Over the past year, Michelino Sunseri, a professional trail runner, has had a recurring joke with the patrons at his other job as a bartender in the mountains of Wyoming.
“Oh, dude,” he recalls the locals saying, “You’re probably just going to get pardoned by Donald.”
Sunseri couldn’t help but laugh this week as he recounted his place at the center of a tale that has reverberated throughout his community of mountain obsessives, a vocal set of libertarian legal enthusiasts, and, in the end, the White House. The absurdist gag had come true: On Tuesday, President Trump pardoned Sunseri for his crime of using a restricted path for two minutes in the course of breaking a record for the fastest known time running up and down the tallest peak in the Teton Range.
The saga began in September 2024, when Sunseri made his way down the 13,775-foot mountain and clocked in at two hours, 50 minutes, and 50 seconds—breaking a 2012 record by a little over two minutes. Sunseri said that the path that constituted the scene of the crime has been around since the 1930s, and, while somewhat obscure and technically prohibited in the 1980s, was traversed fairly commonly; running along the well-trodden trail didn’t involve any destruction of fauna, foliage or natural resources. “I’m not taking footsteps that aren’t ones that have already been taken before me,” he says, including by all of the previous record holders besides the most recent one.
Sunseri had been training for the feat for four years, and when he pulled it off, the social media celebration, including from his sponsor, North Face, was immediate. But he quickly heard that Grand Teton National Park authorities had caught wind of his infraction and reached out to the park over Instagram to try to make amends via community service or trail work. Once he spoke to a ranger, though, he learned that federal misdemeanor charges were already in the offing, and he hired a lawyer.
The following year, Sunseri stood trial for two days. A friend of his counted around 20 federal employees in attendance, including six with body armor and assault rifles. A local attorney in attendance, who had previously represented accused murderers and rapists, told him it was “the biggest show of force I think I’ve ever seen in a federal courtroom.” According to Sunseri, laughing again as he remembered the day, the government’s first witness was another local runner who had also used the trail and hadn’t known it was illegal. After the bench trial concluded in May, the judge deliberated for three months before finding Sunseri guilty of violating a National Park Service regulation. (Prior to his pardon, Sunseri was still awaiting sentencing.)
