Team Tess started with two neighbors on one mountain. Twelve years later the Breckenridge contingent of the CNY Xtreme Hike has become one of the most productive grassroots fundraising efforts in the town, and the science it helped pay for reached the family that started it.
The rule of the CNY Xtreme Hike is simple and steep. Raise $2,500, then climb an Adirondack high peak. Sometimes more than one in a day.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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For twelve years a group of neighbors from the Breckenridge area of Onondaga Hill has been doing exactly that. Their running total is close to $250,000.
The whole thing traces back to a diagnosis. Over two decades ago, Mary and Mike Michaels of Onondaga Hill learned that their 14 month old daughter, Tess, had cystic fibrosis. What followed was not a single fundraiser but a permanent operation, and the family named it Team Tess.
Across all its efforts, Team Tess has raised well over $750,000 for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
The arithmetic of a very hard hobby
Run the numbers on the hike alone and the scale of the commitment shows up.
Nearly $250,000 raised over twelve years averages out to roughly $20,800 a year, every year, from one neighborhood group.
At the event’s $2,500 per hiker minimum, a quarter million dollars represents on the order of 100 individual fundraising commitments. Not one big check. Roughly a hundred separate rounds of asking friends, family and coworkers, each one followed by a mountain.
And the hike is only part of the picture. Set the hike’s $250,000 against the $750,000-plus that Team Tess has raised overall and the Xtreme Hike accounts for about a third of everything the effort has brought in.
The rest comes from the kind of events that fill a Central New York calendar. Team members who are not up for a major climb do the Great Strides Walk. They collect Tips for Tess as guest bartenders. They golf in the Tee it Up for Tess tournament.
It started with two people
The first Team Tess hike was Mary Michaels and her neighbor, Ann Marie Donohue.
It did not stay that size. Year after year the group pulled in more Breckenridge neighbors, plus family members and friends, many of whom live in the Town of Onondaga or grew up there.
The town’s own newsletter lists the Breckenridge hikers and their support crew by name: Jeff and Sue Erhard, Deb and John Williams, Ellen Miller, Valerie and Rick Mancabelli, Mary Ellen and Pat Guinto, Ed and Ann Marie Donohue, Dee Tate, and Mary and Mike Michaels.
Between them, over the years, they have scaled 17 high peaks, including Whiteface and Marcy.
They are going again this month. Mary Michaels, Karen Phillips, and Onondaga residents Cindy Hoyne and Ann Marie Donohue are set to climb another high peak, which had not been announced when the town published its newsletter.
The part where the money did something
Fundraising stories usually end at the total. This one has a second half, and it is the reason the family keeps going.
Money raised by Team Tess, combined with what Cystic Fibrosis Foundation donors nationwide have contributed, helped fund advances toward a cure. One of them is a drug called Trikafta.
Here is the part CNY Signal can verify independently of the town newsletter. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Trikafta, a combination of elexacaftor, tezacaftor and ivacaftor, on October 21, 2019. It was cleared for people with cystic fibrosis ages 12 and older who have at least one F508del mutation, the most common mutation in the disease. The approval rested on two clinical trials involving 510 patients between the ages of 12 and 64.
Tess Michaels started taking it about six years ago, which lines up with that approval window. Her family says it has completely changed her quality of life.
That is an unusually direct line. Neighbors climb mountains, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation pools that money with money from donors across the country, the research pipeline produces a therapy, and the therapy reaches the household whose daughter’s diagnosis started the climbing.
Why the grassroots model matters here
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation has long used a venture philanthropy model, funding drug development directly rather than only supporting patient services. That is why community fundraising for CF has a visible connection to therapies that actually reach market, and why a family in Onondaga Hill can point at a specific medication.
It also explains the persistence. Mary and Mike Michaels have said that they, along with Tess and their younger daughter Taylor, will keep raising awareness and money at the grassroots level until every single person with cystic fibrosis is cured.
The word grassroots is doing real work in that sentence. This is not a corporate campaign. It is a set of neighbors on one Onondaga Hill street who agreed, repeatedly, for more than a decade, to raise $2,500 and go climb something difficult.
Both Michaels are quick to credit the reason they can keep doing it: the network of neighbors, friends and family behind them at every step.
How to support it
The 2026 CNY Xtreme Hike has a public fundraising page through the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. CNY Signal confirmed the page is live at fundraise.cff.org/CentralNYXtremehike2026. The town newsletter also prints a QR code to the same event.
If you want to give to a specific local hiker rather than the event generally, the event page lists individual participants.
For anyone in the Town of Onondaga considering joining rather than donating, the entry requirement is public and unchanged: raise $2,500, then climb.
What a high peak actually asks of you
The phrase Adirondack high peak carries a specific meaning in New York, and it is worth unpacking for anyone reading this from a desk in Syracuse.
The high peaks are the mountains of the Adirondack Park traditionally counted as the tallest in the state, the set that hikers work through over years to earn Forty-Sixer status. Mount Marcy, one of the two the town newsletter names, is the highest point in New York. Whiteface, the other, is among the most recognizable, and the only high peak with a road to near its summit, which is not the route a fundraising hiker takes.
Climbing one is a full day. Climbing one that straddles a second or third, which the newsletter says these hikers sometimes do, is a longer day still, on trails that are rock, root and water for hours at a stretch.
Seventeen of them, spread across twelve years, by a group whose average member is a neighbor rather than an athlete, is the part of this story that does not show up in the dollar figure.
What cystic fibrosis is, briefly
Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease. It is caused by mutations in a single gene, and the most common of those mutations is the one named in the Trikafta approval, F508del.
The practical effect is thick, sticky mucus that builds up in the lungs and the digestive system, which drives infection, inflammation and progressive lung damage. For most of the history of the disease, treatment meant managing those consequences: clearing airways, fighting infections, supporting nutrition.
What changed with the modulator therapies, the class Trikafta belongs to, is that they act on the malfunctioning protein the gene produces rather than only on the symptoms it causes. That is the distinction between treating the damage and treating the mechanism, and it is why the approval was covered as a turning point rather than an incremental one.
It is also why a family that started fundraising over two decades ago can point to a specific outcome. The research window they were donating into was the window in which that class of drug was being developed.
The town noticed
One small thing is worth saying about where this story came from.
The Town of Onondaga runs a section in its newsletter called The People in Your Neighborhood, and it used that space to profile a family and a group of hikers rather than a project or an official.
Municipal newsletters usually go to brush pickup schedules and budget notes. Both of those are in the same issue. So is a full page on neighbors who have spent twelve years climbing mountains for a disease most of their readers will never encounter.
That is a choice about what a town thinks is worth its residents’ attention, and in this case it produced a public record of names, totals and history that would otherwise have lived only in a fundraising page.
One note on how we reported this
This story is built on the Town of Onondaga’s own Spring and Summer 2026 newsletter, which ran a profile of the Michaels family and the Breckenridge hikers in its People in Your Neighborhood section, and which the town publishes publicly on its website.
CNY Signal added the arithmetic, verified the fundraising page is live, and independently confirmed the Trikafta approval date, its approved population and the size of the trials behind it through the FDA and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation rather than relying on the newsletter’s description.
The Michaels family publicizes Tess’s diagnosis themselves as part of an active public fundraising campaign, which is why it appears here. The details about her health in this story come from what her family has chosen to make public.
The names of the hikers appear as the town printed them.
