Projects, Accomplishments, and Climbing New Hampshire’s 4000 Footers
We started hiking New Hampshire’s 4000 footers on September 26, 2020, except we had no idea we were starting a project. We thought we were just climbing some mountains.
I love a project. Give me a cookbook with a Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame and I will bake them all. Create an 11-mile walk that circumnavigates our entire town and I will walk it. New Year’s resolutions are my jam. I meditated for a year. I read only books by men for a year. I kept going with my resolution to do yoga every day for three years.
My husband does not love a project. As we approached the end of our 4000-footer project (which he fully embraced but eventually tired of conceptually, though he still liked climbing the mountains), I suggested that our next project could be climbing the highest mountain in every state. He said he didn’t want another project, he just wanted to be able to do what we want. Plus he had no interest in climbing the highest mountains in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Kansas. I, of course, thought climbing the highest mountains in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Kansas would be great, because I love a project and have a special fondness for projects that involve silly things like circumnavigating your town or climbing tiny biggest mountains.
The 48 4000 footers in New Hampshire’s White Mountains are exactly what they sound like: mountains taller than 4000 feet, 48 of them. If you’re thinking 4000 feet doesn’t sound like a big deal, you’ve probably never hiked the White Mountains, which make up for not being 14,000 footers or Himalayas by being rocky, rooty, steep, scrambly, long—and spectacularly beautiful. People who hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine usually get to the White Mountains after four or five months of hiking, at which point they think they are really tough and can do anything. Then they hit the White Mountains, where the AT goes through some of the gnarliest 4000 footers, and they get their asses kicked.
Hiking all 48 4000 footers is a thing. If you climb them all, you can get a certificate. Then you can do the grid, which is hiking every mountain in every month, so 48 x 12 mountains (we will not be doing the grid, but we met a lot of people who were ). You can also do a Direttissima, which is hiking all the mountains in a single hike (you can break the hike into sections, but you have to follow the route) (do I even need to say that we will not be doing a Direttissima? although we were passed on the trail by someone who was doing it as we headed to the peak of our final mountain).
When we decided to hike all 48 4000 footers, which was some time around that first hike, I bought a 4000 footer book and my husband downloaded AllTrails, because that’s who we are. At first we just climbed the mountains we felt like climbing, mostly southern mountains, which were close enough to our home just outside Boston that we could drive up and back in a day, and mountains that looked easy and/or fun (we realized this might not have been the best approach when we got close to the end and our remaining mountains were all far, hard, and/or stupid).1
Aside from a couple of mountains that were stupid (fuck you, Tom, Field, and Willey) or miserable (fuck you, pouring rain on the Wildcats), this was a great project, even, or perhaps especially, the far and hard (love you, Bonds, Presidentials, Owls Head, Isolation). We got to deeply know the White Mountains. We met lots of great people and had many excellent mountaintop conversations. We now have favorite motels and restaurants all over New Hampshire and are regular patrons of the world’s best Dairy Queen.
Most of all, we just really liked climbing the mountains. Of course we decided to do this project because it checked so many of our boxes: we are mountain people and nature people and view people and New Hampshire people and my husband is an animals and birds people (we saw a moose! but no bears, to his great disappointment). And these mountains delivered it all in spades, more than making up for the occasional aches, pains, rains, and frustrations. Plus it gave us something to plan, do, and remember together—you know, a project!
I’m not very good with accomplishments. I was brought up not to brag, and while I take pride in completing and achieving things, I tend to downplay them. When pressed, I’ll generally say that my children are my greatest accomplishment, which they absolutely are: as excellent people and my favorite people. But really I believe they are their own accomplishments. I made them in my body, did a reasonable job of meeting their needs, and bought them any book they wanted. But they were their own amazing selves so quickly that I really do believe they just came that way.
On the other hand, the accomplishment I’m most proud of, openly and in my own mind, is the two marathons I ran, one at 30, the other at 40 (I had planned for 50, but my left knee wasn’t having it). I’m especially proud of being faster than Oprah on my first marathon and cutting my time by 14 minutes on my second. The reason I’m so proud is that there was nothing easy, natural, or expected about me running a marathon. Though I started running when I was 18, I never thought of myself as an athlete, I’m stubby and clumsy, and I don’t think anyone, whether they knew me or not, ever said, wow, I bet she would make a great marathon runner. My marathons were sheer determination, planning, training, and grit. I decided to do them, I did them, and I’m proud of it.
We climbed our last 4000 footer on Sunday. Various circumstances left us with two mountains at the end, one that was just another mountain, one that was hard and beautiful. We chose to finish on hard and beautiful, which was the right decision, quite hard, and very beautiful.
I wrote about all our hikes on Facebook (we started way before this newsletter), so a lot of people got invested in our project and knew we’d finished. For the next couple of days, people kept telling me what a great accomplishment it was and asking me what our next project was and how I felt.
The funny thing is that I don’t really feel like it was that great an accomplishment—and I promise I’m not being self-deprecating. It was a big project, for sure, and I’m proud of it. But we were always going to complete it, because if there’s one thing about me, I can walk forever, and if there’s one thing about my husband, he will do what has to be done. We also did it over five years, which was an average of 9.6 mountains a year, but really was a lot of mountains in 2021 and 2022, when we were still emerging from the pandemic and there wasn’t that much to do, and fewer in the last three years, when life got complicated again. Because really, climbing 4000 footers just became part of our life, one of the many things we did on a regular basis: going to work, going to yoga (me), fishing (him), seeing our family…and climbing mountains. And life doesn’t feel like a big accomplishment, though I suppose it is, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Still, I do have to get better at being appreciative rather than dismissive when people tell me it’s a great accomplishment, because I know it looks like a big deal if it’s not part of your life.
Honestly, though, I mostly feel sad that it’s over. I mean, I’m also relieved, for at a certain point it became a bit of a burden to balance mountains and life in order to finish the project, not to mention the fact that life—snow melt, Covid, weather—kept disrupting mountains. But I’m also sad that we don’t have any more mountains to climb, that I don’t know when I’ll get back to the best Dairy Queen again, that I don’t…have a project.
My husband tells me not to be ridiculous, there are lots more smaller White Mountains to climb, and now we can climb any mountain we want. Of course he’s right, and we’re already planning to climb Mountain Mansfield in October (that would be the highest mountain in Vermont…just saying).
Maybe what I like best in life is the doing, not the having done.2 Which may be why I didn’t even consider gathering the documentation to get the 4000-footers certificate, but I’m already wondering when I will come up with a new project.
Book Thoughts
I followed up on my book review polemic by writing a review in which I share the whole plot. But: 1. so does the author, in the very first chapter; 2. it’s a memoir; and 3. there is still plenty of plot, even suspense, in the details, of which I share very few. The book is Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, and I could have written three times as many words as I was allotted. I didn’t get to talk enough about the writer-to-influencer pipeline (hello Glennon, hello Suleika) or serial memoirists (hello again Glennon, hello Michael Patrick MacDonald3) or how the issues Gilbert addresses in this memoir show up in her previous ones. I didn’t get to use so many good quotes or go deep on the poems and doodles or make my OG claim to have loved Eat, Pray, Love before it became a thing (not that I would have said that in The Boston Globe, but still).4 That said, Jia Tolentino gets a lot more words than I do, and her excellent New Yorker review covers a lot of that ground, though sadly not the poems and doodles. That said, Tolentino recounts the plot in enormous detail, so consider this your spoiler warning.
Because we still deserve nice things…
I was reading the New York interview with the Cyrus women, and when Miley said her dad likes Eva Cassidy, I was so excited I texted my husband, “Billy Ray Cyrus likes Eva Cassidy!”5 Then I thought, why do I always forget about Eva Cassidy? Also, I need to listen to some Eva Cassidy right now. So I did.
“Songbird” gave me chills. “Time After Time”? More chills. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”? I was crying. I kept listening, but it was basically more of the same, so I will spare you the details, and just say that she sings so beautifully, song after song of perfection.
Eva Cassidy was a singer in Washington DC, who died young of cancer. I had to look up the details—1996, melanoma, 33—which means that my memory of listening to her in the late 80s when I lived in DC is indisputably false.6 We used to listen to Songbird all the time, but it wasn’t released until 1998,7 so I don’t know what that false memory is about, except maybe identification leading to transmutation because she lived where I lived when I lived there, I had a big melanoma scare when I lived there, she was just a year older than me, and she died, which was just so sad.
Maybe you listen to Eva Cassidy all the time (maybe everyone listens to Eva Cassidy all the time and that’s why Billy Ray Cyrus likes her?). Maybe you remember her and forget her and remember her again, like I do. Maybe you’ve never heard of her. Either which way, she’s the nice thing, also the saddest thing, and the good thing about forgetting her is I get to remember her.
My two tips for this project are: 1. Think about the order of your mountains from the beginning, not just easy to hard, if you are a beginner, but also what you want to be climbing at the end. 2. Get on the trail early! Parking lots fill up, the early morning is beautiful, and you’re likely to have empty trails and even empty peaks. We met so many people heading up the trail as we were heading down, and we were always happy to be us rather than them.
OK, that’s a bit of a lie, because I often hate writing and love having done it. Except for this newsletter, which I always like doing, even this one which has been oddly difficult.
I have a theory about Michael Patrick MacDonald, but he never wrote the third memoir that would have proven it. Then again, not writing might also prove it.
Yup, I loved it. Bite me.
Miley also says, referring to basically everything, “It has to be joyful, meaningful, or lucrative,” which is wild because I almost wrote a book about leaving academia* in which I used “meaningful, enjoyable, and lucrative” as a frame for making career decisions (ideally you should have all three, if you’ve got two you’re doing ok, if you’ve got one you might want to go in a different direction, and if you’ve got none, I’m so sorry). Me and Miley! Who would have thought?!
*I had a publisher bugging me for chapters when I realized that writing the book would mean spending several years with miserable academics, first doing research, then promotion. I had finally recovered from being a miserable academic, and I couldn’t bear the thought. It was probably a bad decision, but I’ve made a lot of bad decisions because I couldn’t bear the thought, which probably means they were actually good decisions. (And yes, this is a footnote to a footnote.)
Now that I think about it, it also couldn’t have been the 80s because I listened to her with my husband and I didn’t live with him then.
Back when we listened to Eva Cassidy all the time, there were only two albums, or so we thought, or maybe that’s just all we had. Turns out there were a couple of early ones, and apparently someone has been churning them out every couple of years ever since. There’s also a musical and a 2025 film. So maybe she is a big deal and I live under a rock, alas for me.
If not knowing all of Eva Cassidy's music means you live under a rock, then I do, too--I don't know that I've ever even heard of her. So now I have something new to listen to! Also I loved your project. I have friends who visited every state park in VA, which is a manageable project that didn't seem like an accomplishment, but did seem fun, but I think we are just fundamentally not project people. Or else we haven't found our project.
We also love a good project and I love to complete a list! I’m not surprised, but I’m pleased that we have that in common. Some day, i want to follow route 1 on our bikes from Maine to key west. Peter is not yet on board for that. Let me know if you have any interest (obviously, we’ll have to be retired bc it’ll take a long time)