Photo by Phil Brown

Nate enjoys the view from the summit of East Dix.

The height of insanity

By Nathan Brown

You’ve been crawling for two miles up a rocky trail. Your pack, which didn’t seem so heavy at the start, is yanking at your shoulders. You can hear the sinews in your neck rip like a piece of cloth. Your throat is sore and dry. You close your eyes and swallow a ball of phlegm that your throat is too ragged to spit up. With your last ounce of strength, you shake your water bottle. It’s still empty.

This doesn’t sound like fun. And yet some people climb mountains willingly. My question is, why?

Historically, this isn’t something people enjoyed. That’s why every culture, as soon as it can, acquires donkeys, camels, elephants, llamas, horses, reindeer, huskies—anything to ease the burden of hiking. Of course, armies still marched during war and hunters hiked to find game, but they had to. It was work. They didn’t enjoy it any more than the guy in the field dragging a plow for 14 hours enjoyed his work.

Still, we have in our midst deluded souls who think that it’s fun to spend the weekend trudging up mountains. Living in upstate New York, we’re exposed to this sickness more than most. We live near the Adirondacks, a haven for those who equate blisters with bliss. The Mohawks, who gave the mountains their name, weren’t big on climbing. By and large, they avoided the mountains. They gave the Algonquins, their enemies to the north, the epithet “Adirondack”—which means “bark-eater.” The Mohawks did most of their hunting south of the Adirondacks, because no game animal with any intelligence would choose to live in a place where it can snow in July. The Algonquins apparently did hunt in the Adirondacks and were reduced to eating bark. Mmmm. The aboriginal ancestor of the granola bar.

I probably have more experience hiking than most kids do. My father loves to hike. He can hike 20 miles in a day. He even wrote a book about the Adirondacks. This means I have wasted many perfectly good days trudging up the High Peaks and other summits. I’m supposed to derive a sense of accomplishment from this. Yee-haw, I can walk uphill. When I was a little kid and too stupid to complain, my Dad thought that I loved hiking. No, it was just that my lungs were too empty to waste air complaining. Now, my lungs are a little bit bigger, so I can voice my opinions a little more readily. Not that this makes a difference.

One of the more amusing ways to cope during a hike is to imagine yourself somebody from long ago who is doing some sort of drudgery. I could be an Aztec porter, with 100 pounds of jade and tobacco tied to my head, marching down the narrow, paved roads built by my people. Or I am a Roman slave in the gold mines of Spain. I pretend that the cuts from branches are whip scars; that makes it more fun. Occasionally, I get too lost in fantasy, stumble backward into a sapling and end up with hemorrhoids.

I hike because my Dad makes me. But why do people willingly do it? If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to hike, then you’ve probably noticed that most hikers are men. Maybe they need to prove their masculinity. They don’t know how to fix a toilet and they’ve never killed a bear, but damn it, they’re still men if they can climb to the top of a mountain. Maybe they’re trying to convince themselves that they’re as tough as the men of past generations. Television, computers, overstuffed chairs, fast cars and fast food haven’t made them fat and lazy. They could build the Pyramids if they had to. The fact that past generations did all that work so future generations wouldn’t have to doesn’t seem to occur to them.

This is just one possible explanation, and perhaps it’s not the right one, but it’s as good as any other I can think of. Until we get around to classifying the craving to hike as a psychiatric disorder and put some of these nuts in therapy, we’ll never know the truth. I just hope it’s not genetic.

Nathan Brown, lives in Saratoga County and has trudged up about 40 mountains in the Adirondacks. His father is the editor of the Explorer.

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