BISBEE — The Save Our Stairs board of directors couldn’t be happier with the success of the 17th annual Bisbee 1000 stair climb held Oct. 20.

More than 1,300 people participated in the event, so Save Our Stairs ended up clearing around $30,000 after expenses of $32,000 were subtracted.

Around 5 percent of the money will go to the city of Bisbee for the maintenance and repair of the 1,000 steps that make the course, said Cynthia Conroy, Save Our Stairs director and originator of the sporting event.

The remainder of the money will go to existing programs in the area to help fight childhood obesity, which has been noted as a problem nationwide and in Arizona.

Obesity leads to other diseases later in life, such as diabetes and heart disease, Conroy said.

The problem is reaching epidemic proportions in the Unites States. So educating parents and children on nutrition and ending the sedentary lifestyle caused by television, the Internet and computer games are two informational goals the organization hopes to meet in time.

Right now, the board is considering just which programs to support. Southeastern Arizona Behavioral Health Services and the schools on Fort Huachuca have programs aimed at childhood obesity that the group is now looking at to help fund.

“We are also looking at different agencies and school programs that fit into our goal of nutritional education and fighting childhood obesity,” she said.

Conroy also sees the possibility of working in connection with the Cochise County Health Department and Cochise College to establish a local program.

To do what they can right now, Conroy developed the apple for a junk snack campaign.

“You can eat apples any time of the day and get a nutritional boost and it fills you up. You actually use more energy in eating and digesting an apple than it gives you. So, the old adage ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ may be truer than we think. If kids ate apples instead of junk food, they would lose weight,” she said.

Based on that, a nutritional campaign “Eat An Apple First” to bring attention to the fat-fighting chemistry of apples has been devised by Save Our Stairs.

“The Bisbee 1000 has always been a two-prong event,” Conroy said. “It’s a fitness event first and repair-the-stairs part is secondary.”

When Conroy first conceived the event with all the stairs in Old Bisbee, it became evident that some repairs were going to have to be made in order to have a safe course traversing the 1,000 steps. But fixing the stairs that were in disrepair for years would take an astronomical sum of money. So, Save Our Stairs was formed and entered into a partnership with the city to maintain and preserve the course steps. The group generally alerts the city to which stairs and hand rails need work prior to the event so repairs can be made before race day.

“There are three miles of stairs in Old Bisbee and so we never intended to repair an individual’s stairs,” she said. “There’s just too much work to do and too little money.”

In the past week, Conroy has come up with some interesting statistics. Of those participating in the event, 42 percent were from Cochise County. Only 5 percent live in Bisbee, and 45 percent come from Pima County and the city of Phoenix. An additional 5 percent came from small towns in Arizona and 8 percent were from out-of-state.

“In Tucson, it’s been established that for every 1,000 people you have participating in an event, the business community and the city make around $1 million. We had 1,300 on the course and another 700 in the hills watching and doing other things in Bisbee, so we figure Bisbee gained around $600,000 during the weekend,” she said.

All the lodging facilities in Bisbee were filled to capacity and over-nighters were referred to Tombstone and Sierra Vista, Conroy said.

Conroy was grateful for the numerous volunteers that helped make the event such a success.

“We have the most wonderful volunteers. We had volunteers from Fort Huachuca, the Border Patrol, the Arizona Rangers and local people,” she added.

Next year, and every year in the near future, Conroy hopes to build the event and double the participants.

“We want 3,000 people next year; 6,000 in 2009. Eventually we may have to put a cap on the number of participants,” Conroy said. “People do this event because it’s fun. Almost all of the people who ran the stairs said they had the time of their life and plan on coming back next year.”