Cason Crane

Cason Crane (born 1992) is an American mountain climber. In 2013, he became the first openly gay mountaineer to scale the Seven Summits.

Crane is the oldest of five children born to David W. Crane, the president of NRG Energy, and Isabella de la Houssaye, an international lawyer, in Mercer County, New Jersey. He lived in Hong Kong between the ages of one and six before returning to Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

Education

Crane attended Princeton Day School through his eighth grade year, along with the rest of his siblings. In 2011, he graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall, a private boarding school in Connecticut, where he competed in a number of sports. He came out as gay at the age of 14; both his parents and his school were supportive, although he experienced bullying by classmates on occasion. After deferring for two years to travel to Lebanon and Israel and climb the Seven Summits, Crane joined the Princeton University Class of 2017, majoring in international relations.

Crane summited his first mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, as a 15-year-old freshman in high school with his mother. He described it as a "gateway mountain" which piqued his interest in mountaineering. As a junior, following the suicides of Tyler Clementi and one of Crane's friends, he was inspired to raise awareness about suicide among LGBT youth through mountain climbing. This led him to start the Rainbow Summits Project, with the goal of climbing the Seven Summits—the highest mountains of each continent—in order to raise funds and awareness for the Trevor Project.

By the beginning of 2013, a year after starting the Rainbow Summits Project, Crane had successfully climbed five of the Seven Summits: Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Elbrus in Russia, Cerro Aconcagua in Argentina, Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia and Vinson Massif in Antarctica. In May 2013, he reached the summit of Mount Everest in Nepal, guided by New Zealand climber Lydia Bradey, the first woman to summit Everest without using supplemental oxygen. Crane's successful ascent of Mount McKinley in July 2013 at the age of 20 marked his completion of the Seven Summits, making him the first openly gay man to have done so. By the completion of the project, Crane had raised US$135,000 for the Trevor Project.