Chasing the List

AMC Outdoors, September 2007

The Four Thousand Footer Club Turns 50

Eric Savage began peak bagging early in life. He was just four years old when he climbed his first 4,000-footer, Mount Moosilauke. For him, peak bagging—notching summits of a certain class off a list—has always been synonymous with exploration. The benefit of having a list to follow is that it sets a course for that innate desire for discovery. “I got hooked on this idea of always going some place I haven’t been yet,” says Savage. “For me, lists were a matter of coming up with a menu of places to go. Otherwise, how do you pick some place to go when you’ve never been there before?”

Sam Hagner shares Savage’s thirst for discovery. He and his wife, Liz, hiked the White Mountains in the 1960s whenever he had time off from school. After college, Hagner established a psychiatric practice in Philadelphia, but he says, “I decided…that I had to get out of there. I had to get up where the mountains were.” In 1969, Hagner moved his family and his practice to Durham, N.H., and began going to the Whites, armed with a list.

That list has existed for 50 years, compiled by the founders of the Four Thousand Footer Club of New Hampshire to encourage people to hike beyond the popular Presidential Range and Franconia Ridge areas in the White Mountains to summits—like Owl’s Head and Hancock—that had few visitors, and sometimes not even any trails. More than 8,000 people, including Savage and Hagner, have walked the 300-plus miles it takes to scale each of the list’s 48 4,000-foot and higher peaks.

“People can say, ‘You guys are really obsessive to peak bag, what’s it about?’ It’s not only climbing a peak,” Hagner, now 81, says. “It got us into areas that I wouldn’t have gotten into otherwise, wild areas, where we had to bushwhack, where we had to plan our approaches with topographic maps and so forth, and that was half the fun.”

Nathaniel Goodrich, a Dartmouth College librarian and avid outdoorsman, created the original list that eventually spawned the formation of the Four Thousand Footer Club. In a December 1931 article for Appalachia, Goodrich came up with a list of 36 4,000-foot and higher mountains he had climbed in New Hampshire. For a peak to qualify, Goodrich said that it had to rise at least 300 feet from any ridge connecting it to a neighboring 4,000-footer. And here’s the thing about coming up with a list the way Goodrich did; once it’s written down, somebody will feel compelled to do it. The first to take the bait was Francis “Mully” Parsons, who is said to have finished scaling the 36 mountains on Goodrich’s list in 1934. By then, however, Goodrich’s list had expanded to 51, which, you guessed it, Parsons also later completed.

The Four Thousand Footer Club was formally established at the suggestion of AMC’s General Outings Committee in the spring of 1957. That same year, at a get-together hosted by none other than Par-sons, the freshly established Four Thousand Footer Club Committee came up with a list of 46 total peaks, all of which would have to be scaled in order to gain admission to the club. But instead of following Goodrich’s original insistence on a peak rising 300 feet from a nearby ridge line to qualify, the committee opted instead for a 200-foot rule. Today’s total of 48 mountains is the result of the addition of Galehead Mountain in 1967 and Bondcliff in 1980.

In the early years of the club, the number of hikers who actually scaled all the 4,000-footers was relatively small, only a couple dozen annually. As the decades have passed, the club has attracted more and more hikers who now earn a patch for their efforts and a place at the annual recognition dinner. An average of 200 per year routinely completed the task in the 1980s, a number that jumped closer to 250 in the 1990s. Over the past few years, the average has again spiked and now hovers around 300, says Savage, the current chair and corresponding secretary of AMC’s Four Thousand Footer Committee, with 310 hikers finishing in 2006.

The only problem with lists, though, is that eventually they are completed. Savage remembers how he felt after finishing the 4,000-footers on a trip across the Presidential Range in 1989. “By then I had already gotten into the next list, so I didn’t have that letdown,” he recalls. “Some people finish and they’re like, ‘now what?’”

Chasing the List cont'd>>