It is not hard to climb to the highest point in Illinois, unless we are accounting for tedium. Charles Mound (elevation 1,235 feet) is on private property, and open to the public only a handful of weekends a year—including, to my good fortune, the Saturday and Sunday before Presidents’ Day. To get there, I cross the Mississippi River heading east from Dubuque, then drive another 20 twisty miles through the snow-covered pastureland of northwestern Illinois.
Charles Mound is just outside the village of Scales Mound (population: 400) and there are few indications of its claim to fame within town limits, except for signs advertising the High Point Storage facility. Once there—and by “there” I mean the side of the road, at a point marked only by orange arrows indicating what appears to be the entrance to a snowmobile trail heading into the woods—I pull on my wool hat and stuff my pockets with my phone and my last snack, a Hershey’s bar with almonds. I follow the snowmobile trail along a flat, slippery, snowy trail. After perhaps 10 minutes, the trail splits, and I follow more arrows, pointing east—only to realize after a few minutes that the snowmobilers and I may have different objectives, at which point I turn back down the hill, retracing my path.
As I do, I encounter another lone highpointer, who has followed me or the arrows in the wrong direction.
“Hey,” I say.
He nods and raises one hand halfway to his ear, the universal sign for “I’m not taking my AirPods out.”
I correct my navigational error and hike up this unspectacular hill—the sort of hill that might be known to children within a 12-minute driving radius (but not farther) as a good spot for sledding. I pass a pretty red barn, then a sign that reads: “HI-POINTERS: PLEASE PARK HERE ON GRAVEL ROADWAY AND CONTINUE BY FOOT.”
Is this true? Could I have actually skipped the hiking altogether and just started my ascent from here? Whatever the answer, I have arrived at the highest point in Illinois. Some states mark their highpoints with ornate monuments, but Illinois has made a different choice; I walk right past it, until I simultaneously encounter a “no trespassing” sign and recognize that I’m going downhill. After I turn around and retrace my steps, I see a flat marker that might be cheerful in the summer but in the winter has the look of a firepit used by a fugitive bank robber to roast squirrels. A few steps away is a marker boasting the stamp of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. Beyond, a panoramic view of rolling, dun-colored hills and bare trees. I take my pictures.
I am standing higher than anyone in the state of Illinois, unless they’re standing at the top of Chicago’s Willis Tower, which rises several hundred feet higher.
“Not much to it,” I say, to another solo highpointer, who reaches the summit a few minutes behind me.
“There sure ain’t,” he replies.
Midway down the hill, I pass another hiker, who asks me how much farther it is to the summit.
“Do you see that barn?” I say, eager to be helpful. “It’s that far, and that again.”
It’s the most I, or to my knowledge anyone, has spoken all morning.
Highpointing is a strange, singular endeavor: Hiking all 50 state highpoints requires the technical ability necessary to scale Denali, the highest point in both Alaska and North America, but also the frame of mind to seek out Ebright Azimuth, at 447 feet the highest point in Delaware; the primary danger at the latter is impeding traffic, since the actual highpoint is in the middle of an intersection. Few facts illustrate this unlikely combination of traits better than this one: About 6,000 people have summited Mount Everest, while only about 10 percent as many have climbed all 50 state highpoints. A 50-state highpointer will have hiked 40-plus miles through Wyoming’s Wind River Range to reach Gannett Peak and also journeyed out to Nebraska’s Panorama Point, which is only accessible by vehicle and is surrounded by bison and wind turbines.
Panorama Point has a rating of 3.5 stars on All Trails (even Charles Mound has a 3.9), but in the plaintive reviews I see signs of a psychological profile with which I am entirely familiar:
“The high point is not much to show but still counts.”
“Unless you’re peak-bagging the state high points, I would probably bypass this.”
“Not impressive; it is just to say you’ve been there.”
My morning drive was tedious. The hike was not unpleasant, but all things being equal, I would rather be in my bed, or a classroom, or a car wash. Except—except—I can now say that I have been to the highest point in Illinois, and that knowledge fills me with a strange but luxurious sense of self-satisfaction.
Happily, there is an organization filled with people intimately familiar with that sensation: the Highpointers Club.
* * *
The Highpointers Club was founded nearly 32 years ago by Jack Longacre, a long-distance truck driver with a steadfast love for the natural world. A former Boeing employee, Longacre explored the peaks of the Pacific Northwest with the firm’s Boealps club, and over the next five years made it to the top of all 50 states, finishing with Wyoming’s Gannett Peak. In October 1986, while living within a short hike of Taum Sauk Mountain, the highest point in Missouri, he wrote a letter to the editor of Outside magazine in which he announced his plan to organize a club dedicated to summiting the states. He called for all interested parties to meet at a hotel in L’Anse, Michigan, the following April, which would afford them the opportunity to recapture the highest point in the Great Lakes State. Seven people showed up to what would be recalled as the first Highpointers Convention, several of them eager to correct a surveyor’s mistake: They had previously summited Mount Curwood, before discovering that neighboring Mount Arvon was 11 inches higher—and thus Michigan’s true high point.
Thus, was born the Highpointers Club—with its unlikely mix of accomplished mountaineers and eccentric “listers,” as 48-stater Mick Dunn called them—and during the ensuing three decades, the rolls have swelled to nearly 3,000 people, of which a handful have climbed all 50 highpoints. “We’re a bunch of neurotic people—that’s how I describe it,” Dunn told me in the run-up to the 2013 convention, in Millinocket, Maine. “We’re people who want to accomplish everything on a given list. Maybe it’s highpoints. Maybe it’s state capitals. Maybe it’s kayaking the largest lake in each state. That’s one my girlfriend and I made up.”
As Dunn demonstrates, Longacre had dialed into a durable if unlikely frequency: whimsical adventurers, that unlikely subset of true mountaineers and people who are curious about all the legends on all the map, including the stylized plus sign indicating a state’s highpoint. And also the wanderers: I stumbled upon my first highpoint, Massachusetts’s Mount Greylock, in the middle of a four-day backpacking trip through the Berkshires with a high school boyfriend. Who were these people who scurried out of their cars to stand beneath the War Veterans Memorial Tower there, snap pictures, and take off? They might well have been highpointers—maybe in a rush to get down to Mount Frissell, the stateline-straddling Connecticut highpoint. (In fact, the summit of Mount Frissell is in Massachusetts, while the highest point in Connecticut is only part-way up the hike to the peak.)
Since my accidental summit of Mount Greylock, I have been to low-altitude highpoints such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Delaware, Tennessee, Michigan, and Illinois. I have also been to the highest point of Indiana, something I forgot until I was driving to the East Coast from Iowa City last Christmas and almost detoured two hours out of my way to make a second (deeply unnecessary) trip to Hoosier Hill. I joined the Highpointers Club in 2010, but I thought of myself more as an observer than a participant, a chronicler of this strange pursuit with my recorder always at the ready.
I never met Longacre, who died on October 15, 2002, not long after attending a last convention at Black Mesa, the highest point in Oklahoma, where friends and members met him on the summit for a final farewell. Shortly before his death, he had worked with a longtime member and close friend, Jean Trousdale, to publish his memoir, Keep Klimbin’ (The repeated Ks are a Highpointers joke, the legacy of a broken typewriter key.) Trousdale accomplished that goal, and then he set about fulfilling Longacre’s final wish, to have his ashes scattered at all 50 highpoints. As the club founder put it in his own eulogy: “It is my impassioned desire that my ashes be placed on the top of the continent’s loftiest peaks, allowing the rains to wash them down and over the lands. Then, I would become a part of the world and not hidden beneath it as I would be in a grave.”
“Jack had 50 little 35 mm film canisters with the name of each state written on them, and he showed me exactly how to seal them,” Trousdale told me following my first Highpointers Convention, at Mississippi’s Woodall Mountain, a few years before her own death in 2016. “He couldn’t see me quite getting to all 50 highpoints.”
Over the next year, Trousdale—a clinical psychologist who hiked most of her 44 state highpoints in her 60s—sent off the canisters of his ashes so that they could accompany climbers up Denali and Mauna Kea, Britton Hill (Florida) and Mount Katahdin (Maine), until they’d ascended all 50 highpoints. And she didn’t stop there: The canisters went on to Mount Fuji in Japan, and Argentina’s Aconcagua, the highest point in South America. Soon, Longacre’s ashes had reached all of the Seven Summits but Everest.
“There was a fellow I heard from, Stuart Smith, who’d done a few highpoints,” Trousdale told me. “He was going off somewhere and wanted to know if he could take ashes, and I said, ‘Sure.’ He’d already completed the adventure grand slam—the Seven Summits and North and South Poles—and he said he wasn’t going back up to Everest, but he was going to the Himalayas to climb Lhotse.” Midway up the Lhotse face, Smith crossed paths with a Mexican climber, David Liaño González, who was en route to Everest. “A couple weeks later, I got a call from Liaño González, and he sent me a picture [of Everest’s peak] and said he was sorry he couldn’t take a picture of them scattering the ashes because it was too windy,” Trousdale said. “That’s how we got the last of the seven highpoints, and it’s at that magical place that Jack Longacre’s ashes rest.”
When we last spoke, Trousdale was carefully guarding the remainder of Longacre’s ashes. “At this point, we’re just about out,” she said. “He wasn’t a big guy, but he had very heavy bones.”
* * *
After a two-year, pandemic-induced delay, the 2022 Highpointers Convention takes place next month (June 22-24) near Mount Davis, which is the highpoint of Pennsylvania and the summit of a ridge in the Alleghenies known as Negro Mountain. It may come as a surprise that both those names are shrouded in controversy: Pennsylvania State Representative Rosita C. Youngblood tried to have the latter changed in 2009, while the former has been criticized for honoring a white settler rather than a valiant Black man who gave his life to protect fellow members of a party under fire in 1756. (It is believed that man was the intended honoree behind Negro Mountain’s current name.)
I attended the last convention before the pandemic took place in July 2019, on the shores of Lake Superior’s Keweenaw Bay, a 40-minute drive through the forest to Michigan’s highpoint (still Mount Arvon). Nine months before COVID-19 would bring an end to such easy conviviality—a dinner honoring highpointers past and present, a watermelon feast at the top of Mount Arvon, everyone crowded together for a group portrait—it would have been impossible to predict that the next two conventions would be canceled.
Nine years had passed since my first convention, in Mississippi, and I had attended only one other, at Ohio’s Campbell Hill, in betweeen. By this time, though, I could no longer tell whether I was writing about the highpointers —observing them—or if I had become simply a fellow traveler, among like-minded company. There are pros and cons to both, but the benefit of the former was that I had a built-in excuse to talk to all the highpointers, many of whom knew each other, had climbed mountains together, and could recite all of each others’ jokes and bear tales.
In Michigan, I got to know Jim Sutton, who finished his first tour of the 50 highpoints when he was 36 and joined the club in 1991, after sending Longacre a tidy payment of $5 by mail. His first highpoint was, in fact, Mount Davis, an unexpected detour during a trip home to see family in Pittsburgh. “My wife was pregnant with our elder daughter at the time—[my daughter] Nora wants to claim she was there, but in utero doesn’t count, because she didn’t physically touch the rock,” he said. Since then, he’s revisited most of the highpoints, and he describes the conventions as “a lot like a high school reunion, especially in that most of the people here are over 50.”
We discussed how the easy availability of information on the internet has reduced some of the convention’s utility. “It used to be a thing where you’d tell people, ‘Don’t take this route, take that route,’” he said. “And it’s a misery-loves-company thing.”
A what?
“Listen,” he said. “Who in their right mind will drive 300 miles out of their way to go visit a small mound covered with cow dung in western Kansas, simply because it’s slightly higher than the other cow dung-covered mounds around it? In Minnesota you get eaten alive by mosquitos. At Denali, two days out of five you’re going to be stuck in a tent, and the average trip is two and a half weeks. If you’re doing Wyoming, round-trip, and you walk it—we did part of it by horses—it’s over 50 miles to get in and back, depending on the route. ‘Misery’ is part of the game: ‘You can’t believe the weather that I got!’ It’s one-ups-manship in how miserable you are.”
More than that, thought, the draw is the camaraderie of doing the same weird thing, together. “In Maryland, there was a restaurant called—I kid you not—Piddle Griddle,” Sutton said. “Now, who wants to eat at a place called Piddle? But we did. And when I took my family back there, they wanted some lunch, and they were looking at McDonald’s, and I said, ‘No, no, we’re going to Piddle Griddle. You go to places you would never go to otherwise. And you meet the greatest people out there.”
The choice, as he laid out, between McDonald’s and Piddle Griddle felt like all of our biggest choices, writ small: corporate versus independent, global versus local, slow versus fast. Highpointing is a vote for the Piddle Griddles of the world: the homemade, the unexpected, the human-scale. Highpointing, in its way, is the scenic route as a lifestyle choice. It has proven to be a lifelong distraction, a to-do list that will spool out endlessly.
Last summer, I got close enough to see Denali from the ground, and that was close enough; barring a late-in-life pivot that is extremely unlikely, I will never be a 50-state completer. But highpointing has reshaped the way I look at the world. It is a vote for the path not taken—one that prods me forward, to Sunflower Hill (Kansas) and Hawkeye Point (Iowa), and from there to the great mountains of the West: Granite Peak (Montana), Mount Whitney (California), Mount Rainier (Washington), and all the rest.