiking. As a kid, he didn’t get the point of just walking a trail for hours. But as a young adult, he realized that time with her in the mountains was the only thing that consistently felt right. Between fi ghts, he’d disappear into the backcountry, trying to balance the violence of combat sports with long days under open sky. Then a missing hiker pushed him over the edge. A young man named Micah Tice disap- peared on Longs Peak in November 2018. Liberato had seen his mother’s posts on- line, begging anyone continued on page 8 MONIKA SWIDERSKI
