44 | ADIRONDACK PEEKS Mom Triumphant Ben Christenson, #11223 Mom drove to upstate New York every summer for almost fifteen years before she first hiked a high peak. Her boys went to summer camp at Deerfoot Lodge, located eight hours north of our house in Virginia. Once, she went up and back in one day. As her four sons grew older, she could rent a place when she came up, and after seeing two of her sons finish their 46, one in 2015 and another in 2018, she began to get the bug. She started with Cascade on August 1, 2017, and ended on Haystack six years later to the day. In that time, hiking high peaks changed from a diversion to an obsession. Her first three years, she knocked off the common day hikes: Cascade, Porter, Marcy, Giant, Rocky, and the MacIntyres. Somewhere around 2020, one of her sons told her, “You know, you could definitely finish your 46.” She hadn’t considered it, but as she did, she doubted herself: she was nearing 60. “That’s for people my kids’ ages,” she thought. Then, as she read stories in PEEKS of people older than her finishing, her hope and ambition grew. Nevertheless, she had a sense of urgency. She was not getting younger, and she didn’t know how long her body would hold up. As they say, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. True for finance, true for hiking. In 2022, she hiked 22 peaks on 8 different days with Dad, crafting intricate travel arrangements around his work schedule to get up to the Adirondacks as much as possible. After years of hearing fun stories from her sons—my brother finished his 46 on a ten-person, sunrise hike of Allen—now my parents began to add their own Adirondacks hiking stories to the family. One such memory came during my parents’ first camping experience in the Adirondacks. We set out on a clear and gorgeous day, and after Dial and Nippletop, we left our packs at Elk Lake to tag Colvin and Blake then return to camp. As the day waned, the wind picked up, the temperature dropped, and our sweaty t-shirts started to chill us. My parents were accustomed to warm showers and beds each night, and suddenly they were facing a night with no fire or other easy source of warmth. While I pitched our tent and set up our gravity filter, I noticed Mom struggling to eat her peanut butter-slathered tortilla through chattering teeth. I urged her to put on her warmest clothes and climb into her sleeping bag. I remembered from my Wilderness First Aid training that when dealing with a hypothermia case, “A cold brain is a dumb brain.” I wanted to make sure Mom was doing alright, so I asked for a report from the tent. Her hypothermic, eloquent response surprised me and instantly became family lore: “I’m shaking like a puppy in the house of an abuser.” Even chattering in her sleeping bag, exhausted from a day of packing, Mom has a knack for words. Mom makes a conscious effort to connect with her sons. When my brother was studying James Joyce in Ireland, she read Ulysses. I started rowing, and she read Boys in the Boat. Her interest in the high peaks started as a way to understand this place that was special to her sons. Living in the suburbs of Virginia, the beauty of the Adirondacks is spectacular and restorative, and we raved about it year after year. Over time, she not only came to understand our attraction, she became the Adirondacks’s biggest fan. She will now spend hours poring over listings to find an optimal hiking and family base camp for our summer vacation. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of lunch, dinner, and dessert spots in the region. While the rest of us settle into our routines for the other 51 weeks of the year, Mom says things like, “I go to the Adirondacks in my mind almost every week. It’s my happy place. Do you do that?” I do not. It’s easy while you’re hiking to appreciate the little things—clear weather, clean water—but Mom treasures that perspective and simplicity year-round. Mom and Dad’s hiking philosophy is, “slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” seldom stopping but seldom exceeding three miles per hour. Mom chooses her footing with care while Dad ends every hike caked in mud from the knee down. They’re good company: two solid interlocutors at a conversational pace with one designated klutz is a recipe for having fun and feeling good about yourself. Their final peaks were Basin and Haystack, and they set out from the Garden on a brisk, cloudy, fateful morning. Accompanying them were their three younger sons, witnesses to their achievement and comedic relief in the interim. We spent much of the hike, especially the overland to Slant Rock, just laughing at inside jokes. Life is busy nowadays, and having hours on the trail is a rare chance to talk withThe four 46ers in the family atop Haystack.
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