Adirondack Forty-Sixers, The Obsession of the High Peaks

In the nineteen twenties, two brothers named Robert and George Marshall set out to climb every mountain in the Adirondacks that exceeded four thousand feet in elevation. They brought along their guide, a man named Herbert Clark. When they finished, they had climbed forty-six peaks. They called the project complete.

The problem is that when surveyors went back with modern instruments, four of the forty-six peaks turned out to fall just short of four thousand feet. The original survey, conducted without the benefit of precision altitude measurements, had been slightly wrong. This meant the club that formed to replicate the Marshalls' achievement, the Adirondack Forty-Sixers, was organized around a list that included four peaks that technically did not qualify.

The club kept the four peaks. The tradition was the point, not the altitude. More than ten thousand people have completed all forty-six since the Marshalls first did it in the nineteen twenties. The club operates on an honor system: you report your summits yourself, sign a form, and receive a patch. There is no one checking. Many of the summits are above treeline, exposed to the sky, with no shelter and no ranger station and no way to verify whether you were there. The assumption is that you climbed it because you said you did.

Mount Marcy, at five thousand three hundred forty-four feet, is the highest point in New York State. On its summit, the Hudson River begins as a trickle from a spring. From the top, on a clear day, you can see Vermont and the Green Mountains to the east, and the St. Lawrence Valley opening to the north, and the scale of the park below you is simply the scale of a wilderness.