It might confound some Calgarians that their new mayor likes saying he gained much of his leadership ability from a 24-week solo hike .

To best understand, journey in your mind to the Mather Pass, some 3,680 metres above sea level in California’s Sierra Nevada. On a rock cliff with barely enough room for two people, with three people stranded there.

It’s one of the more gruelling stretches of the Pacific Crest Trail, the Mexico-to-Canada trek he embarked on months after losing the 2021 Calgary mayoral race. Jeromy Farkas was confident he and his newfound hiking friends could shortcut through the pass.

A towering wall of ice and snow lay ahead of them, and they straight-shot toward it — as the morning sun began to turn their path to slush.

After one slip too many, he conceded defeat. “The mountains laugh at my ego and arrogance,” he wrote in an online journal .

Farkas was marooned on a cliff face for about 12 hours, along with Heisenberg and Bookie (they all used trail nicknames — he was Pathfinder, a moniker Farkas has carried with him since). Melting ice for drinking water, watching large rocks and ice chunks fall past their narrow perch, and doing loads of reflection — on his life on the trail and as a sure-headed city politician who’d tasted failure in that arena, too.

“The experience shook me. I still feel the embarrassment and shame for bringing things so close to the literal edge,” he’d write in the Calgary Herald .

“That failure — no, my failure — was the best teacher. I resolved that it would never happen again.”

Jeromy Farkas and a hiking companion pause to smile during their May 2022 journey through the Sierra Nevada range as part of the Pacific Crest Trail. (Facebook/Jeromy 'Pathfinder' Farkas)

He’d make it safely through Mather Pass and finish the hike.

Then, last week, he overcame another life-defining failure.

After shedding much of the combative conservative persona he had in four years as a city councillor and then 2021 mayoral candidate, Farkas won the top job on his second pass.

Farkas, 39, did so by carving a narrow electoral path through a canyon of more clearly progressive and conservative rivals.