He’s got ’em on the list—he’s got ’em on the list, and they’ll none of ’em be missed—they’ll none of ’em be missed.
W. S. GILBERT
PEAKBAGGING IS A CROSS between outdoor recreation, competitive athletics, and religion. Originally, climbing mountains was primarily a recreational experience, and for many people it still is. Its overtones of aesthetic appeal and communion with nature make a formal listing of peaks “bagged” seem harshly inappropriate. However, when a mountain range has, let us say, 46 summits over a given height—and for some reason it seemed for a while as if a disconcerting number of the world’s ranges did have precisely 46 such peaks—it is only human nature to want to climb them all. Thus is born the sport—eventually the religion—of peakbagging.
The first known peakbagger in our northeastern mountains was a man by the name of Alden Partridge. Founder of the military school at Norwich (now moved to Northfield), Vermont, Partridge climbed peaks all over New England during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. That was when there were virtually no trails, and certainly no superhighways to whisk you to the trailheads for your peak. Partridge would walk from his home in Norwich to Crawford Notch in the White Mountains, 76 miles, in one day. On the next day he’d bushwhack up Mount Washington and back to his inn. On the third day he’d walk 76 miles home. In rainy spells he’d get soaked thrashing through the thickets, but persist for days on end anyway. He was a most remarkable peakbagger and a fit forefather for the rest of the madcap breed.
Two of the most attractive personalities who ever walked a wooded mountain ridge are associated with the formal codification of peakbagging in the Adirondacks.
Herb Clark was one of scores of Adirondack canoeing, fishing, and hunting guides, and probably never would have found a distinctive niche in outdoor recreation history had he not one day been given an unusual assignment. His client, the great civil liberties New York lawyer Louis Marshall, wanted someone to entertain his two overly energetic teenage sons, Robert and George, by taking them on mountain climbs during vacations in the Adirondacks. So Clark began to climb various peaks with the boys. Then they got the fatal idea: why not climb all of the peaks over 4,000 feet in elevation? They studied the maps and picked out 46 such eminences.
Thus began the first systematic bag-’em-all peakbagging extravaganza. Between 1918 and 1925, Clark and the Marshall brothers climbed those 46 mountains. It was a magical adventure.
George Marshall was probably a great fellow, but his older brother, Bob, had to have been one of the sweetest, most exuberant, unmistakable cutups who ever walked this earth. And how he walked this earth! A cragged 6-footer crackling with “great gusto and infectious enthusiasms,” he not only pioneered on the Adirondack 46, but went on to explore Alaskan wilderness, repeatedly (more than 50 times, by actual count) logging 40 wilderness miles per day in the most uncompromising terrain. He threw himself into wilderness preservation with the same relentless but good-humored zeal, as cofounder of the Wilderness Society and a key Interior Department official during critical decision-making times for wilderness all over the country. Allegedly during that original Adirondack peakbagging spree, Clark kidded Bob about carrying a huge log for firewood from a ridge far removed from their campsite; undaunted, Bob shouldered the log and made Clark and his brother eat their words as they watched him wrestle that huge log over mountaintops for hours and finally into camp for the evening’s fire.
As for Clark, he was an original too. When they were walking a lone dusty road toward the base of one of their Adirondack peaks, he solemnly assured the brothers that this road was the original site of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac, pointing out holes where shells had landed as proof. Bob Marshall, himself one of the funniest men of the mountains, called Clark “the happy possessor of the keenest sense of humor I have known.”
With this joy-lit trio began the zany pursuit of the Adirondack 46. According to the official records, eight years passed before the feat was repeated by a fourth person. In the eight years after that, however, 21 more stalwart Adirondack trampers had reached all 46 summits. In the next eight years, there were 43 more successful peakbaggers, and the race was on. Today the number is over 2,000, and they have their own club, the Adirondack 46ers, complete with officers, dues, and an official magazine.
By coincidence, the White Mountains over in New Hampshire, when first counted, also turned out to have 46 peaks over 4,000 feet in height. By the 1930s ardent lovers of the Whites were keeping their list of peaks climbed too. Ultimately a group within the Appalachian Mountain Club organized the “Four Thousand Footer Committee” and began handing out scrolls, patches, and decals for those who had been to the tops of the New Hampshire 46.
Peakbaggers zealously pursuing membership in either the Adirondacks or White Mountains group climb mountains with a religious dedication like that of monks resolutely repeating their rounds of prayers or good works.
Over the years the mapmakers of the US Geological Survey (USGS) have not treated the sacred number 46 with proper veneration and respect. Relatively early in the game, the impious triangulations of the USGS uncovered the heretical revelation that the holy roll of 46 summits originally climbed by the Marshall brothers included four peaks whose elevations were several embarrassing feet short of 4,000. One (Couchsachraga) was only about 3,800 feet. Not only that, but another mountain (McNaughton), which the church fathers had completely overlooked, was in fact over 4,000 feet high.
Like all uninvited scientific discoveries, the impact of this revelation on the organizational hierarchy of the revealed religion—in this case, the peakbagging 46ers—was traumatic. Like many ecclesiastical orders before and since, the high priests decided that the best way to deal with this new fact was to ignore it. To this day the anti-Darwinian 46ers gallantly carry on with the original tablet of 46 peaks handed down by the Marshalls.
Edward Gibbon, surveying his completed life’s work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is said to have summarized his 2,442-page effort with the words, “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.” Those twin forces perhaps won the day in the Adirondacks. And so, with religious zeal and barbaric energy, aspiring 46ers must still climb those three 3,900-footers and little scrubby 3,800-foot Couchsachraga, while the offending McNaughton may be omitted.
For many years the rival high priests over in New Hampshire smirked behind their vestments about this humiliating inaccuracy of the Adirondack “46.” Then the anticlerical forces of the USGS slipped into the temple of the White Mountains and smashed another icon. The Four Thousand Footer Committee had overlooked, it seemed, a 4,000-foot eminence called Galehead. Sorry, reported the cynical scientists, you have 47, not 46.
Consternation and dissension struck the upper priesthood of the Four Thousand Footer Committee, to the undisguised amusement of the Adirondack 46ers’ fathers. One might have thought the state of the Manchester Union Leader and “Live Free or Die” to be safe from the machinations of modern science. An editorial in the Appalachian Mountain Club’s official publication called for leaving Galehead off the formal list, whatever the spurious findings of the surveyors. Dark suggestions were whispered about omitting the apostate mountain from the AMC maps. Meetings and correspondence flew back and forth. Finally the duly authorized Four Thousand Footer Committee met in close recess and secret conclave and, sending up the white smoke, announced that henceforth there were indeed 47, not 46, 4,000-foot summits that aspiring peakbaggers must climb.
Let a hog in your house and he’ll walk on your table. The scientists, having won their point, had to rub it in by “finding” yet another 4,000-footer, the rugged and exciting Bondcliff, hitherto regarded as a mere subsidiary ridge on Mount Bond. So now we’re up to 48 in New Hampshire. The cocky surveyors stalk the shadows just beyond the official list with rumors of still more to come. (That northwest peak of Hancock? Guyot? Others as yet unrevealed?)
Thus the two groups are now in somewhat the position of baseball’s major leagues relative to the designated-hitter rule. One accepts the findings of science and requires initiates to climb the 48 (sic) measured 4,000-footers; the other clings to tradition and the memory of the Marshalls, and hews to its beloved 46 summits despite the cold water thrown by the surveyors.
Meanwhile, down in the Catskills, the devotions of peakbagging were slower in coming. There are only two 4,000-foot summits in the land of Rip Van Winkle, but the impulse to form a club overcame nature’s oversight by dropping the cutoff point 500 feet. For the Catskill 3500 Club you must bag the 34 Catskill peaks over 3,500 feet in elevation . . . and climb four of them in winter. The Catskill group never has taken its orders quite as seriously as the more prestigious Adirondack and White Mountain faiths. “After all,” wrote Catskill tramper Henry Young, “when you are grabbing peaks that are only 3,500 feet high, you have to have a sense of humor.”
The mania for peakbagging in the Northeast has spread beyond the mystical limits of 46. Maine, it appears, has a dozen 4,000-footers. Vermont has five more. This gives the New Englander a total of 63 peaks to shoot for—whoops, make that 65—and many do, to become members of the Four Thousand Footer Club of New England.
Put these together with the Adirondacks’ 46 and the Catskills’ two, and you have (or had originally) the Northeast 111 (now 113).
About 10 years ago, not satisfied with reclimbing their 4,000-footers (like the Adirondacks’ Jim Goodwin, who has climbed his 46 eighteen times each), a New England group drew up a list of the 100 highest in New England. There followed lists of 100 highest by state. Finally someone came up with the inevitable list of 3,000-footers; there are 445 of those in New England. Sure enough, a few folks have climbed them all.
We asked one of the 3,000-footer peakbaggers whether anyone was working on the list of 2,000-footers. His response was, “Do you think we’re crazy?” We thought the answer to that question was clear a long time ago.
Vermont, with only five 4,000-foot mountains, has set up a somewhat different goal of its own. The Green Mountains’ gentler contours are traversed north to south by the celebrated Long Trail, stretching 265 miles from Massachusetts to the Canadian border. First cut all the way through in 1930, the Long Trail now has more than 2,000 End-to-Enders.
The end-to-end mania is more widely associated with the world-famous Appalachian Trail. This 2,000-mile feat now has become so much of a status symbol that trail traffic presents serious erosion and overcrowding problems. About 700 miles of the AT run through New England, from its northern terminus at Maine’s Katahdin, over such celebrated summits as Mount Washington and Mount Greylock, and crossing the Bear Mountain Bridge into New York on its way south toward Georgia. (More on this in the next chapter.)
There are other north-south supertrails in the West, such as the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide. These are both more than 2,000 miles long. Some years back an aggressive walker named Eric Ryback pulled off the first grand slam by hiking the AT, the Pacific Crest, and the Continental Divide.
Back here in the Northeast, a further challenge has been discovered: climbing the 46 in winter. With heavy snow, formidable temperatures, and the wind that sweeps loftier summits, winter climbing is a considerably more challenging undertaking than summer trail walking. Miriam Underhill, considered by many to be America’s greatest woman mountain climber, after a distinguished career in the Alps and other remote ranges, set herself the goal of climbing all of New Hampshire’s (then) 46 between December 21 and March 21. During the 1950s Miriam and her husband, Robert, a formidable climber himself in the 1920s, succeeded in pulling off this difficult achievement—the first two to do so. Their feat was made even more astonishing by the fact that the great lady was 62 years old and Robert over 70 when they finally stood atop 5,715-foot Jefferson, having climbed all 46 on snowshoes, crampons, or skis. Today there are more than 100 people who have achieved this remarkable goal. Some have even done all of them more than once, and one incurable has done them each from all four points of the compass in winter.
Naturally, when New Hampshire’s 46 had been climbed in winter, some hardy snow lovers set their sights on the New England list, including the Maine and Vermont summits. Interestingly enough, one of the first four to achieve this tough objective was also a woman—Penny Markley, a Maine apple grower.
The Adirondacks’ 46 have also been done in winter, and those who have climbed in both ranges in winter rate the Adirondacks as tougher. This is because many of the New York peaks are without formally maintained trails and must be climbed as genuine map-and-compass bushwhacks. In winter that can be super rough. Nevertheless, almost as many have climbed this list as that of New Hampshire.
Inevitably the toughest goals of all have attracted the aspirations of the most confirmed of peakbaggers. On January 2, 1971, Jim Collins, the second man to do the Adirondack 46 in winter, reached the summit of remote North Brother in Maine, becoming the first conqueror of the Northeast 111 in winter. It is noteworthy that, despite the boom in winter climbing, it was not until 1977 that a second man, Guy Huse, achieved this goal. During the 1980s various indefatigables knocked off the various 100 highest lists in winter, and in 1993 the greatest peakbagger of New England, a man with the unlikely name of Tom Sawyer completed all 445 of New England’s 3,000-footers in winter, a truly remarkable odyssey.
There is no end to the imaginativeness of the dyed-in-the-wool certified peakbagger.
Fred Hunt, an Adirondack hiker of prodigious ground-covering talents, has climbed both New Hampshire and Adirondack lists in winter—at night.
Ed Bean, the first man to climb the Adirondacks’ 46 in winter, then began going back with different parties of climbers, surreptitiously hoping to become the first man to kiss a different woman on the summit of each of the 46.
The resourceful and ingenious Bean also set himself a goal that once proved very helpful to these writers. It seems that Ed wanted to take a leak on the summit of each of the 46 in winter. One blustery March day, the two of us were snowshoeing up Santononi’s windswept ridge, having heard that Ed had been there the day before with another party. As we emerged on the summit ridge itself, we were surrounded by dense clouds and terrific winds. Visibility was reduced to a few feet. We groped our way along the ridge, buffeted by those cyclonic gusts, trying to figure out how we could be sure that we were on the true summit. Suddenly at our feet we saw—yellow snow! Old Ed Bean had left his trademark the day before. We knew we were on the summit.
Another incurable peakbagger, the Reverend Henry Folsom, set out to do all of the New Hampshire peaks in one continuous walk, rather than driving to different trail heads. The resulting 244-mile trek took him 19 days. He dubbed his feat “The Four Thousand Footer Directissima.”
We also heard of one young woman who was out to climb the New Hampshire 46—oops, 48—in bare feet. We don’t know whether she made it.
Several dogs have done each of the two 46s. Our own dog, Ralph, had climbed all of the New Hampshire peaks at least three times (some much more often) before his death in 1976.
One of the great pranksters of the AMC’s White Mountain hut system, the late Tony MacMillan, once organized what he called the Six Thousand Footer Club. Because there is only one true 6,000-foot mountain in the Northeast, Tony contented himself with locating three or four outcroppings of boulders somewhere near the top of Mount Washington. Devotees of high living as well as high mountains, Tony and his epicurean friends would gather annually to parade from bump to bump, fortified by champagne and lavish hors d’oeuvres at each “summit.” The hilarious venture in peakbagging would climax when the celebrants tottered back to the summit buildings to collapse in merriment among the bewildered tourists—perhaps a suitably iconoclastic approach to the often overbearing posture of peakbaggers.
The mania for climbing many peaks in a short time or in unusual ways is not confined to New England’s back hills.
Colorado has 54 mountains that are over 14,000 feet. Two hikers climbed these peaks in 21 days, which they figured made a cumulative climb of 147,000 vertical feet (an average of 7,000 feet per day) and a total of 300 miles. Their main purpose was not to speed-run the “Fourteeners” (the peaks could be done faster—although the hikers’ time was very good), but to make an endurance test out of the stunt and document their medical histories. One of the climbers was a doctor.
Some hikers play the game of trying to reach the highest point in each of the 50 states. One can go from the lofty mountain bulwark of Mount McKinley in Alaska, at 20,320 feet, to a record low of 345 feet in Florida. This “peak” is not even a mountain, just the highest sand hill in a flat state. Colorado has the distinction of having the highest lowest altitude: 3,350. In other words, wherever you are in Colorado, you can’t be lower than the summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock.
One zany couple set out to walk the entire perimeter of the contiguous United States—roughly 19,000 miles! They started in July 1975 and finished in late 1978.
By an almost unbelievable coincidence, the Alps have 46 peaks that are over 4,000 meters. Except for the metric conversion, the good old White Mountains and Adirondacks have something in common with the snowy Alps of Europe, though not their glaciers and crevasses. As we all know, Mont Blanc is the highest at 15,771 feet. Many people have climbed all of these 4,000-meter peaks. The trick is to do them all in one season. We understand that Fritz Wiessner, a Vermonter born in Germany and one of this century’s greatest climbers, did just that.
What happens if we move this game to the great mountains of Asia, the Himalayas? This is the home of Mount Everest, at 29,028 feet the highest point on the globe. When mountains get this high—the lowest of the 13 is 26,287 feet—they get a lot harder to climb.
What if someone, stuck on the number 46, wanted to climb the 46 highest peaks in the Himalayas? That would be a feat. These would be, of course, the 46 highest in the world, and the elevation of the lowest would be a cloud-splitting 23,890 feet.
There is one more stunt for world record makers: climbing to the highest point in each of the seven continents, including such stunning peaks as Everest, McKinley, Mont Blanc, Africa’s Kilimanjaro, and Antarctica’s Mount Vinson, at 16,860 feet. That last is not so terribly high for those who have already climbed Everest, but it is very hard to get to. The seven summits have been “done” by enough globe-trotting peakbaggers to make this less of a high-stakes game.
Scotland has its own special game—or inanity. This mountainous country has 280 peaks over 3,000 feet, which the Scots call Monros, after the man who first listed them. One climber of these was a dog, who not only chaperoned his master on the climbs but also ascended the 3,000-footers in England, Wales, and Ireland, a feat only about a dozen humans could claim at that time.
In 1972 two strong hikers set out to see how fast they could hike all 46 Adirondack peaks. They were careening along at a pace that would have knocked them all off in five days, or more than nine 4,000-footers per day. An unkind fate intervened to pronounce a harsh judgment on their folly: crossing over the summit of Marcy in the teeth of a hurricane, one of the pair suffered a massive heart attack and died. Suddenly he went from young, strong, buoyant, and ambitious, to . . . just plain dead.
When death struck this peakbagger the outcry against the mania for speed records was predictable. And it wasn’t the first such protest. Benton MacKaye, the man who is credited with having more to do with creating the Appalachian Trail than any other, years ago deplored those who tried to cover the 2,000-mile trail in the fewest number of days. “What I hope is that it won’t turn into a racetrack,” grieved MacKaye in Backpacker magazine. “I for one would give the prize to the person who took the longest time.”
Conservationist Edward Abbey is another who has spoken out against speedy traverses of trails and peaks. “Stopwatch hiking,” Abbey called it.
Even everyday hikers can sometimes take offense at trail speedsters who pass them at a breakneck clip. One hiker was heard to remark to a group of trail runners, “Why do you people hate the woods so much?” He explained his question by acidly commenting that they seemed in such a hurry to get through the woods that they must not enjoy them very much.
Influential leaders of the Appalachian Mountain Club began calling for the abolition of the Four Thousand Footer Committee. The critics charged that peakbagging clubs tended to lure people out onto remote summits that would otherwise remain less heavily trampled, causing trail erosion, damage to vegetation, and overcrowding problems. Critics also contended that peakbagging was a deplorable motive for going to the mountains.
Systematic peakbagging is “a numbers racket,” according to one critic, and “seems sacrilegious” to another. The growth of peakbagging clubs introduces “an undesirable artificiality into the natural scenery of the mountains,” according to the articulate Levin. The gist of this attack on peakbaggers is the charge that they rush breathlessly from one mountaintop to the next without enjoying the view or contemplating the details and mystery of the mountain environment. “I often wonder if they ever appreciate any of the beauty that surrounds them,” sighs one observer.
We’d like to rise to the defense of the peakbagger. Unquestionably there are those who grind through their list of 46 peaks with little of the spirit of appreciation that most of us think the mountains deserve. But we would guess that they are the minority. The ranks of overt peakbaggers include many people whose deep and lasting love of and commitment to the mountain environment is indisputable. Let’s cite some examples:
1. Robert Marshall—the man who started the whole game back in the 1920s with his brother and their guide-friend, Herbert Clark. Yes, Marshall was a peakbagger—he never would have denied it—but he also devoted his all-too-short life to conservation and wilderness preservation. He climbed mountains because he loved them.
2. Dr. Orra Phelps—a grand lady whose dedication to peakbagging was so strong that she was among the first to climb all the Adirondack 4,000-footers. That was way back in 1947. Then she went on and “bagged” them all again. Peakbagger, yes—but Dr. Phelps is also a botanist of exceptional knowledge and insight. She has probably led more people to share her appreciation of mountain flora than anybody in the Adirondacks through her talks, slide shows, writings, personally led walks, and work as a ranger-naturalist at the Adirondacks’ nature museum and trail.
3. Miriam Underhill—an inveterate peakbagger, the first to climb the New Hampshire 46 in winter, and early conqueror of all 111 four-thousand-foot peaks in the Northeast. Her abiding affection for the mountains she climbed stands out on every page of her autobiography, Give Me the Hills, and in her work as both an editor of and photographer for Mountain Flowers of New England.
4. Almost any of the great peakbaggers we know, whose love for the hills keeps taking them back to the high ridges to feel the thin, cold air and see the wild, uncompromising scenery and hear the clear call of the white-throated sparrow in a mist-clouded alpine landscape.
An odd psychology infects many people in the mountains when they see other hikers moving rapidly along mountain trails. Some people resent the fast hiker with a depth of indignation that’s difficult to understand. Most of these people are not so narrow-minded as to insist that everyone should enjoy the mountains in precisely the same way as they do; yet they seem to want to exclude the hiker who gets enjoyment from maintaining a fast pace on a rugged trail.
We plead for tolerance—and caution the critic not to jump to conclusions when he sees someone move past him rapidly on a ridge. It’s been our experience that most of the fast hill-walkers we know are people who deeply appreciate the mountain environment. They may be going fast, but they’re taking it all in.
Yet we’ve seen people become actually angry at the sight of a hiker moving fast. This “vague prejudice,” as Mr. Levin calls it, even found its way into print in a Green Mountain Club brochure on guidelines for use of the Long Trail. One of its 15 instructions, along with such useful admonitions as carry out all trash and stay on the trail above treeline, is: “Take your time: The Long Trail is no place to break speed records.”
We’re sorry to see people with one approach to hiking try to impose their personal prejudices on people with another approach. The mountains are a place for people to enjoy themselves in their own way as long as that doesn’t interfere with enjoyment by others or damage the mountain environment. The fast hiker isn’t making noise, or littering, or doing anything else to interfere with anyone else’s enjoyment. We wish his critics would get off his back.
We find that we go to the mountains for many different reasons. Sometimes we poke along slowly to look at the wildflowers or gaze on an exceptional view. Sometimes we travel with one or a few friends and enjoy leisurely companionship in the mountain setting. Often we’re working on trail maintenance, devoting many hours to a fraction of a mile. Sometimes we push off-trail to explore valleys or ridges we’ve never been to before. Sometimes, however—not as often as when we were younger, alas—we like to push ourselves and take in a considerable amount of trail mileage and several summits in a single day. On some of our “biggest” days, when we’ve covered lots of miles and peaks, we’ve also treasured moments of spectacular scenery, cloud effects, unusual wildlife sightings, or hard-to-define moments of exaltation absorbing the majesty and mystery of the hills around us. Neither peakbagging nor fast hiking are inconsistent with complete appreciation of the mountain scene.
We are unreconstructed peakbaggers, no question. One of us is working on her seventh round of the New Hampshire 48; the other on his 17th. We’ve done them and the Adirondacks’ 46 in winter too. Once we did all the New Hampshire peaks in a continuous two-week trip. This kind of thing may strike many people as silly. That’s OK. But we see no reason to dispute the spirit in which we or anyone else may approach the hills—as long as nothing is done to downgrade the experience of others or of the mountain environment.
A more sophisticated argument against peakbagging relates to the existence of official “clubs” that pass out badges or scrolls to people who climb all 46 or whatever number. The charge is made that such clubs lure more people to the already overcrowded mountains or encourage “artificial use patterns” and spread a lot of traffic onto peaks and trails that otherwise might remain relatively pristine.
This is a respectable argument that deserves to be thought about. Four-thousand-footer clubs probably do bring more people to some of the lesser-known high peaks. This is a problem that ought to concern the clubs. It seems unlikely, though, that such clubs increase total traffic in the mountains significantly. People who hear about a club and start trying to “bag” peaks are probably people who already had taken up hiking seriously.
We do deplore groups that attract more crowds to the mountains because we think that many ranges are already reeling from the effects of too many people. We also deplore large parties at any time, because of their impact, especially their psychological impact, on the experience of others and the spirit of quiet and solitude. We’ll have more to say about these things later, a lot more. But we don’t believe the peakbagging clubs attract people who wouldn’t otherwise be there anyway. Others are guilty of that.
At any rate, whether clubs and their attendant publicity are valid, there seems to be no defensible argument against the pursuit of peaks as an individual’s objective. It’s all part of that “fine kind of madness.”