Grid hikers take on 48 4,000-ft mountains

Grid hikers (from left to right) Bruce Pfendler, Al Aldrich (in orange), Ed Hawkins,

and Guy Jubinville stand atop South Twin Mountain after having already climbed North Twin Mountain.

They were en route to Galehead Mountain. All three peaks are more than 4,000 feet in elevation.

The term 'grid' is spare and scientific, speaking neither to wonders of nature nor the pulse of personal endeavor.

For a small but growing group of relentless New England hikers, though, the grid - catalogued on a spreadsheet 48 rows deep, 12 columns wide - documents a particular pursuit of both mountains and motivation.

Forty-eight is the number of 4,000-foot peaks in New Hampshire's White Mountains; 12 the number of months in a year. Hike each 4,000-foot peak in each month of the calendar, and you summit the grid's magic number: 576.

The feat apparently was first accomplished two decades ago by a longtime bagger of peaks. Since then, seven others have joined him, including Ed Hawkins, thought to be the second to finish, in 2002, and now at work on his third and fourth grids.

The attempt itself can seem both obsessive and sublime. It sets a ridiculously distant goal for those not satisfied with other traditional measures of the mountains, such as a single loop of the 48 4,000-footers, or summiting all 67 of New England's 4,000-footers, or climbing New England's highest 100 peaks. Yet the grid also delivers those who pursue it where they've always wanted to be: enjoying the White Mountain heights, where boreal chickadees whine in the fir-spruce forest, or a flock of winter finches rides the wind over a ridge.

Hawkins explains it like this: "Doing the grid gets you back to what you originally started doing. Just to be outdoors."

It's hard to know how many people are now attempting this significant expansion of the single-layer goal of summiting New Hampshire's 4,000-foot peaks one time, no matter the season.

Hawkins maintains an e-mail list on which he announces many of his upcoming hikes to more than 200 people. During one week in September, for example, Hawkins hiked the Kinsmans on Wednesday, Mounts Tom, Field, and Willey on Thursday, and Mount Moosilauke on Saturday morning, for which he had to hurry to beat foul weather.

Hawkins is 62. He types his e-mails in capital letters:

"HI TO ALL

THIS COMING WEDNESDAY, NOV 5, WE WILL BE HIKING THE TWINS AND GALEHEAD.

THE PLAN IS TO MEET AT THE GALE RIVER TRAIL TRAILHEAD PARKING LOT, OFF THE GALE RIVER LOOP ROAD, AT 7:00 A.M. . . .

ALL HANDS SHOULD BRING A MINIMUM OF 2 QUARTS OF H20 FOR THIS 12.0 MILE TREK. . . ."

Getting started

Seven hikers idle in the cool of daybreak, wearing boots and gaiters that cover their lower legs, packs pulled snug on their backs, with ice spikes and hiking poles dangling. Not 50 feet up the wet-leafed track, Al Aldrich, 62, says of the grid's 576 climbs, "You don't set out to do them all."

The decision to hike the grid, in other words, happens in increments, maybe after climbing all of the 4,000-footers, or doing them all in winter. What more?

Aldrich, of Jackson, N.H., played basketball during high school in Swampscott. Then he played tennis during one decade and ran races the next. Before the hike toward North Twin peak, and South Twin and Galehead beyond, Aldrich was "78 percent" done with the grid. He has also stood on the highest point in 40 of the 50 states.

"If I had started earlier I'd be excited to go up to Denali [in Alaska], but not now," Aldrich says. "So we'll end up with 49 states."

Shafts of soft sunlight sift down the narrow valley. The group hops rocks across the Little River, and the trail gets steep.

"After you've gone through the humidity, flies, and bugs. And you think, 'People do this in winter?' " says Guy Jubinville, 56. "It's almost more fun."

Jubinville, who lives in Twin Mountain and has worked for a decade as custodian at the Appalachian Mountain Club's Highland Center, in Crawford Notch, completed the grid in October, the culmination of 14 years of hiking. He recalls a particular trip to the summit of Mount Jefferson in December 1993. It was 25 degrees below zero.

"An epic, we call it," Jubinville says. "And we survived it. We made sure everybody was good. . . . We had people shivering. And we had to move."