Shakedown city

OK campers, after months of radio silence I am finally getting my act together to start posting. As you can imagine, this big expedition was a no-go because of the COVID-19 situation, and also because of a lot of family and financial details I had to work out.

Now that work is largely done, and I have been itching to hit the road. Jane is off for a week with her sisters on Lake Winnepesaukee, so time to strike while the iron is hot.

Some of you have seen my fancy new bicycle, which is finally fully assembled with all the bells and whistles, but untested. Since Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are relatively safe, this is the opportune time to take a shakedown cruise, deliberately load the bicycle up as heavily as possible, and see if anything rattles loose.

I could go on at length about the bike, but that will have to wait until later. Most of you probably don’t care anyway. I will give you fair warning if I do.

As the title of this blog grandiosely suggests, my principal objective for this expedition is to reach as many state high points as possible, completely under my own power. I am not alone in this curious compulsion, the Highpointers Club lists many hundreds who have done all 50 of them, but as far as they know, all got there by car, either to the summit itself or to the trailhead. It seems to me that if you were going to climb these suckers, you should do it from the bottom. I admit that the whole thing is foolish, but if you’re going to do it, you might as well really do it.

If you wade through the Denali chapter of this website, you will come fairly rapidly to a discussion of how this all got started, with my good friend Brian Sawyer, in 1973. Even then we felt a need to climb these from the bottom. Early on we did Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, the highest point east of the Mississippi, and rather than just drive to the top we searched around for a trail that started as low as possible. Over the years, this compulsion is only gotten worse, and now that I have retired I finally have the chance to take a long trip and try to achieve this goal. Jane is dubious about the whole enterprise, and really is not in favor of this, but has graciously accepted it, kind of. More about that later.

I’m sure many of you are scratching your heads and wondering what possessed me to get started down this cockamamie path in the first place, perhaps on the pages of this journal I will try to articulate this. For now, however, let’s just get started.

Right away, I will need to explain what I mean by climbing the high points “from the bottom.” The location of the lowest point of each of the states is often ambiguous or ill-defined, so for simplicity sake I am just going to try to start at sea level. I won’t try to do this between each state, but I do want to “zero out” at sea level at the outset.

Limiting myself to Northern New England, the obvious choice is Mount Washington. This is the highest in the northeast, and a formidable peak, quite dangerous despite its relatively low elevation compared to the west. I believe more people have died on this mountain than any other in the US, including Denali, mostly From not taking it seriously. I have climbed it a bunch of times, but I always from a parking lot on one side of the mountain or another. For this trip, I plan to go to the ocean first, and then to the trailhead. The closest the ocean gets to Washington is in southern Maine, so I have selected Goose Rocks Beach in Kennebunkport, where Jane and I spent our first romantic getaway in 1981.

The bike is “loaded for bear“ like a pack mule, with a backpack, hiking poles, boots, enough gear to brave the harsh weather up there, despite it being in the 80s and 90s at the lower elevations, along with camping gear (both hammock and tent, since I prefer the former but often it’s not feasible at the campgrounds), cooking gear, bike tools, food, and electronics. I was horrified to see that bike and all the gear weighed 105 pounds. Ridiculous, I know, but again this is a shakedown cruise. I need to learn the hard way what I can do without, obvious as it may seem to all of you.

OK, time to hit the road. At 9:30 on Friday, July 24, 2020, the mule rattled down our driveway and headed east.