Climb Ev'ry Mountain

Fifty Summits!

Our family moved to Switzerland seven years ago, and I immediately set out to explore the Alps, which begin a short drive from our home. One day a friend took me on a summit hike, and she opened up a new world for me. I discovered the joy of pushing myself, sometimes to exhaustion, as well as the wonderful feeling of empowerment in getting to the very tippy-top of a mountain and surveying the grand vistas below me.

My first Swiss summit, Stockhorn (2190m) in September 2019.

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Hulk Proud of Hulkself

I loved that summit hike so much that I decided to set an eccentric goal for myself—to hike to the summit of as many mountains as possible. To make the challenge meaningful, I imposed the following rules:

1. The mountain must stand at least 300m¹ above its surroundings. (I refer any naysayers who think 300m is a mere hill to the charming Hugh Grant film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain, the whole plot of which turns on the fact that geographers have set the minimum height of a mountain at 300m.)

2. I allow myself to use cable cars and other transportation to get partway up the mountains if need be, but I must climb under my own power at least 300m.

3. It’s ok to do the same summit hike more than once, but if the total elevation gain is 400m or less, I only get to count the summit once. So, for example, I have hiked 900m up to the summit of Faulhorn (2681m) six times (so far) and count it as six summits, but my dozen or so hikes 350m up to the summit of cute little Belpberg (892m), only count once.

The most elevation gain I have ever managed in a single hike is 1000m, and during a single week a couple of years ago, I did two strenuous summit hikes, ascending more than a mile under my own power. A few weeks ago, I hiked to the summit of a mountain for the fiftieth time. Hulk proud of Hulkself!²

Celebrating summit fifty, Niesen (2362m), with a well-deserved beer.

These accomplishments are especially meaningful to me, because as a total klutz who is blind as a bat to boot, I am terrible at team sports. As a kid I was the last to be picked for the kickball team, the first to strike out, and the most likely to (literally) drop the ball. If you have never experienced the groans, grumbles, and eyerolls from other kids forced to have you on their team, I envy you!

It was only as an adult that I realized that in fact I loved being physically active out in nature. I wasn’t bad at exercise; what I was bad at was PE, with its emphasis on drills and skills for team sports and its tendency to humiliate uncoordinated kids. So the first lesson from my summits challenge is that we should not let other people decide for us whether we are good at something. What may look like a lack of ability may just mean that we haven’t yet found the right outlet for our interests and talents.

Don’t Be a Dumbass

Last summer, on a steep, rocky trail with sheer drop-offs all around, I encountered an Unprepared Hiker:

The guy, a friendly American, was in the middle of an around-the-world hiking trip. He wore sneakers, shorts, and a t-shirt and had no backpack, no poles, no food or water, no nothing. He showed me a video of a hike he had done in Argentina in the middle of a blizzard, for which he was dressed pretty much like the guy in the costume. Amazingly everything turned out ok. Ah to be young.

The rest of us need equipment, for safety and enjoyment alike. There is currently a debate raging on one of my favorite podcasts, Blocked and Reported, about hiking boots. One co-host and her partisans maintain that savvy people hike in regular sneakers, because hiking boots are heavy and kind of dorky.³ I don’t know what the trails are like where the members of Team Sneaker live, but here in Switzerland hiking boots are de rigueur, if for no other reason than that we need traction to keep us from falling off the mountain.

This sign is giving us excellent advice. I know from personal experience that this ridge trail is about to get extremely hairy—and impossible to navigate safely in sneakers.

Hiking poles are controversial too. I get that they make us look old, but they provide the stability that allows us to take more difficult hikes. Plus, they turn hiking into a whole-body workout. And perhaps because I have the metabolism of a hummingbird, I also recommend not stinting on food and drink. Calories are good! My go-to-hiking treats are very Swiss: cheese and beer. But whatever you enjoy, consume lots of it, with gusto, not guilt. Because whether on hikes or any other of life’s adventures, we are doing something hard. Accepting help is not a cop-out. It is the only way we will succeed.

People Are Pretty Terrific, Actually

Honesty compels me to admit that I was once young and foolish—the Unprepared Hiker, the dumbass. Almost thirty years ago, my husband and I did our first summit hike up Montana’s Cinnamon Mountain (2814m). We were used to casual walks around our home in DC, where it is relatively flat and also at sea level. We didn’t realize that you become dehydrated quickly at higher altitudes, so we didn’t take enough water. We started to get into trouble near the summit. Both of us developed severe headaches, and we were worried that we wouldn’t be able even to get back down, let alone manage the summit. But God watches out for babies and fools. Two people on horseback came up behind us and gave us their two-liter bottle of water, which we drank down on the spot.

I have written before about my love for hiking culture. We hikers look out for one another. There was the older man who heard me gasping for breath and ordered me to rest on a boulder, or the man who, scandalized that I had never tried fondue, treated me to hearty lunch. My fiftieth summit hike was my first this season above 1500m, and the altitude was getting to me. My ascent was slooooooow. Every person who passed me (there were many!) stopped to check that I was ok. Of course they did, because, as a wise woman once sang, “the reason we’re here / . . . is to love each other / take care of each other.”

At Some Point You Will Step in a Cow Pie

And no matter how fancy you are, you will eventually pee in the woods. Yes, you too. Me too. You will argue that no, THIS is the correct path, and to prove it you will step off the trail and immediately sink knee-deep in the mud in front of everyone. You will trip over a root and—in full view of concerned picnickers—will flail wildly, and when you recover your footing you will cry out triumphantly “TA DA!” to their amusement. You will be hot and bedraggled and covered in dust (and lord knows what else). You will ask a fellow hiker to take your summit photo, and he will insist you remove your hat, which reveals a sweaty, disheveled mess for all the world to see.

Portrait of a lady with hat hair at the summit of Bettmerhorn (2647m), with the Aletsch Glacier in the background.

And you won’t care one tiny little bit how you look, because you know that caring about how we look is the enemy of joy.

I mean this metaphorically too. In a video, the novelist Ocean Vuong discusses the “self-consciousness of trying”:

This “cringe culture” is “I don’t want to be perceived as trying and having an effortful attempt at my dreams.” . . . I think [students] are absolutely scared of judgment. And so in fact they perform cynicism, because cynicism can often be misread, as it often is, as intelligence. . . . But in fact they are deeply hungry for sincere, earnest effort.

Readers, this post is a plea for the courage to engage in sincere, earnest effort. We are happiest when we take on something difficult, try, fail, try again, fail again, fail better, and maybe one day succeed.

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A lot has changed for me since I first began this challenge. For example my knees. I used to be able to bound around unencumbered, even on the toughest trails. Now I need my poles on every hike and will sometimes resort to bumping down the steepest bits on my butt. A recent, wretched, descent of 720m over 4km⁴ made it clear that from now on I should take a cable car down instead of taxing my aging joints.

I have set a new goal of sixty summits by age sixty. I’m currently at fifty-one summits and have a few more years to go before my self-imposed deadline. But once I hit sixty summits, I will declare mission accomplished. And that’s the final lesson: All good things come to an end. And when the end comes, we face our next challenge, to accept these inevitable changes with grace. And then we look for a new challenge and begin again.

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How about you, readers? Have you ever taken on an eccentric challenge? What rules did you set for yourself to make it more meaningful? What did you learn from the experience? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Of course today’s tidbit is “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,”⁵ ravishingly sung here by Audra McDonald:

To paraphrase Anthony Lane’s line about Idina Menzel, when Audra McDonald nails a song, it stays nailed.

1. For American readers: To convert meters to feet, multiply by 3.28.

2. H/t our son, Noah, who invented this expression when he was in elementary school.

3. For the record, I don’t like big clunky boots either. My hiking boots are minimalist. They are low-cut, light, waterproof, and breathable, and they have good traction. Infinitely superior to sneakers, in my opinion.

4. For the uninitiated, this is an exceptionally steep descent.

5. Here’s an amusing family story about this song. When our kids were little, we attended a performance of The Sound of Music. In the final scene, as the Von Trapps are escaping over the Alps, accompanied by a rousing chorus of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” sung by the entire cast, Casey leaned over and whispered, “Won’t all that loud singing let the Nazis know where they are?”