A blue heron looked up from the slimy water and gave me a sly sideways look, just as the digits 11,999 started to roll.  This was during a 1.6-mile barefoot stroll along the paved trails of Andrew Brown Park, Coppell, Texas.  I’m kidding – I don’t actually carry an odometer.  Rather I measure distances using a GPS watch and track my training (walking, hiking, running) in an excel spreadsheet with 16 tabs stored in the cloud.  It’s only in the spreadsheet that I see the world in digits.

From Andrew Brown Park it was off to DFW and then there was the long flight back to New York and a dark drive home in the rain.  The next morning, I emerged from boreal gloom onto the open summit of Wittenberg Mountain, where the southern view unfolds before your eyes as you step toward the edge of a flat sandstone ledge – nearly 100 miles of rolling green ridges, spring forests, hazy clouds — and it occurred to me that this, too, will end.  Instead of counting up past 12,000, maybe I should be counting down from (X-12,000) to zero, where X is my total lifetime mileage.  Only, I don’t know X.  Not yet.  But with each year it’s drawing closer.  I can sense it, just like when parachuting at night, how the invisible horizon rises to greet you – that’s when you flex your knees and get ready to roll.

Barefoot Peak-bagging

On the subject of digits — the last thousand miles of barefoot training included nineteen (19) mountains.  Last summer I climbed Maine’s 14 high peaks and a single Catskills mountain, but by the time December rolled in, it was time for footwear again. 

I was lounging in my favorite recliner, fire crackling behind the screen, on a dark dismal evening in the dying days of 2023.  Staring at the flames.  Pondering my future.  Hungering for something ambitious.  Craving a goal so audacious – something so big and bold it would take a spreadsheet to keep track of.  I flipped open my laptop, accessed my training log, and counted up all the mountains I’d climbed barefoot, starting with Peekamoose Mountain in September 2015.  The count was 351.  Which comprised some 200 barefoot Catskills peaks (practically in my back yard), plus the high peaks in the Adirondacks, New Hampshire, and Maine, and two ascents of Mt. Whitney in California’s High Sierra. 

I reasoned to myself that if I’d climbed so many peaks barefoot, it was presumably an activity I enjoyed.  So why not sign up for more.  And make it a multi-year project.  Which would force me to manage the aging process thoughtfully (an eminently sensible idea).  Walk that narrow ridge between doing too much, which risks catastrophic injury — and too little, in which case opportunity slips through open fingers like sand.

So I decided to set a goal of 1,000.

The new target meant that I would have to climb 649 peaks in my remaining lifespan — or rather in my remaining healthspan, which for the average American is only 64 years.

Part of the reason for the big number was my interest in encouraging other people to give barefoot mountain-climbing a try.  It’s such an intense and primal way to engage with nature.  It teaches agility and balance and is good for foot strength, which may deteriorate when you wear shoes all the time.  And it’s great fun — except for sharp rocks and gravel — but once you learn to take your time, the obstacles turn out to be manageable.  My logic went like this — if I told someone I’d climbed a single mountain barefoot, they might take it as a stunt, but if I finished the thousand, they’d conclude the sport is more accessible than it might seem.

Excited to have a new mission, I flew out to Phoenix for the holidays.  There I climbed Camelback Mountain, Piestewa Peak, and South Mountain, my left knee feeling a little stiff, which I attributed to Stairmaster sessions earlier in the month.  On the descent from Superstition Peak 5057, I slipped on gravel and jammed the knee, and now it really burned.  I limped down the mountain.  Limped through the airport the next day and flew back home.  Limped over to see my sports doctor, who diagnosed an “irritated” meniscus. 

Five months later, it still aches.  But I’ve finally got back into action, with five peaks in the Catskills complete – which I’ll tally up in my next report, when I get to 13,000 miles.

(If interested, you can track my progress at www.1000mountainsproject.com)