Chris Smith: Santa Rosa teen cycles equivalent of Mount Everest

At midnight Friday night, a rallying crowd watched Ryan Yust, 16, pedal his bike 2.1 miles up east Santa Rosa’s steep Los Alamos Road.

The Montgomery High junior then rode back down to where he’d started, turned again and muscled his way back up. He continued, up and back, up and back, for 24½ hours.

“I started almost falling asleep on my bike,” recalls the Santa Rosa native. Eventually his body screamed and he was exhausted and seeing things that weren’t really there, and he knew he should accept the food offered by friends, relatives and fellow Boy Scouts and cyclists, but he was nauseated and afraid it wouldn’t stay down.

Ryan was in danger of giving in to it all when cyclists who were pulling for him pedaled alongside and goaded and cheered him on.

Sunday had barely begun as Ryan pushed himself up the ascent for the 43rd and final time. He achieved a cumulative elevation gain of 29,028 feet and became the youngest person on record to cycle up and down a hill or mountain for the equivalent of the height of Mount Everest in a single ride.

The completed challenge, called Everesting, has Ryan feeling that he can probably do whatever he sets his mind to.

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TV’S ANDY SAMBERG and congressional powerhouse Nancy Pelosi partied with maybe 300 other notables Saturday night at Guerneville’s ever-evolving River Theater.

The occasion was a wedding that happened earlier in the day down the road at the Bohemian Grove. Theater owner Jerry Knight honored a vow not to divulge the newlyweds’ identity, but a 12-year-old with two minutes and Google access could determine the couple were Rolling Stone contributing editor Josh Eells and New York City photographer Annabel Mehran.

Jerry Knight said the talent, the dancing and merrymaking made for “one of the best times we’ve ever had in the theater.”

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SECOND HOME: Anyone who’s lost track of a child for even a moment knows a Santa Rosa dad isn’t exaggerating when he says it was “absolutely excruciating and terrifying” not to know where his 13-year-old stepson was.

The boy, who lives with autism, had walked away from his family’s home. His frantic stepdad phoned the new Children’s Museum of Sonoma County, someplace the teen likes to go. Staffer Kelsey Martens promised to watch for him.

About a half-hour later, the dad’s phone rang. It was Martens. The boy had come into the museum, and right then he was being engaged and entertained in the art studio.

A jubilant reunion followed minutes later.

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SOMEONE OUT THERE saw an ambulance crew help Louis Castro out of his car in a downtown parking lot and whisk him away.

Castro was feeling so woozy as he pulled into a space off Third Street that he feared he was having a heart attack. Doctors at Kaiser later found it wasn’t anything nearly so ominous.

As Castro’s sister, Edith, went to pick up his long-parked car, she expected that it would have been wallpapered with parking tickets, maybe even towed.

She and her recovering brother wish they could hug the person who’d taped onto the windshield a pink-lettered sign pleading, “Please do not ticket this car. Gentleman was taken by ambulance. Thank you.”

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.