The new year is soon to be upon us and that means one thing. It’s time to set some new highpointing goals for 2023! This past year was filled with some epic adventures around some of the bigger peaks out West, including:
- My first glaciated climb on Mt. Hood, thereby summiting the highest point in my home state of Oregon.
- Getting weathered off Washington’s Mt. Rainier (just above 10,000’) due to an atmospheric river.
- A 10-day backcountry trip in the Wind River Range to nab Gannett Peak in Wyoming.
- And of course, a fall hike up Maunakea in Hawaii while I suffered from the dueling bouts of altitude sickness and the flu.
While each of these highpointing adventures was incredibly memorable, I’m feeling as if I’m ending this year filled with melancholy . I have 46 of the state high points under my belt now. The remaining four states – Montana, Washington, Nevada, and Alaska – are all within my crosshairs.
Finishing off this meager list of state high points will still take a bit of travel, a heap of good luck, and a fair amount money to achieve. But I’m feeling like someone entering their final semester of school. I’m so very close to the tail end of this journey.
To that point, I already booked a repeat attempt of Mt. Rainier (Washington) for late June 2023. And I plan to tackle Boundary Peak (Nevada) sometime in early June as part of my training for Mt. Rainier. Then there’s Granite Peak (Montana) – which I may or may not attempt in August 2023.
And if I’m being 100% transparent here, summiting those three peaks will probably be the end of my state highpointing quest. I’m just not sure I will ever have the desire to spend the approximately the $15,000 it will require to attempt a climb up Denali’s 20,310′ summit. When it comes down to it, I’m truly a hiker, not a mountaineer. I’d be just as happy going to Alaska, visiting the National Park and gazing up at that Denali from a trail.
Thus, I’ll probably be joining the ‘Forever 49’ club of highpointers, which means I could be done with all the state high points (that I will ever climb) within the next seven or eight months’ time. This wild goose chase around the country that began in the summer of 2018 is winding down quick.
WHAT NOW?
Nearing the end of this goal has left me feeling a bit rudderless. What is a high pointer supposed to do when all the state high points on their ‘to-do list’ have a giant check mark next to them?
Was I going to just walk away from the hobby of highpointing entirely? Or would I make a second trip around the U.S. – this time trying something new like visiting each state’s lowest points (most of which are rivers and don’t require any hiking or mountaineering)?
Probably not. My passion for this hobby was born out of my love of travel and hiking. Those are the aspects that resonated with me so deeply. I genuinely enjoyed being out on the trail and climbing up to that next big ridge or summit. So I’m not sure I could ever be happy being a lowpointer.
I was mulling this highpointing dilemma over in my head during my flight back from Maunakea when a sudden inspiration hit. If I wanted to keep highpointing, why not start a new list? One containing the highest natural point for every county in my home state of Oregon?
County highpointing is an off-shoot of this hobby. In fact, I hiked up to the Somerset County highpoint in Pennsylvania during the 2022 Highpointers Konvention this past summer. And I met several people at the convention who were pursuing the county high points in their respective states.
The more I thought about this idea, the more I genuinely liked it. Oregon is a wonderfully diverse state, with rainforests, volcanic peaks, coastal mountains, deserts, canyons, and more.
My thru-hike on the Oregon Coast Trail back in 2021 brought me tremendous enjoyment as I walked the length of the entire state from north to south along its western edge. I began to appreciate the nuance in the state’s landscape in a whole new way based on that 400-mile experience.
Wouldn’t highpointing across the state be an equally amazing way to enjoy and explore the state I love so much? I’d get the chance to trek in natural areas that were far off the beaten path in this new quest.
Moreover, there are 36 counties in Oregon, making this new list of high points significant enough in length to seem like a real challenge, but still reasonable enough that it wasn’t completely overwhelming (like Texas with its whopping 254 counties).
OREGON’S COUNTY HPs
Once I got back home with access to the internet, I did a little sleuthing to see what this new highpointing ambition would require from me. And the results only reinforced my excitement for this potential goal.
Several counties in Oregon seemed to share singular high points. I didn’t even need to hike up to the top of 36 completely different peaks to meet my goal of reaching the highest natural point in every county.
- Mt. Hood’s summit crossed Clackamas County and Hood River County in the northern part of the state.
- South Sister spanned both Lane and Deschutes counties in the center of the state.
- Mt. Thielsen’s summit was split by Douglas and Klamath counties in the south
- And climbing Mt. Jefferson would provide me an opportunity to potentially cross off three different counties because the peak’s summit straddled both Jefferson County and Linn County, and the mountain’s north ridge was highest point for Marion County too.
Of course, going after these county high points wouldn’t be an easy task. I didn’t live in a flat state like Kansas, where even the highest point had relatively little prominence. Instead Oregon’s high points would require some serious hiking and even a little mountaineering too (just like the U.S. high points).
However, one of the biggest benefits of living in a state in the Western U.S. is that most of these county high points are located on public lands. I only had to convince a handful of private landowners or timber companies to let me access their property to get to that county’s highest natural point.
They way I saw it, I’d finally have a wonderful new excuse to venture out beyond the Cascade Mountains on my backpacking trips. There were country high points located in the Wallowas, the Blue Mountains, Oregon Canyon Mountains, the Oregon Coast Range, the South Columbia Plateau, the Klamath Mountains, and the Northwest Great Basin Ranges!
This was a really good plan! It was like a whole new world was unfolding in front of my eyes, and all of it was right in my backyard within a day’s drive to the trailhead!
So as I kick off 2023, I have a new spring in my step. Highpointing isn’t over for me. I still have the handful of remaining U.S. state high points to look forward to climbing. But I also have a thrilling new list of county state points to work on too!