Originally appeared in The Sierra Echo, Vol. 69 No. 1, January–March 2025 (pp. 34–35)

I was awakened at some ungodly hour by a text message from my climbing buddy. It seemed a group of no fewer than six had been rescued that very morning from the west flank of Mount Baldy, a mountain notorious for its swift dispatch of novice winter hikers. A clip shown on our local news station featured a string of beleaguered bodies trudging through a blustery snowfield toward a search and rescue chopper. They formed a short train, each clutching desperately at the shoulder before them. My friend drew my attention to their outfits: nothing but cotton hoodies and grade-school backpacks.

We made a firm commitment then and there to end up on the local news for nothing short of some profound scientific discovery, certainly not as rescued hikers. This should have held particular relevance to me, as later that morning I was to head out for two days in the Pinto and Hexie Mountains. My plan, such as it was, involved scampering cross-country over inhospitable terrain to attempt the summits of anywhere between four and seven mountains. That doing so alone, equipped with little more than a certain semi-sacred list of peaks, could lead to a similar bit of news footage had not fully occurred to me.

Allow me to explain. Over the past few months my personal life had increasingly become dominated by a list of mountain summits. You might find it strange that some innocuous piece of paper, and one of questionable provenance at that, could carry such brute authority, but then look at the Bible. Regardless, the allocation of time and resources had swelled to the absurd, and the whole endeavor had taken on a hint of the pathological.

That’s not to say this was uncommon. Anyone who aspires to its completion soon discovers that such a list is tailor-made to induce a remarkable level of compulsion. Nor is there any shortage of lists to choose from. In fact, should you develop a sudden hankering to sabotage your marriage or put your livelihood at risk, there are no less than four reputable lists in Southern California alone. The Sierra Peaks Section, the Hundred Peaks Section, the Lower Peaks Committee, and the Desert Peaks Section—any one of which would pose a monumental undertaking. And yet, for reasons I’ll defer to a licensed psychiatrist to diagnose, I found it perfectly reasonable to tackle all four lists at once.

So I became a list man. Ricocheting from peak to peak—some technical, others pedestrian—I crammed as many highpoints into each outing as I could manage. My vigor waxed and waned, but not so my dedication. I dragged myself up long hot canyons and unrelenting slabs of granite in far-flung outposts of the Sierra and dusty corners of northernmost Mexico.

The appalling speed of my transformation struck me only a week ago while attending a formal dinner composed entirely of fellow list-obsessives. It was the annual banquet for the Sierra Peaks Section, an arm of the Sierra Club reserved for those who held in common that most formidable list of summits. These were no common dayhikes, but the most precipitously demanding peaks in the Sierra Nevada range, many requiring an intimate grasp of both ropework and mortality. So, highly accomplished mountaineers. And never mind that the median age of the room approached that of the local mortuary. These adorable octogenarians, having garnered a staggering list of alpine achievements, now struggled to remain awake beyond the late hour of 9PM.

There was the woman sitting across from me for whom a Class 3 pass was named—surely the highest of mountain honors—who spent the entire evening fiddling with her hearing aids. They had an intricate control box roughly the size of a shortwave radio and emitted a squeal so distressing that the keynote speaker often paused to await a more sympathetic frequency. Two seats to her left, a large man nodded off into his soup bowl. This once-intrepid climber, whose surname graced a particularly challenging alternate to a well-known 14,000 foot summit, had now developed the curious habit of responding to every comment with a long, tremulous “ahhh…” that somehow managed to sound neither quite like a declaration nor a question. But then there was his soft gaze to consider, as well as the furtive nature of his somnolence; and at the night’s end I watched a woman bring his car around so as to spare him the misery of crossing the small parking lot on foot. Sobering, to say the least. For while it may be common knowledge that the heroes of immortal legend are no such thing themselves, it is an unsettling thing to witness.

Which begs the question, why bother? Why struggle to overcome a mountain, let alone several hundred of them, all for no apparent purpose? The myth of Sisyphus comes to mind, in which the Greek king is tasked with rolling a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it tumble down again. (Whether there was a summit register at the top was never mentioned.)

Naturally, there is no shortage of examples as to life’s ultimate absurdity. But one so flagrant as a list of mountains, writ by committee and subject to change, seems to push the issue. And yet lists rule us unfailingly. Not only in the realm of outdoor sport—with the Triple Crown of Thru-Hiking, Colorado’s 14ers, and ultimately The Seven Summits—but also in polite society, where the obvious trifecta of career, spouse, and offspring has defined the lives of billions.

It is a tragic thing, some might say, to be driven to extremes. But so too indifference. Perhaps life, being wild and boundless, should resist all value judgements. All that is to say there was no more logical way to spend my weekend than motoring deep into the Mojave to wander its chalky gullies and tangled ridgelines. I’ll admit to a deep contentment at the long, lifted views above the basin, and how the sentinel mountains darkened, turning ocher with the sunset.

This may be the tranquility of nature. Or the base pleasure of achievement. A more jaded climber might say it is because when scaling mountains we face the paradox of life directly: that by imbuing it with meaning we deny its hollow essence. Regardless, the call of a good list is hard to counter. Though in the end one is as good as the next, and there is little difference in climbing a corporate ladder as the south flank of Mount Baldy. Provided, of course, we do so in something other than cotton hoodies and Jansport backpacks.

As printed in The Sierra Echo