AMC Outdoors, September 2007
Fortunately, for inveterate peak baggers there’s no shortage of lists. The Four Thousand Footer Club recognizes not only the White Mountain 4,000-footers, but also the 67 New England Four Thousand Footers as well as the 100 highest peaks in New England. Recognition is also given to peak baggers who chase the summits during the winter months. Elsewhere, there are lists that encompass the 4,000-footers in the Adirondacks, the 14,000-footers in Colorado and California, and, yes, the famous Seven Summits, where mountaineers climb the highest peaks on all seven continents.
While the thirst for exploration is obviously a powerful motivator, it’s a reasonable question to ask what else propels people to pursue what many would consider a quixotic, even bizarre, goal. Sue Eilers might be expected to have some deep insight into the hypnotic allure of peak bagging. Eilers, a member of the Four Thousand Footer Committee, began hiking after a divorce to make sure that her two kids didn’t spend their weekends watching television. That initial decision set Eilers on a course toward some prolific peak bagging, including not only the White Mountain 4,000-footers, but also the 100 highest peaks in New England during the winter, the 770 mountains in the Northeast over 3,000 feet, and her current project of finishing the Appalachian Trail, section by section.
Despite all the miles she’s logged, Eilers struggles to supply a simple explanation about why peak bagging is so compelling to her. “I don’t know why people do it. You’re talking to someone who has climbed the 770 peaks in the Northeast and I still don’t know why. It’s fun and it’s an adventure,” she says.
Eilers isn’t alone in grasping for an answer. Hal Graham, who estimates that he’s done the White Mountain 4,000-footers any-where between 10 and 12 times, has even launched his own list. The Trailwrights 72 Summits Club requires people to not only hike each mountain individually—no bagging multiple peaks at once—but also perform at least 72 hours of trail maintenance. Graham puts it this way: “Say you put a cookie on the top of a mountain. You grab that cookie and you put it in your bag. You don’t get it until you get there.”
Regardless of what initially draws people into the kind of peak bagging the Four Thousand Footer Club requires, actually completing the list is, for many, a truly transformative experience. Part of the application process requires hikers to write an account of one of their ascents. For Savage, reading through the applications can be illuminating, moving, and inspirational. He recalls one person who wrote about how completing the list truly changed his life, from being a sedentary couch potato who smoked two packs a day to an avid hiker looking for new challenges.
“Having the club there pushes some people,” says Savage. “Just to see the personal growth that happens to people as a result of having that goal is amazing. It’s like someone put out a ladder to help them climb to some place they hadn’t been before.”
Some hikers are so engrossed in the experience of completing the list that they put an extraordinary amount of effort into filling out the membership application. Savage remembers going to the post office one day and pulling out what he thought was a shopping catalogue; it was actually an application. “It looked like a first draft of a manuscript, almost 85 pages,” he says. “It was literally a journal of minutes and seconds of everything that happened on a hike. It even described the drive up to the trail head in amazing detail.”
For some, it’s not enough to just finish a list. They need to do it first, or faster, than anyone else. The White Mountain 4,000-footer list is no different, and in recent years there have been people who have finished the trek astoundingly fast. In 2002, Ted Keizer, also known as Cave Dog, reportedly finished climbing all 48 peaks in just three days, 17 hours and 21 minutes, a feat he completed with the help of a support crew. Tim Seaver is said to have broken that record by an hour and a half in 2003. On Internet discussion boards, talk about speed re-cords often includes quibbling about whether a list is complete when a hiker reaches the last summit, or whether it’s not done until they hike all the way back out to the trailhead of the final peak.
None of that matters to the club, because it refuses to chronicle speed records. “We don’t care if it took 50 days or 50 years to get there,” says Gene Daniell, who spent two decades as chair of the Four Thou-sand Footer Committee and has been a writer and editor of the White Mountain Guide since 1979. “I don’t argue against speed records. I don’t say it’s wrong to keep them; it’s just not our way of looking at things. The point of the club is the shared experience.”
That shared experience motivates some members to chase other climbing lists and some to forge lifelong bonds with other members. Savage says the bond amongst hikers tends to be strongest while they’re chasing their goal. “When you’re working on the list there is more camaraderie than when you actually become a member, which I think is because you’re trading stories, swapping routes and deciding how you’ll finish.”
The quest has also prompted many people to participate in AMC activities or other conservation efforts. For Daniell, that’s what it’s re-ally all about.
“When you have done these 48 peaks, you’ve visited a lot of the forests and become familiar with what’s out there and hopefully you have a desire to protect and preserve it,” he says. “The small amount of damage that people do with their boots in walking up and down the trails, to me, is relatively small in comparison to the good they can do by support[ing] this beautiful resource we have.”
—By Chris Warren
<< Chasing the List, prev.
Print version
