The Case Against Peak Bagging

You’re listening to Miles of Quiet. Episode Six. I was on a summit a few years ago, somewhere in the Sierra, and it was a good one. Long approach, thin air, the whole thing. I got to the top a little after ten in the morning, and the view was exactly what you’d want. Ranges stacked up behind ranges, going blue and then gray as they got farther away. And I stood there and took it in, and it was genuinely beautiful, and after about ten minutes I noticed something.

I was already thinking about the walk down. Because the thing about a summit is that it’s the exact middle of your day, not the end. You’ve climbed all morning to get somewhere you cannot stay, and now you have to go back down the same mountain you just came up, on tired legs, in the heat. I stood on that peak and did the honest math on what the summit actually was, and I’ve been chewing on it ever since. That’s what I want to talk about today. So.

I’m Henry Wilder. Last episode I got honest about van life, the parking lots and the frost and the water pump, all the stuff the pretty version leaves out. Today I’m staying honest but moving back to the trail, and I want to make a case that I know is going to bother some people. I’ve been on a lot of summits. The view is great for about ten minutes. Then you have to go back down the same mountain.

This is the case against peak bagging. Here’s the thing about that. If you don’t know the term, peak bagging is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the practice of collecting summits. There are lists. The high points of every state.

Every peak in a range over a certain elevation. The fourteen-thousand-footers in Colorado, of which there are a specific number, and people set out to climb all of them and check each one off. And I want to be fair right at the start, because I’m about to argue against this and I don’t want to strawman it. There’s nothing wrong with a list. A list gets people off the couch. It gives a season some structure, gives you a reason to train, gives you somewhere to point the truck on a Saturday.

I’ve used lists myself. Some of my best days outside started as a box I wanted to check. So this isn’t me saying summits are bad or that ambition is bad or that you’re doing it wrong if you like standing on top of things. It’s more specific than that. My problem is with what happens to your attention when the summit becomes the point. Let me try to explain the difference between a goal and a metric, because I think that’s the whole thing right there.

A goal is a direction. It’s a reason to go, and it can be a good one. A metric is a number that starts standing in for the thing it was supposed to measure. And the trouble with peak bagging, the way it usually gets practiced, is that the summit quietly turns from a goal into a metric. You stop climbing the mountain and start collecting the mountain. And the second that happens, everything that isn’t the summit becomes overhead.

The approach becomes something to get through. The forest becomes something you power-walk with your head down, earbuds in, watching your pace, because it’s between you and the number. You start treating four-fifths of the day as a tax you pay to get the one photo at the top that proves it counted. And I’ve done exactly that, so I know how it feels from the inside. There were seasons where I hiked with a checklist in my head, and I got to the top of a lot of mountains, and I could not tell you one honest thing about the walk up any of them. Because I wasn’t there for the walk.

I was there for the top. The walk was just the price. I remember one in particular, though remember is a generous word for it. It was one of the Colorado fourteeners, and I did it in a hurry because I wanted to climb a second one the same weekend. I know I stood on top. There’s a photo, so it happened.

But I could not tell you the color of the rock, or whether there was water on the way up, or a single thing I thought about between the trailhead and the summit. I have a clearer memory of the parking lot than the mountain. And that should have told me something years before it finally did. You can visit a place and never actually go there. Peak bagging is very good at arranging exactly that. I talked in the very first episode of this show about the long boring middle of a hike, the part where nothing happens and your brain finally goes quiet and starts actually thinking.

Peak bagging is the thing most likely to rob you of that, and it robs you of it in a sneaky way, because it feels productive the whole time. You’re not wasting the day. You’re crushing it. You’re making great time. And you get home having summited something and having experienced almost none of it, because your attention was three miles ahead of your body the entire way. That’s the cost, and it’s easy to miss, because a list doesn’t feel like it’s taking anything from you.

It feels like it’s giving you purpose. And I think that’s exactly why it took over. We are, most of us, trained from birth to want the measurable version of things. School handed us grades. Work handed us numbers. We learned early that effort only counts if it produces a score somebody can check.

And then we go outside, into one of the few places left that doesn’t keep score, and a lot of us don’t know what to do with that. The quiet is disorienting. So we import the scoreboard. We turn mountains into a list, because a list is legible in a way a slow afternoon isn’t, and we’d rather have a thing we can complete than a thing we just have to be present for. Peak bagging isn’t really about mountains. It’s about our discomfort with anything that can’t be finished.

Now let me tell you what I think you actually miss, because I don’t want to just talk about it in the abstract. I want to tell you about a day that had no summit in it at all, that I remember better than most of the summits I bagged. There’s a drainage I hike sometimes, a valley with a creek running down the middle of it, and it doesn’t go anywhere impressive. There’s no peak at the end. The trail just follows the water up into the trees and eventually peters out in a meadow that isn’t on any list and never will be. I went up there on a day when I had no goal, which used to be unthinkable for me.

And because I had nowhere to be by a certain time, I did things I never used to do. I stopped at the creek for an hour and just watched it, and found three or four spots where I’d want to fish if I came back with a rod. I sat against a tree and read for a while. I watched a dipper, which is a little gray bird that walks underwater along the bottom of streams, which if you’ve never seen one is a genuinely strange thing to witness, and I’d have blown right past it if I’d been making time. That’s the thing that gets me about the dipper. It was doing something genuinely remarkable, a bird walking on the bottom of a creek, and it asked nothing of me except that I be slow enough to see it.

A summit would never have shown me that. A summit shows you one thing, at the end, for about ten minutes. A slow day shows you a hundred small things and lets you keep as many as you’re paying attention to hold. I got to that meadow around midday, ate lunch, and turned around when I felt like it. No summit. No photo that proves anything.

And it’s one of the best days I’ve had outside in years, and I’ve thought about it more than I’ve thought about most of the peaks. Here’s what I think was going on. When you take the summit away, you take away the reason to rush. And when you take away the reason to rush, the whole day opens up sideways instead of pointing up. You start paying attention to what’s actually around you, because it stops being scenery you’re passing and starts being the place you’re in. The creek isn’t in the way anymore.

The creek is the point, or the dipper is, or the hour you spent doing nothing against a tree is. A summit gives you one destination and turns everything else into a hallway. No summit gives you a whole valley. I want to say something about the view, too, because the view is the argument people always come back with. But the view is worth it, they say. And sometimes it is.

I’m not made of stone, I’ve stood on top of things and felt my chest go open at what was in front of me. But be honest about how long that lasts. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and then it’s cold, or it’s crowded, or you’re hungry, or your legs are telling you about the descent, and the view that you climbed four hours for has quietly become a place you’re standing while you get ready to leave. The view is real, but it’s brief, and it’s a small slice of the day. And if you built the entire day around that ten minutes, you spent hours in service of a moment that, by its nature, can’t last. Whereas the walk, the creek, the boredom, the thinking, the dipper, all the stuff in the middle, that’s the part you were actually in for most of the hours.

That’s where the day mostly happened. I think about it like a meal. Nobody sits down to dinner and eats only the last bite because it’s technically the finish. The whole point is the meal. But peak bagging treats the mountain like the meal exists only to deliver that last bite, and everything before it is just chewing you have to get through to earn it. That’s a strange way to eat.

It’s a stranger way to spend a day outside. It seems backwards to me to treat the longest, richest part of the experience as the throat-clearing before the real thing. So here’s how I hike now, and it’s a change I made on purpose, and it took some undoing. I still climb things. I want to be clear about that, because someone’s going to hear this as me saying summits are for suckers, and that’s not it. I go up peaks.

But the summit isn’t the organizing principle anymore. I don’t build the day around getting to the top and back as efficiently as possible. I build it around being out for the day, and sometimes the top is part of that and sometimes it isn’t, and I try hard not to care which. I stop when something’s worth stopping for. I let the walk be the thing instead of the tax on the thing. And if I get to a summit, great, and if I turn around in a meadow two miles short because the light’s doing something and I want to sit in it, that’s just as good a day, and honestly it’s usually the better one.

There’s one more thing I’ve noticed since I stopped chasing the tops, and it surprised me. I enjoy the summits more now, on the days I do reach them. Because I’m not arriving depleted, having spent the whole climb resenting it. I get to the top having actually been on the mountain the whole way, and the view lands differently when it’s the high point of a good day instead of the entire justification for a hard one. Turns out the summit was never the problem. Making it the only thing was the problem.

Take the pressure off it, and it goes back to being what it should have been all along, which is one nice part of a day made of a lot of nice parts. The change I’d suggest, if any of this lands, is small. Take the number off the day. Just once. Go for a walk that isn’t measured by whether you got to the top of anything. Pick a trail that doesn’t lead to a summit, or pick one that does and give yourself full permission not to reach it.

And notice what your attention does when it isn’t being pulled toward a finish line. Notice how much more of the place you actually see when you’re not spending it three miles ahead of yourself. It’s the same thing I keep landing on with everything out here. The good stuff isn’t at the destination. It’s in the part you were tempted to rush through to get there. Nobody ever came back from a long hike and said the best part was the summit.

They always say it was something that happened on the way. That’s it. That’s the whole episode. Next time I want to go back to the river and get specific about something I’ve only circled so far, which is how you actually read moving water. What you’re looking at, why fish sit where they sit, and what years of standing in rivers has taught me about paying attention to anything, not just trout. I’m Henry Wilder.

This has been Miles of Quiet. Go somewhere that doesn’t lead to the top of anything.