Up and down (continued)

Steve Smith, the proprietor of the Mountain Wanderer Map and Book Store, in Lincoln, New Hampshire, knows this culture almost as well as anyone. The co-author, with his friend Mike Dickerman, of the invaluable book The 4000-Footers of the White Mountains: A Guide and History, Smith became a member of the Four Thousand Footer Club in 1981. Now 51, he has since done all 48 a total of five times, including once in the winter. His wife, Carol, has climbed them as well. Smith grew up in New Jersey, and did some hiking in the Catskills when he was in the Scouts. Later, after moving to the White Mountains, he took up the activity again. "When you work up here, you see the mountains around you all the time, so I started to get back into hiking," he says. After buying a copy of the White Mountain Guide (of which he is now the co-editor) and seeing the list of 4000-footers at the back of the book, he decided that "it seemed like an interesting thing to do."

Asked to recall his most memorable experience on the trail, Smith seems momentarily stumped. He cites a few tense encounters with bears, and a night spent shivering in Guyot Shelter, in the Pemigewasset, when he and a buddy made the mistake of bringing light blankets with them rather than sleeping bags. Then there was the time he nearly got electrocuted. "Another friend and I were on Madison, and a thunderstorm hit completely without warning," he says. "We tried to run down those rocky trails, every second expecting a lightning bolt to zap us, and we made it down to tree line just before it really unleashed."

Smith is a font of Four Thousand Footer lore, telling stories about the legendary Gene Daniell, a co-editor of the White Mountain Guide, who’s an unofficial member of what Smith calls the "12-by-48 club" — that is, Daniell has hiked all 48 peaks in each of the 12 months of the year, a total of 576 trips to the top of New Hampshire’s highest peaks. About Brutus, a 160-pound Newfoundland, one of several dogs to make it through the entire list. (Brutus accomplished his feat during the winter months, as he is too furry to do much hiking in the heat.) About folks who’ve taken 45 to 50 years to do all 48, and about Tim Seaver, a photographer and ultramarathoner from Vermont, who in 2003 set a new record by making it to every one of the summits in three days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes.

To Smith, though, peak-bagging is a journey, not a destination. His philosophy is the opposite of what Brad and I were trying to do that rainy Columbus Day weekend seven years ago. After all, look at what we missed. One of the most stunning photos in The 4000-Footers (it’s also on the cover of the White Mountain Guide) is of a person standing at the edge of Bondcliff, with West Bond towering above him in the background. We didn’t see any of that.

"Try to appreciate each mountain for its own individuality and not just a name to be checked off on a list," Smith says. When asked about his best experience hiking, he replies, "Just being out in the Bonds on a crystal-clear day with some good friends. It’s hard to beat that."

Someday, I’ll have to go back.

You don’t have to harbor aspirations of climbing all 48 peaks to enjoy a hike in the White Mountains, of course. But after you’ve done a few, you might find that you get the urge to keep going, to see how many you can reach. Before long, the goal may not look insurmountable, as you begin checking off peak after peak.

What makes the 4000-footers enticing, I think, is that an ordinary person can actually hike them all without sacrificing life, limb, or fortune. Contrast this with the folks who hike the entire Appalachian Trail, traveling all the way to Georgia. Tramp about the White Mountains often enough and you’ll run across these so-called thru-hikers — especially at the AMC huts, where they’ll help serve meals and clean up in return for being allowed to spread their sleeping bags on the dining-room floor. They are an odd lot, which is not surprising. It takes four, five, six months to do the entire Appalachian Trail, making it a proposition that requires daunting amounts of time and money, as well as the ability to walk 12 to 15 miles a day and a superhuman capacity to withstand intense boredom.

You may recall that Bill Bryson, the author and hero of A Walk in the Woods, didn’t actually attain his goal of hiking the entire AT — not even close. If he’d instead set out for New Hampshire, he could, if he’d wished, have made it to the top of all 48 peaks in a summer or two or 10. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have written as good a book, but that’s another matter. The point is, the Four Thousand Footer Club is an endurance contest for ordinary people. Unlike the Appalachian Trail, unlike the Boston Marathon, unlike that God-awful footrace to the summit of Mount Washington that’s held every summer, this is something anyone who really wants to can actually do.

Later this year, assuming I can first squeeze in a hike to the top of Mount Moriah, I hope to get back together with Brad for our last two 4000-footers — the Hancocks — and finish what we began in 1968. Finally, we’ll be members of the Four Thousand Footer Club. I’m not sure what we’ll get — a patch to put on my pack, I guess. But we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that we’re part of a select group. And hey — maybe we’ll get started on the New England Four Thousand Footers, or the New England Hundred Highest. (Or maybe not.)

Ultimately, though, I agree with Steve Smith: Peak-bagging is not what it’s all about. "Man, to realize and appreciate the beauties of this chain of Mountains, must first visit them," writes Lucy Crawford, widow of Ethan, in her History of the White Mountains, published in 1846. "Neither can he learn them by riding over a railroad at lightning speed, or seated in a pent-up stage coach, catching a glance of their summits now and then, but he must pass over them and around them, seeking their most prominent cliffs and projections, for views in the beautiful valleys beneath."

In the summer of 2001, I took Tim and his friend Troy on their first real backpacking trip — a long hike to Galehead Hut, on the northern perimeter of the Pemigewasset, where we spent a couple of days scrambling up the Twin Mountains and Galehead Mountain. The first night, they were inside playing a board game while I sat outside.

In the dark — punctuated by occasional outbreaks of heat lightning — I could make out the Bonds to the east and the Franconia Ridge to the west. An enormous valley spread below me. Not a road or town was in sight. The vista must have been very much like it was when Lucy Crawford was writing her memoirs more than a century and a half ago.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com