The Firewood 003: Peakbagging Peekamoose
Say that 5 times fast. This time, we go into the ethics of expensive bragging-rights mountain hikes, and I try really hard to not talk about my Wrangler.
Hello, friends.
First of all, thank you so much for the kind notes you’ve passed along since I launched this project. As a gesture of my appreciation, I am going to spare you all from yet another rant about car ownership in New York City. Because I almost did that, and then realized that’s what I sent you all last week.
Anyway, this weekend I’m headed back upstate because the foliage is peaking, and I am ever grateful to my friend Kate for having a futon for me to sleep on because I was unable to install the overlander tent on the Wrangler due to the prior owner having some weird aftermarket parts installed that require an actual mechanic as opposed to my brother helping me out in exchange for pizza. But I told you this wasn’t going to be about cars. This weekend’s plan, tent be damned, is to climb Peekamoose and Table Mountains, or as I’ll be logging them, numbers 14 and 15 out of 39.
Mountains, even if you don’t want to call them that
The Catskill Mountains are between two and three-and-a-half hours north of NYC, depending on where exactly you’re going and how bad the traffic is getting out of the city. They’re a province of the Appalachian Mountains that began their steady emergence about 350 million years ago as the accumulation of sediment deposited from a river delta, the water flowing downhill from a long-gone mountain range now known as the Acadians. You, more likely, know it from its cultural significance in the vein of midcentury Jewish resorts or ‘60s counterculture or New York Times trend pieces about bearded Brooklyn refugees buying up all the real estate.
They’re also home to something called “The 3500s.” There are, conveniently, 35 mountains in the Catskills with peaks at an elevation of 3500 feet or higher. And climbing all of them is a thing. If you do it, you get bragging rights and a cool badge.
Some of you reading this, I am aware, live in places with “real” mountains, and likely do not think that anything 3500 feet tall is a “real” mountain. Fear not. The 3500s challenge manages to be an actual challenge. About a half dozen of the peaks don’t have any trails and merit a bushwhack to the top, another half dozen are along the Devil’s Path, a 22-mile hike that seems like it was designed by a sociopath, and the organizers of the 3500 Club have stipulated that four of the mountains need to be climbed twice, once in between the winter solstice and spring equinox, which frequently means snowshoes are required. (One of the must-climb-twice peaks is Panther Mountain, distinguished from the rest of the range by the fact that it’s likely the remains of a meteorite impact crater.) So it’s a total of 39 hikes, not 35.
But the 3500s is actually not the most famous “peakbagging” challenge in New York; that would be the “46ers,” the 46 highest peaks in the taller (and geologically unrelated) Adirondack Mountains to the north. You can even buy a scratch-off map on Etsy. More famous yet, and involving considerably more altitude, is Colorado’s lineup of 14ers. On a smaller scale, some local tourism bureaus will concoct their own peakbagging challenges, like Maine’s Moosehead Pinnacle Pursuit, a six-peak hike with an added bonus for anyone who climbs all six in two days.
The dark side of the summit
Some hikers dislike the idea of peakbagging because it turns the excursion into a checklist item rather than a day in the woods. I admit I’ve soured on it some due to my recent growing aversion to the most famous peakbagging challenge of all, the Seven Summits. Not only did the pursuit of this goal end up killing a former colleague, but when you think about it, it’s primarily a bragging-rights achievement open quite literally only to extremely wealthy people with loads of free time, and several of the mountains are now experiencing severe environmental degradation from the impact of large numbers of people who try, often unsuccessfully, to attain the summit. In outdoors and entrepreneurship circles I’ve met a handful of people who hope to climb all seven, and they ranged from mildly to intolerably narcissistic. (My colleague who lost his life on Everest, a truly lovely and kind soul and most certainly not an egomaniac, was in the midst of a project to create Google Street View maps of the trails to each summit so that people could experience the world’s highest peaks from home. I still have ambiguous feelings about the ethics there.)
So I understand how problematic it can be to focus too much on the summit, and being able to say you’ve reached it. It’s the ultimate embodiment of human attitude crashing uninvited into the wilderness, of turning the hundreds of millions of years of orogeny underfoot into something for you to conquer, or more coarsely, to “bag.”
A story told through mountain peaks
But, if I may, I’d like to make two arguments in praise of peakbagging. Not the lavish, exotic, hire-a-private-guide, look-how-I’m-cashing-out-my-stock-options peakbagging of the Seven Summits and its ilk, but the fun kind that involves state park trails, no-frills campsites, and occasionally needing to call the landline phone of some weird hermit to ask him if you can access a trail that’s on his property.
Rediscovering one’s inner wilderness is not like suddenly finding the TV remote behind a couch cushion. It’s a gradual process. Most of us humans, at least those of us raised in Western cultures, can straight-up freak out if you throw us in the woods and don’t tell us what to do there. The scheduling and planning required around peakbagging gives you some structure, and also encourages you to spend more time outside in pursuit of the goal.
A story told through mountain peaks may be a happy one or a heartbreaking one or a triumphant one, but it is almost certainly a beautiful one that fuses the persistence of the natural world with the passage of human time. The photo near the top of this mess of words is from the summit of Indian Head, my first-ever Catskill 3500, on my 26th birthday nearly 10 Octobers ago. I don’t think I even knew about the 3500s Club. But I found the photo today while writing this, after consulting my Peakbagger.com profile for what the heck my first 3500 had been. According to Google Calendar archives, I’d run 12.5 miles the day before, which makes me feel very out of shape now. But self-critical guilt aside, I spent some time today meditating on where I was, and where I’ve gone, and what I still have yet to climb.
I’ve now hiked 13 3500s, including two of the required double hikes (Panther and Slide); this weekend’s plans will make Peekamoose and Table the next two if the weather and my hip joints hold up. That’s another thing: Mountain goals, even if they’re small ones, are humbling. You can have a checklist and schedule and color-coded calendar items all planned out, but you’re really just beholden to the pace of nature and your own body. There is, somewhere in there, a lesson in there about surrendering and relinquishing control.
Stay wild and don’t unsubscribe,
Caro
PS: I know I told you I wasn’t going to talk about cars, but a word of advice: If you buy a used Jeep, make sure you find out what aftermarket parts the last owner installed, and if the dealer can’t give you a good answer, take it to a mechanic for an assessment. TRUST ME.