Appalachia, Summer/Fall 2007
Gene Daniell reflects on keeping lists, peakbagging, and bushwhacking.
Of the many hikers involved in the Appalachian Mountain Club Four Thousand Footer Club since its formation in 1957, one who stands out for his intensity and love of the mountains is Eugene Daniell. Here, the former Appalachia Accidents editor and longtime editor of the White Mountain Guide tells of important events that led to his serving on the Four Thousand Footer Committee for two decades: his project, begun in graduate school, to visit every New Hampshire township; his prison term for being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War; the Christmas gift of a trail guide from a former brother-in-law; and his self-described addiction to the mountains that soon followed. Gene Daniell will retire from his post of co-editor of the White Mountain Guide this year, after 25 years. In January, he told his story to Christine Woodside, the Appalachia editor, and Mohamed Ellozy, the current Accidents editor and a Four Thousand Footer Committee member. The three met at Ellozy’s apartment in Brookline.
CHRISTINE WOODSIDE: Mohamed was telling me that the first list of this sort was made in the late 1800s in Scotland, and then the Europeans listed the 4,000-meter peaks in the Alps, and then the first U.S. list was in the Adirondacks.
GENE DANIELL: I’m not sure, however, that the other lists he mentions had all that much influence on the Adirondack one, which is our true ancestor.
CW: I guess where I want you to start, then, is the difference between the approaches that the White Mountain four thousand footer list and the Adirondack list had from the beginning.
GD: The Adirondack club developed from the project of two adolescent boys named Robert and George Marshall, sons of a wealthy businessman, who spent their summers in the Adirondacks. They hiked with a guide named Herbert Clark, and they made a list of the 4,000-foot peaks using their criteria, which were somewhat different from ours.
CW: How were they different?
GD: They used a 300-foot rather than 200-foot [minimum drop in elevation between qualifying peaks along a ridge]. But, on the other hand, they also said that three-quarters of a mile along the ridge between two peaks—even if you don’t have the 300-foot drop—is enough to qualify. They were working with the old maps that were made by relatively primitive methods in the teens and ’20s, you know.
Bob Marshall eventually became a very famous figure in the American environmental movement. He was one of the founders of the Wilderness Society. The Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana is named for him. He did extensive exploration in Alaska. He died quite young, 38, I believe.
[Discussion ensues about members of the Grace Methodist Church in Troy, New York, who in the 1930s formed the Forty-Sixers of Troy, forerunner of the Adirondack Forty-Sixers, which formed in 1948.]
They were really the first people to pick it up; a guy named Ed Hudowalski was the ringleader. His widow, Grace, became the great figure in the 46er club.
MOHAMED ELLOZY: The mother figure of the club.
GD: Yes. She lived well into her 90s and—
ME: They’re trying to name a peak after her in the Adirondacks.
GD: Yes. At any rate, for years she wrote hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters to everybody who sent in [applications]—personal letters to everybody. ... Even though the maps eventually showed that four of the peaks were under 4,000 feet, and some of the others probably shouldn’t have qualified, they decided to stick with the original list, and that was largely I think the influence of, following in the footsteps of Bob Marshall.
CW: It became kind of sacred in a way, because it was a historic list?
GD: Yes. Well I think it was the Bob Marshall angle that really did it. The Forty-Sixers originally were fairly religious, too.
CW: What do you mean, religious?
GD: Well, they started as a church group. Part of their meetings was a vesper service where everybody held hands and sang hymns and that sort of stuff, which I didn’t care for, being as I am, not partial to organized religion in general and that kind of public display in particular.
Guy Waterman once commented that he thought the fact that the Adirondack people kept their original list, while we in New England changed ours when new maps came out, was that the Adirondack Forty-Sixer founders were largely humanists, whereas the Appalachian Mountain Club people were more scientists, but I don’t think he was correct about that.
CW: What do you think?
GD: As I say, I think it was the influence of Bob Marshall; otherwise, I think they might have amended their list, too. It’s hard to say what would they have done. Our club started probably in 1931 with an article in Appalachia by Nathaniel Goodrich. Goodrich was a pioneer trail builder—he helped open the Garfield Ridge Trail, to name just one, and many, many others. And he wrote an article suggesting a four thousand footer club. He used the 300-foot qualification, so he got something like 36 peaks. His comment was, “Yes, I have done the lot, and wish heartily there were more.” Well, eventually we arranged for more—but for a long while nothing much happened.
We regard him as number one on our list. The Adirondack people give everyone a climbing number. But that’s not—it’s sort of funny, because you get climbing numbers assigned in the year you apply [for the Adirondack Forty-Sixers]. So if you apply ten years after you finish, you get a much higher number, which is less impressive to those in the know. You might get a 500 instead of a 200. We didn’t do that at the start, and obviously it would be a pretty big project to give numbers at a later date to everyone—8,000-plus members now. So we’ve never done climbing numbers, and a lot of people are very unhappy about that, particularly people who climbed the Adirondacks first and then came over to the Whites.
CW: A climbing number?
GD: Supposedly that represents your order of finish. In the Forty-Sixers, I am number 1,407. But people do delay applying—I’ve had people apply for our lists as much as 25 years afterwards. I have kept a list for the White Mountain Four Thousand Footers in winter, and I revise it—I change numbers as people finish. There aren’t a lot of names on that list, so you can do it fairly easily.
CW: Then you’d be contacting various people and saying, “Guess what, you’re not really 101; you’re really—”?
GD: This is what I tell people whenever they ask. I say, “You are presently number 184, but if somebody who finished before you applies, you will be bumped down.” The disadvantage of the Adirondack system is it doesn’t give you the true order of finish. It only gives you the true order of finish within an application year.
ME: I saw a New York car with number plates, ADK, followed by a four-digit number.
CW: (Laughs.)
GD: The thing is, this is a game. It is not to be taken all that seriously, in my opinion. If you take it too seriously, you get compared to certain parts of the body that have less than glamorous functions.
ME: Unless you’re with someone else who takes it seriously.
GD: I mean, you know, people who are competitive by nature get competitive about these things. They care about whether they’re fifteenth or seventeenth or something like that. To me it’s always been a game. We have our peculiarities, which we can chuckle about, and if you can’t chuckle about it, you’ve got a little bit of a problem. I mean, I’m as OCD as almost anyone in this game.
CW: OCD?
GD: Obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have a teenage daughter, so I know some of the current slang.
CW: So this Nathaniel Goodrich—
GD: He was the librarian at Dartmouth College. There were a lot of people who thought he was not a very pleasant person, but he did in fact do a lot of good things. I think it was around 1948 that some people—that couple who were number 1 and 2 on the Northeast list, the McKenzies, was it? They were out to climb all of the four thousand footers in the Northeast and they did the Adirondacks, two in the Catskills and whatever list they came up with in the Whites and Maine and Vermont.
CW: So you’d call that one of the very early lists too.
GD: There were no formal clubs at this point. And they just worked from whatever list they could make up. There was this guy, Roderick Gould, who finished them in early 1957, and I believe he went off to Europe and got himself killed trying to do something that was too difficult for him in the Alps.
It happens to some of us. Some of us just get benighted on the Bonds.
ME: I think we both have been benighted on the Bonds.
CW: You both were benighted on the Bonds?
GD: I just handed over to my daughter-in-law the picture of my son, now her husband, when he was 10 years old on West Bond in winter, with the sunset illuminating his face. We still had 9 miles to hike after dark.
ME: Which is not too bad if you return by the trail.
GD: Well, we bushwhacked up, so we had a beaten path to go back on. We had bushwhacked up Hellgate Brook to the col, and did both peaks and then we headed back down, but we had a beaten track to go down. But I have bushwhacked that valley after dark, too.
CW: How did you know where you were going?
GD: It’s fairly easy to tell. The first thing—when you’re out in winter it’s usually fairly light, because the snow reflects light around you fairly well. You’re not that likely to step off a cliff you didn’t see or something like that. It’s not ideal, but as long as you don’t use lights, you generally have enough night vision to get by. A valley, particularly one with steep sides like this, is fairly easy to figure out.
CW: You just stay in it.
GD: You’d have to climb to get out of it, so it’s mainly a case of whether you or manage to just stay far enough away from the brook so you don’t get into the alders or step into the places that aren’t frozen and that sort of stuff. I try to stay up on the bank a little way away from it. And sometimes—the first time around we found a logging road. That gives you a nice flat surface so you’re not trying to go sidehill on a steep slope, which is very tedious and tiring.
ME: There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about that trip. That at the following winter’s awards dinner, you asked one of the awardees, “What is your favorite memory of the winter fours?” And she said, “Sunset on West Bond, Gene!”
GD: I have seen the sunset in winter from both West Bond and Bondcliff
ME: This brings us to what may be one of the most interesting things. The real difficulty of completing the list in winter is—some of the peaks are really difficult. And almost anyone can do Tecumseh in winter, but doing all 48 including the Bonds, Owl’s Head, Isolation ...
GD: On the other hand, my daughter, I think, was 12 when we did the Bonds in winter, and it took us barely over twelve hours to do it because the conditions were really perfect.
It seems that around ’57, there was a lot of feeling—that was when there was no Boston Chapter; it was General Outings, they called it—among the active hikers that people were going to the same old places, and that they needed to get a little variety and something new, you know, a little source of inspiration. That everyone was going to the Presidentials and the Franconias and a couple of other places, and maybe it would be nice to see some other things. And so they made the list. Then they went to the AMC Council [the predecessor of the AMC Board of Directors], and the Council came back and said, “We think this is a good idea, but you have to have definite criteria for a separate peak.” So they decided to make it [at least a] 200-foot [drop to a col between peaks]. They came up with a list, which at that point was 46 peaks.
CW: So this was a group of people? There wasn’t any one person compiling this list?
GD: I don’t think it was a single person.
ME: It was a committee. There’s no doubt it was a committee.
GD: One of them, Barbara Loo, is still around, living here in Boston. She was Barbara Richardson throughout most of this. At any rate, there was a committee, and I think Al Robertson was heavily involved with it. He was the first chairman. So they formalized it. There was this big hike to Hancock and South Hancock. South Hancock was very seldom climbed, if ever, before then. There was a party where a bunch of them finished up the now-official list in September 1957. It’s not necessarily clear that earlier people like the McKenzies climbed South Hancock, for instance, because it may not have been on their list. People discovered several more peaks along the way. West Bond was one of the ones they discovered that would not have been a qualifier on Goodrich’s list because it’s not [300 feet higher than the col].
CW: But it is 200 feet?
GD: There’s debate on that one, too. But, over my dead body does West Bond get cut out of the list.
ME: What about South Hancock?
GD: That one I would have accepted deleting if other people hadn’t agreed with my logic for keeping it.
CW: So you’re saying there’s still a question about South Hancock?
GD: There’s always a question about some of these.
ME: Maps are not 100-percent accurate.
GD: Particularly when you have 40-foot contours [on the map; the col below] West Bond could be anywhere between 160 and 240 feet. Guyot is in the same situation except that there are two doubtful cols, rather than one.
CW: But I thought Guyot was not on the list.
ME: It’s not.
GD: West Bond has a 50-percent chance of qualifying for the list. It’s been on the list. The principle we used is that we would not change peaks unless one on the list clearly didn’t qualify anymore, or one not on the list clearly did. There has to be a clear—what they call in football indisputable evidence, when they do the replay. And Guyot has two cols, either one of which could fail, so it has a 25-percent chance of qualifying.
ME: That gets us into the theology of list-making rather than the practice.
GD: Well, it’s all part of the game.
ME: It’s a game the committee plays. It’s not a game hikers play.
GD: Well, anyway, now we’ve gotten up to the point where we have a formal club. It was a tremendous hit. By ’64, the vanguard had done it and were antsy for something more. That was the year of the New England Four Thousand Footer list. Originally, some of the White Mountain Four Thousand Footers were trailless: Owl’s Head, West Bond, the Hancocks. They eventually got trails because that’s what happens when ...
CW: ... you have a lot of people walking up them. Even Owl’s Head, is it really officially a trail?
GD: It isn’t, officially.
ME: But it is as good a trail as any.
GD: Well, until you get a good blowdown or something. In the Adirondacks, they had about sixteen to eighteen peaks, depending on how you count, that were trailless, and they intended to try to keep it that way. But, unfortunately, you can’t have 300 or so people with their friends climbing these peaks every year without a path developing. We call them herd paths; the name originated in the Adirondacks. Their name for bushwhacking was random scoots.
CW: Random scoots? That’s a great phrase. Who made that up?
GD: I don’t know, but really it doesn’t stand up to close inspection. You may be scooting, but you’re hardly random—if you are, you’ll be lost. Well, they had a very big storm there [in the Adirondacks] around 1950. And they had tremendous blowdown problems. There were many areas where you just could not get through. And these herd paths developed on the routes that were possible. The terrain over there is steeper.
And the result was that these herd paths sometimes went in very inappropriate places. I’ve seen some terrible damage to the mountainsides. So we had the New England Four Thousand Footers in ’64, and by ’68 the vanguard was getting antsy again, so the New England Hundred Highest [list] came along then. The Hundred Highest have a considerable number of trailless peaks. And some of them still don’t have well-defined herd paths, though it’s difficult to keep them from evolving.
ME: Things have changed in the last few years. I mean, it’s getting very, very popular.
GD: Herd paths get easier.
ME: From what I hear there’s a perfectly good herd path now from South Crocker to Redington, which used to be a dense bushwhack.
GD: Well, I hit it pretty well the first time I did it.
ME: You did it before it grew.
GD: You see, that’s wrong. The more it grows, the better off you are. The first time I did East Kennebago it was practically impenetrable, but I came back on the same route fifteen years later, and the dense small trees had either gotten big, or the ones that didn’t win the competition had died and fallen and rotted, so now there was space between the trees where there used to be none. On the other hand, Scar Ridge was a cakewalk when I did it, and today it’s a notoriously terrible bushwhack.
CW: Which ridge?
GD: That’s west of Osceola. Continuing the ridge of Osceola off to the west. In the middle ’70s that was a fernwhack. Nice and open and big trees. What happens is the trees get old, they get blown down, and then you get garbage.
ME: That is, when I did it very late in the last millennium, there were sections where for hundreds of feet you were walking above the ground, in the air, on fallen trees.
CW: Just jumping from one to the next.
ME: Jumping—carefully!
GD: One of the more interesting things is going through a blowdown area where you’re on a trunk eight feet off the ground, and you look down and see these sharp spikes where the branches are broken off pointing out at you. If you slip, you’re going to be disemboweled.
CW: OK, so, did you say this was fun?
GD: Of course it’s fun, most of the time. Not that spiky stuff, though I tended to avoid things like that wherever possible.
Some of these peaks have gotten much easier, and some have gotten much harder over time. And it’s a natural progression where the trees get larger and larger and larger until they get old and die, and then you get blowdowns and small dense new growth that’s hard to get through.
Personal List-Making
CW: I’d like to talk a little bit about you, and your interest in hiking, and how you got involved in this.
GD: I believe it was the spring of 1969. There was a certain newspaper whose name I am loath to pronounce—
ME: The [Manchester] Union Leader?
GD: They had this contest—they would put the outline of a town and various features in it, and you were supposed to name the town. And I thought this was an interesting challenge until I learned that there was such a thing as a base map of the state, which had all the townships, and you just had to look at that and the answers were obvious. For them it was a way of selling newspapers. They did it for 70 issues. I fell for it.
CW: So in 1969, how old were you?
GD: I was 22. ... I decided somewhere along the line to visit every township in the state of New Hampshire, and I still have one outstanding that I haven’t done.
CW: Before you get your “township patch”?
GD: There was briefly a club for this, but they didn’t include the unincorporated towns. I was safe there. My missing township was unincorporated and so wasn’t on their list.
CW: OK, so you decided to visit all the townships, and what did this mean?
You had to get in your car and hit a bunch of them in a day?
GD: Yes. That’s what I’d do.
CW: Where were you living at the time?
GD: I was living outside of Durham. I was a graduate student at [the University of New Hampshire]... studying English, getting my master’s degree. So, I drove around to various parts of the state. Well, it turns out that there are two townships, Sargent’s Purchase and Thompson and Meserve’s Purchase, which are most easily visited by going up the Mount
Washington Auto Road.
CW: (Laughs.)
GD: My brother-in-law, and my wife at that time, and I, drove up the Mount Washington Auto Road. My brother-in-law and I were talking about this, and we decided it would be a neat thing to climb Mount Washington just once just to be able to say that we’d done it, and that was all we had in mind. Well, I was always a hard person to buy Christmas presents for. My brother-in-law happened to see a White Mountain Guide in a local bookstore, so he bought me a copy for Christmas 1969. And I started reading it, and I saw the four thousand footer list, and my OCD came out.
ME: The collector gene.
GD: I decided I was going to do the four thousand footers just once, just to say I’d done it, and then quit hiking. I mean, what was the point, once you’d done all the highest peaks, of reclimbing them or climbing anything else? So I did it, but I got addicted. One of the perspectives I’ve always had is that you can start out as a completely heartless, soulless peakbagger but—most people are going to get drawn in by the beauty and the enjoyment of being out there in the woods, all those things. That’s really awkwardly expressed.
CW: That is actually pretty well expressed, although couldn’t it be the reverse as well, that you start out thinking you’re just going for the beauty and then you get drawn in to the idea of keeping the list?
GD: Definitely, that happens, too. People get close and sort of have to finish up. Some people try not to do them all but it can be hard to avoid doing those last few peaks—particularly if your friends are going to one and you don’t want to stay home.
CW: But in your case it was: “I’m not much of a hiker; I don’t see myself doing this for fun; I just want to do it to say I did it”?
GD: At first. My father always referred to me as the hothouse flower. I wasn’t athletic. I was a mama’s boy. He tried to get me out hiking a few times. He wasn’t a hiker at all, but he had as a young man climbed the Matterhorn and the Grépon.
CW: But of course there’s a difference between doing something that your father says to do and then coming to it on your own.
GD: Eventually things came around full circle. I have a version of his will in which after his bequest to me there’s a little note in pencil: “None of this is to be used for climbing mountains.”
CW: None of the money would be used?
GD: I was a bit of a mountain bum.
CW: So when would you say you crossed the line from soulless peakbagger to something else?
GD: Very quickly.
ME: How long did it take you to finish the list?
GD: It took me two summers, but ’70 and ’73, because I was in prison for most of ’71 and ’72.
CW: Yeah, and you have to talk a little bit about that, and tell us why you were in prison.
ME: And your cartographic adventures.
GD: I was a Vietnam Era draft resister. I thought the war was a hideous mistake.
Kids I knew growing up were killed or wounded or mentally damaged, fighting to protect a hopelessly corrupt and clueless government in South Vietnam. I knew I couldn’t do much to stop the war but I had to do what I could, and saying “No” to the draft was about all I could do.
CW: What happened? You were drafted and you said, “I’m not going?”
GD: Yes. This was in ’69. This was before I had climbed any of the mountains. It dragged on for a while and then actually they sent a couple of FBI folks over to arrest me and take me into Manchester. I was let out on the same personal recognizance bail as the head of the New England Cosa Nostra at that time. That swelled my head a little bit, but—
CW: And then what happened?
GD: Time went by. I was tried and convicted. More time went by as my appeal went through. Finally I lost the appeal and the Supreme Court refused to hear my case, and I went to jail from April 1971 through September 1972.
ME: Where?
GD: Danbury, Connecticut.
CW: So, what did you have to do while you were there?
GD: Well, I did a number of things. I wrote my master’s thesis on Robert Frost.
CW: Were you allowed to go to the library and get books and that sort of thing?
GD: The library was mostly castoffs from an Air Force base that had closed—pretty useless. I was allowed to get books shipped to me.
CW: So you were on your own essentially in prison.
GD: In prison slang, I was on the pay-’em-no-mind list. For example, one of my friends was also working on a master’s thesis. He was an instructor at the University of San Juan in Puerto Rico. And he’d had a job in a bank and had embezzled, and so he was an ordinary criminal, as they say. He got written up. The rule was that you could not have more than ten books in your cell, and he had twelve books, and he was written up for that. And I never, after the first month, had less than 150 books, and I never got written up.
CW: So at some point you got interested in a hiking list, looking at a hiking list, or compiling one while you were in prison.
GD: When I was in prison, I had maps, and I made a list. They allowed me to have the maps, which I thought was kind of exceptional. I had the whole set for the state of New Hampshire. Now if I had wanted Connecticut, they might have been questioning. I made a list of all the mountains in New Hampshire—map by map, town by town, a complete list.
CW: Do you remember how many were on that list?
GD: Somewhere between 2,400 and 2,500. It varies. Every time you revise a map.
CW: Why did you get interested in making a list of mountains?
GD: I guess I was a list-maker by nature.
CW: Where does this fall in with your trip up Mount Washington, your decision to do the four thousand footers?
GD: I had at this point done half of them.
CW: And then you had to go to prison, and one of the things you did during this year-and-something period—
GD: Roughly a year and a half. Seventeen months and eighteen days if you want to be precise. I spent a lot of time making this list. Naturally, out of that list I derived a list of the hundred highest of New Hampshire. I had no idea that anyone else was doing it. But it turned out people were. Anyway, I came back home and finished up the four thousand footers, and then I sent in my application. AMC was still requiring two sponsors then. You had to have two people who were already members for at least a year sign your application. [The Four Thousand Footer Committee] automatically, if you checked off “not a member,” they sent you a signed application to the AMC.
And I sent that in and became an AMC member, started going on a few hikes, and, in July of ’74, I saw a trip led by Dick Stevens—who was then the chairman of the Four Thousand Footer Committee, and one of my sponsors, although he had never met me—to the peak above Carrigain Pond, which is now known as The Captain. It’s fairly remote, and it’s fairly hard to get at, and there was a trip to it. And the notice also mentioned the New Hampshire Hundred Highest. As I say, I didn’t know that anyone was doing the New Hampshire Hundred Highest. I found out that three people had already finished, and I ended up tying for sixth place on the list, eventually.
So I signed up for that trip and duly went on it. And on that hike, there was one guy who was an MIT student who we never saw again. There was another guy who was around and active in the AMC for 10 or 15 more years, and then got divorced and moved out West and disappeared from the scene. The other four people were Dick Stevens, the leader, who was the Four Thousand Footer chairman then; Bruce Brown, who became his successor; myself, who became Bruce’s successor; and Tom Sawyer who became…
ME: Your successor.
GD: No. Deane Morrison was my successor, and Tom was his. This was July ’74. It’s a very important hike because four of the next five chairs, counting Dick Stevens who was chair then, were among the six people on that trip. Deane was the one who wasn’t there—he came onto our scene about four years later. Eric Savage, who is now the chairman, certainly wasn’t on that one.
ME: Maybe he wasn’t born.
GD: He was in fact about 5 years old at the time. The first two chairmen, Al Robertson and Paul Bernier, were not on that hike, but four of us were. So that hike helped to create a lot of friendships that became central to the leadership of the Four Thousand Footer Club.
CW: So you liked these guys.
GD: Yes. But also, we were all similarly obsessed. This was a group of characters.
Bruce is now out in California, Tom is retired and is currently on the AT [Appalachian Trail] going north to south. ... Dick Stevens is a very interesting character. He was a research chemist at Harvard who was considered an internationally known authority in his area. Bright guy, obviously. After his mother died, he left Harvard, left chemistry forever, moved to rural northern New Jersey.
CW: When were you chairman?
GD: I took over, I think, in ’84.
ME: Could we go back a little bit? You mentioned that there was a New Hampshire Hundred Highest List. Let’s get the chronology of all the lists.
GD: There was a New Hampshire Hundred Highest list that some people were working on. And we consulted, and I had I think one peak that the other people didn’t have, and they had a couple that I didn’t have, like Middle Scar Ridge. Together, we made a list that we all agreed on. These are unofficial lists. The committee does not promote these; it does not recognize them; it only sees to it that there is a list that is fairly reliable.
It’s another over-my-dead-body situation, as far as making it one of the official, recognized lists.
CW: And this is the New Hampshire Hundred Highest list, as opposed to the New England Hundred Highest List, which is officially recognized.
GD: Yes. The New Hampshire Hundred Highest has a lot of trailless peaks.
There can be a question as to what is trailless and what is not. It can have an abandoned trail that can still be followed. It can have an unofficial trail. All these things. At any rate, there are about 42 to 44 peaks that are trailless on this list. Many are in the northern logging country where hikers don’t normally go. It’s never been exactly 100. There has always been a tie at the end.
CW: A tie being that there are a couple of peaks that are the exact same height?
ME: As far as we can determine from the map. Remember, this is not an official list.
GD: And some people have different opinions, like whether Guyot should be on the list. I did put it on the 3,000-footer lists. And another thing is, there were already people working on the New Hampshire 3,000-footers when I got involved. There never was a formal list, so I developed one, and the guy who was working on it most persistently at that particular time refused to accept one or two of the peaks that I put on the list. He said he was damned if he was climbing Mud Pond Ridge—it was a marginal. Since it wasn’t an official list, that was his choice.
CW: When were you working on these two lists that we’re discussing?
GD: 1974 for the New Hampshire Hundred. And then very shortly thereafter for the New Hampshire 3,000. Remember I had a list of all the mountains in New Hampshire, and all I had to do was to check with other people to see what they might have picked up that I might have missed. And there were probably a couple. Then I went on to compile a New
England 3,000-footer list—about 450 peaks—which was more difficult because I didn’t have peak lists for the other states. Ironically, I finished the list the day before my birth mother died—the New Hampshire 3,000-footers. I didn’t know that at the time. That was in 1981.
CW: It sounds as if you were adopted?
GD: Yes.
CW: And you did not learn about your birth parents—
GD: Until about two years ago. This past Christmas Day, I met a sister, two nephews, and a grandniece for the first time.
CW: Did you do the research?
GD: No, my daughter did. She got on a genealogy kick. She found out who my birth mother was, and looked up her obituary. I have two sisters ...after almost 60 years as an only child. They’d been looking for me too. My biological father was a sled dog racer—maybe that’s why I spent so much time snowshoeing around in winter.
[Discussion ensues on the New Hampshire and New England 3,000-footer lists.]
GD: I always wanted to make people pause and think of the implications of hiking a trailless peak: “Am I just going to add another set of footsteps to a mountain, or is this something that I really want to do?” Some of these are very seldom visited, so people get to see them in a fairly unspoiled state, and I want to preserve that. And some of these are in really remote places where you do have to have navigational skills or you could get seriously lost.
[Discussion ensues about obscure mountains.]
CW: Obviously as soon as these lists do become official and public, that does draw crowds, just like the AT—the whole thru-hiking thing. The books that came out drew more people to the AT. I guess the big question is: Has this changed the mountain experience, to have this, or not?
GD: I wouldn’t know, because I’m part of the peakbagging era. I have only second-hand knowledge of how things were before it started.
ME: Let me give you my perspective. There’s been a spread of what’s common. The New England Hundred Highest now are a fairly common issue. On the New Hampshire Hundred Highest, trips are being led, especially by the New Hampshire chapter, regularly, multiple trips in summer. The 3,000-footers are reserved for the hard-core bushwhackers.
GD: You’re talking about over 200 trailless peaks. That’s a lot of bushwhacking. And of course a large number of them have no views, so you really have to love picking your way through the woods.
CW: But here we are, you know, we’re looking at the anniversary of this Four Thousand Footer Club, and the assumption is that this is something that has helped people get to the mountains and help them maybe appreciate them and want to preserve them, so I guess I’m asking in that context, has this been a good thing, for the mountains?
GD: What I always say is that I spent 20 years processing applications for the Four Thousand Footer Club, and I did not do that just so people could wear patches on their jackets or packs. I did it because I thought it helps to create a preservation constituency. I’m hoping most of the people who go out and climb the 48 peaks will get a pretty good overview of what there is out there and what needs to be protected.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this, but back in the teens, there was a plan to build an electric railway to the top of Mount Washington. And it was going to tunnel through the Castellated Ridge, loop back across it, and go back and make one and a half turns around the summit cone of Washington. Because it was not going to be a cog, it was going to have to have a very tightly regulated grade, thus the much longer route. The only reason it wasn’t built was that there was a stock market mini-crash and suddenly there was no money to do it.
There also was a proposal in the ’30s to build a skyline highway over the northern peaks.
CW: They did it in the South.
GD: Yeah. I’m not entirely sure it would have worked. The weather in the Northern Presidentials is a little more severe than in the Blue Ridge—there you can hike in dense woods at an altitude higher than the summit of Washington. Nevertheless, these projects come up, and you have to have people who are willing to sit there and say, “No, this isn’t a good idea.” One of the earliest things I did before I started hiking was to drive the Kancamagus Highway, and I thought, gosh, this is beautiful; they ought to have ten more of these highways all through the White Mountains. That was before I became a hiker, you see. That was my initial reaction, but after I went and climbed the four thousand footers, the idea seemed abhorrent. So, hopefully, the other people will go out there and realize what they have and want to preserve it for the future, and that’s what I was hoping the Four Thousand Footer Club would help do.
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