Growing up, I would not have considered myself to be exceptionally out-doorsy. I did things outside and enjoyed it, but the combination of school, Iowa, and family meant I spent time doing other activities. But when I moved to Tucson, AZ for college I found my hobbies changing rapidly. I found myself in a friend group that prioritized hiking in the nearby mountains, often to peaks.
Through my friends I became aware of the AZ 20-20 Challenge, a grouping of 20 peaks and 20 canyons across Arizona that were hiker accessible. We worked on some of these peaks through my college years, and was my first real introduction to peak lists and peakbagging.
While in South Carolina, we began prioritizing state highpoints, and then when we moved to New York we focused all of our hiking efforts on state highpoints and the NY Fire Tower Challenge – which we successfully completed in only 10 months!
By the time we were in New York, I had discovered peakbagger.com – an excellent resource for peak minded hikers and climbers, as well as a host of other web pages associated with peaks.
Our Hawai’i years and Nebraska years saw a decrease in list related goals, though we still spent most all of our free time and vacation days outdoors, hiking, and, whenever possible, climbing peaks – and as always we tried to visit State Highpoints.
As we transitioned out of the Navy and into the commercial sector and started to realize the new found freedom that this new job would offer, I began seeing that my goals couldn’t be focused on any one area, because we weren’t planning on being in any one area for very long.
So, while hiking Wheeler Peak in Nevada, I came up with an idea. I would make a personal goal of hiking a total of 300 peaks with 300 meters or more of prominence by the time I turned 40.
Prominence is the metric of how far above the surrounding topography a point rises, which is different from elevation. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I would recommend reading the list of articles here.
Since starting this, I’ve found quite the group of like minded peak baggers. Some over at Baggers Without Borders, Peakbagger, and Lists of John. I log all my ascents on most of these sites.