Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
icated to visiting the highest elevation in every U.S. state. The club was founded by Jack
Longacre, an Arkansas trucker who enjoyed visiting state high points and started noti-
cing the same names recorded in all the peak registers, some boasting about their personal
moresensethanmyself!”In1986,theeditorsof
Outdoor
magazinelethimrunashortitem
looking for like-minded collectors; thirty replied. The following year, nine of them met
atop Mount Arvon, Michigan's highest point, and that became the first of the club's annual
“Konventions.”
*
I suppose I also started highpointing before I knew there was a club. A few years ago,
my wife and I hiked Mount Greylock in northwest Massachusetts to admire the fall foliage
in the Berkshires from above. It was an easy hike—at only 3,491 feet, Mount Greylock
is less than half the elevation of Flora Mountain, the
hundredth
tallest peak in my home
state of Washington—but somehow I felt very rugged and manly knowing I was standing
atop the
entire state
of Massachusetts. After discovering online that as many as ten thou-
sand like-minded people share that rush, I track down Craig Noland, official Highpointers
“membershipguy.”He'smanningtheclub'ssign-uptableataSmokyMountainwilderness
show in Pigeon Force, Tennessee, when I call him up.
Craig's been to forty-six of the fifty state high points and come within a thousand feet of
two more. “I got blown off Mount Hood [in Oregon] in a snowstorm once,” he tells me in
a thick, friendly southern accent. “I doubt if I'll get Alaska. I'm older now, and I'm more
decrepit, and I've got too much steel in my back.”
But most U.S. high points aren't the forbidding peaks you're picturing, like Hood or
ie like me who thinks a crampon is something you might buy in
that pink aisle
of a drug-
store. Some are even less rugged than Mount Greylock: Delaware's highest point, for ex-
ample, is in a trailer park. Ohio's is a vocational school flagpole. The highest point in Flor-
ida is Britton Hill—at 345 feet, the lowest high point in any state and considerably lower
There are copperhead snakes,” Craig says helpfully.
It'sastrangelyarbitrarypursuit,visitingplaceswithnoinherentinterestjustbecausethe
capriciousness of manmade borders has put them on your checklist. George Mallory said
he wanted to climb Everest “because it's there,” but what brings three hundred people a
year to a slight rise in an Iowa cornfield? There's really nothing to see; Mallory might say
they're visiting “because the map says something's there, but there really isn't.” The quest
is even more puzzling in the cases of collectors like Peter Holden, who has eaten at more
of the 8,500 Starbucks locations in North America. They
never
get to check off a Mount
ShastaoraTahitifromtheirlists.Theirtravelgoalsaredull,ubiquitous,andnearlyidentic-
