He was 18 in 1978, flush with the certainty of youth and freed from the tethers of high school. He and three buddies thought: Yosemite road trip! Gonna climb Half Dome. Maybe the Clouds Rest peak, too. Gonna do it without much training. No problem, dude.

Tell that to the bears.

"They took our food," Daryn Dodge recalls. "We had to steal it back to finish the trip. We lit a stick with some gas from our stove and waved it around. The bears backed off. We grabbed what food was left. They ended up haunting us all night. They did mock charges at us. We'd take turns staying up all night, beating pots and pans to scare them off. I was scared of bears for years after that."

Dodge is 49 now, entrenched in family life and a career as a toxicologist for the state Environmental Protection Agency.

Yet, on and off for 30 years, Dodge has thought: Sierra road trip! Gonna climb all 248 peaks on the Sierra mountain range list. Gonna be smart and systematic about it.

No problem. And no bear encounters.

On July 25, when he and a climbing party reached the summit of Cirque Peak near Mount Whitney, Dodge became only the 67th Sierra Club member (since records began in 1964) to conquer all 248 summits.

It was the culmination of what Dodge, a Davis resident, calls a lifelong dream.

Not that it started out that way. No way he could've envisioned back during that '78 trip what lay ahead - the skill, endurance and persistence necessary to join such elite company in the Sierra firmament.

Not all the peaks were difficult; some amounted to little more than a stroll for such a capable mountaineer.

But others carried such ominous (and well-earned) names as Devil's Crag, Disappointment Peak, Bloody Mountain and Cloudripper. Equally as daunting, perhaps, is the sheer time involved in the pursuit, driving up and down the spine of the state just to scale some granite.

He has, after all, a life. His wife, Nancy, and son, Marcus, 13, would wave when he'd leave for weekend sojourns or weeklong treks, but also shake their heads in baffled wonderment at his quest.

Why did he do it?

It's the hoary old climber's quip: Because it's there. "It's a great way to see the Sierra," Dodge says. "Lots of great views. And you get to see bears once in a while - and that's always fun."

Reward is mostly personal

He certainly didn't do it for the hardware. Each member of the Sierra Peak Section finishers receives a pin the size of a quarter. "And you've got to buy it for 15 bucks," Dodge says, laughing. "Well, it is a nonprofit club."

Dodge's climbing friend, Steve Eckert, says it takes a certain fetishistic obsessiveness to do it. Eckert should know; he became the 53rd peak scaler in 1999. And it is an exclusive club, he says.

"One thing I love to tease people with is that more people have climbed (Mount) Everest than have finished this (Sierra) list," says Eckert, who lives in the Bay Area. "The point of the list is not to be a risk-taking (mountaineer). It's to get people to move geographically and see the whole Sierra and appreciate it.

"That, and it's a great endurance test."

Eckert says he saw those traits in Dodge - patience, persistence, aerobic performance - when the two first started climbing together several years ago.

"He's totally devoted," Nancy Dodge says. "He's a passionate guy. It's hard sometimes when he's gone on another trip. But you have to understand: It's really important to him."

It's not as if she wasn't aware of her husband's tendencies.

See, before Dodge fully flung himself into peak climbing, he put in just as much effort into endurance cycling. He regularly finished near the top in doublecentury (200 miles) races throughout Northern California and, from 1987 to 1999, completed four Paris-Brest- Paris brevets (covering 745 miles between the two French cities within a 90-hour limit).

By 2004, overuse injuries to tendons in his knees and ankles rendered Dodge too gimpy to compete over such long distances on the bike (though he still routinely rides to work over the Yolo Causeway).

Call The Bee's Sam McManis, (916) 321-1145.