NINE REASONS WHY YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO BE A GRIDIOT—AND SOME HAPPY ALTERNATIVES

Original photo credit: Michael Blair

Not a month goes by when another one of my hiking friends falls prey to the practice of “Gridding”, including a number of folks who swore they’d rather hike Mount Washington naked and backwards during a January nor’easter than become a “Gr-idiot.” 

If you are not already familiar with it, the practice of Gridding involves obsessively hiking each and every peak in an elevation-based list of high peaks once in every month of the year. You keep track of them in  spreadsheet fashion, thus the term "grid." Some people even grid the same peak list multiple times. The original “Grid” got its start with the New Hampshire 4,000 Footers list—to grid the 48 summits requires summiting 576 times. The practice of gridding has since metastasized to many other peak bagging lists.
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​If Gridding sounds like fun to you, read no further. But if the idea of Gridding makes you pine for that naked January hike, but you fear you’ll succumb via peer pressure or a sudden midlife crisis, here are 9 compelling reasons to not become another Gridiot—and a bunch of fun hiking goals you can adopt instead. 

1. When you die, you’re going to be dead a long time. Do you really want to spend precious hours of your short life hiking Mount Waumbek 12 times? The Grid may not be entirely boring (i.e. not in the same general category as watching C-Span or a film of granite slowly eroding) but the world is full of new, spectacular places to visit and things to experience. If you’re thinking of spending your summer gridding vs. taking that trip to the Grand Canyon, or spending more time with your grandchildren, well. . .

2. If everyone is doing it, it’s no longer cool. A few years ago, people were dumping buckets of ice water over their heads and taking photos of themselves planking in strange and precarious places (never mind bathroom mirror selfies). There are still people who will get sucked into doing the Macarena and Chicken Dance at weddings without any shame or sense of cliché.  You don’t want to be one of those people. 

3. Your regular hiking friends are going to get bored with you. “What are you doing this weekend?” “Ah, um, I’m hiking Mount Cabot. Want to come?” “Shit no. I just did that with you a couple weeks ago. Want to do something different with me this time?” “Oh no, that was September, I need it for my October Grid. . .and my November Grid. . .and. . .” “Well, I guess I’ll see you in a few years.”

4. All your social media posts read exactly the same. You were already a little boring when the only thing you posted on social media were hiking updates. Now all you do is post hiking updates about the same peaks over and over again. Zzzzzzzz. . .

5. There is a 5th dimension, beyond that which is known to man, a world in which trailhead parking lots are always full, and the waiting line for the summit photo stretches halfway down the mountain. . . . a world that might be called “The Gridiot Zone.” High profile list peaks are already overcrowded. Parking spaces and elbow room on the trails is in short supply. If everyone were to decide they wanted to grid. . . even a 10% increase in gridding would be too much horror for our puny minds to imagine. And do you really want to be the jerk that deprives a family with young kids of their parking spot and opportunity to do their first summit of Mount Jefferson—just so you can selfishly hike it for the umpteenth time?

6. All your hiking photos look exactly the same. Zzzzzzzzzz. . .

7. Why be a monkey.  If you hiked the White Mountain 48 or the Adirondack 46 with a monkey and an organ grinder in tow, at least you’d be original. 

8. There are nearby places far more spectacular than some of the peaks on the typical grid list. Percy Peaks vs. Cabot. Indian Head vs. Blake. Tumbledown vs. Redington. More than a few of the alternatives are even tougher hikes than the list hikes. Really, if you’re going to grid a list, grid a list of spectacular summits, not a list based on something as unimaginative as an arbitrary elevation cutoff. 

9. If you need something like the Grid as an excuse to hike, what do you need as an excuse to live?

HAPPY ALTERNATIVES TO GRIDDING:

• Go linear. If hiking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail seems too daunting, hike the sections of the A.T. in a single state. You can keep track of your progress section-by-section and experience the pleasure of closure when you complete the state. There are even state patches you can collect.​

​​The 4,600-mile North Country Trail which passes through New York and Vermont can be hiked in the same way. Beside those, there are many shorter long-distance trails contained entirely within the northeast United States, ranging from 21 miles to 580 miles. The Long Trail (VT, 270mi), Cross Rivendell Trail (NH/VT, 36mi), 

​the New England Trail (CT, MA, 215mi with an unofficial extension from the state line to Mt. Monadnock in NH), Long Path (NY, 357mi), Finger Lakes Trail (NY, 580mi), Northville-Lake Placid Trail (NY, 138mi), Taconic Trail System (CT/NY/MA/VT; 2 trails, 58mi), Midstate Trail (MA, 92mi), Warner Trail (MA, 30mi), Bay Circuit Trail (MA, 200mi), Wapack Trail (MA, NH, 21mi), Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway (NH, 48mi), Sunapee-Ragged-Kearsarge Greenway (NH, 75mi), Cohos Trail (NH, 170mi), North-South Trail (RI, 77mi), Hills-to-the-Sea Trail (ME, 47mi), Sebago to the Sea Trail (ME, 28mi), and Georges Highland Path (ME, 60mi). There are completion patches and certificates for many of these shorter long-distance trails.

Southern Maine's Pleasant Mountain

• ​​Explore other states and areas. Too many people I know spend most of their time hiking only in one state or one mountainous area despite the fact that they are driving further to get to parts of their routine stomping ground than they would if they were willing to detour from their habit. It’s a crying shame, for instance, to see people from Boston hiking the relatively viewless single-trail route up Waumbek 12 times in a row who haven’t been to southern Maine’s Pleasant Mountain or the Holyoke Range in western Massachusetts. Of course that says nothing for the practice of real exploration—getting on a plane, flying to a different part of the world, and hiking somewhere entirely new and novel.  One can even make a game of it: for instance doing one good hike in each state in the United States, or one good hike in each country in Europe.
  
• Redline something. Redlining (sometimes referred to as “tracing”), the practice of hiking all the hiking trails in a particular region or guide, is a sure way of keeping your hikes new and interesting. The term “redlining” comes from the practice of using a highlighter or red pencil to trace your progress on a trail map. You can redline an entire hiking guide (such as the AMC White Mountain Guide or the Connecticut Walk Book, among others), hike all the trails in your town or county, or all of the trails in a particular mountain range (for instance, hiking all the trails in Boston’s Blue Hills Reservation). Any hiking guide can be redlined, even those “Best Hikes of. . .” types of guides.

Michael Blair's impressive patch collection (which does include a Grid patch)

• Hike other lists. Fine alternative lists include the New England 100 Highest, 52 With a View, Trailwrights 72, Camden 10 Peak Challenge, Go North Niner, Saranac Lake 6er, Lake Placid 9’er, Lake George 12ster, Terrifying 25, Catskill 3500, and Belknap Range Patch. There’s even a list for people who want to hike the entire Long Trail and all the side trails of it. When you’ve worn out the well-trodden lists, you can continue on with the more challenging and obscure: in many states there are ad-hoc lists of peaks out there for every 1,000-foot elevation increment; quite a few of the peaks require bushwhacking, which could be an entirely new and exciting challenge for you if you’ve never experienced it before.
  
  
• Hike every peak described in a particular guidebook. You place a check mark next to the peak when you’ve done it. For instance, the AMC Maine Mountain Guide contains nearly 400 summits with trails scattered all over the big state of Maine—some of them in extremely remote corners of the state or on islands; just getting to them is an adventure that will likely keep most people busy longer than it would take for them to complete a White Mountain Grid. The number of mountains with trails in the Adirondack Mountain Club’s series of guidebooks is probably nearly as long.

Checking off hiked peaks in the AMC Maine Mountain Guide

• ​Create your own lists. There’s nothing original about the any of the established hiking lists—even the most popular ones started with a whim. All you need is a few defining criterion. You could, for example, make a list of all the hiking trails in your town or county and hike them. You could hike all of the mountains in the northeast named for a color (Blue Mountain, Black Mountain, Red Hill, etc.), a tree type (Spruce Mountain, Chestnut Hill, et.), all the mountains with summits above treeline, all the mountains that have loop trails, views, etc. You could hike all of the waterfalls in a county or state. .  .hike in all of the state parks in a particular state. . . all of the conservation properties owned by a particular land trust, etc.
  
  
• Be totally random. Pick a random page in a hiking guide. Or pick and latitude and longitude out of a hat, find the hike that is nearest to it, and go. Open an atlas to a random page then blindly point to a spot on that page and find the hike that is nearest to it (or use this tool, which lets you generate random latitude and longitudes constrained to whatever geography you like). To find trails, you can use AllTrails.com, GaiaGPS, USGS maps, hiking guides, and other resources. As a lifelong hiker who has visited all parts of the northeast, I guarantee you’ll be routinely surprised and delighted by what you find.​
  
• Do a four season grid. If you’re going to succumb to grid mania, there is something to be said for experiencing each mountain on a list in each of the four seasons (versus every month of the year). Since the solstice and equinox cutoff dates in the mountains often don’t hold true to actual spring, summer, fall, and winter conditions, to make this experience really memorable and true, only hike each peak when conditions are optimal: peak foliage (fall), covered with snow (winter), spring wildflowers and budding trees (spring), and ripe berries with full green leaves (summer).
  
  
• Embrace the wonderful futility of an impossible list. i.e., make your grid list so huge and expansive, that you might not finish it in this lifetime. To make this work, your list must be massive and you must adhere to the rule that you can’t finish the grid of any one peak until you’ve got at least 10 months into every other peak (you can always stop 100 feet short of a summit if a friend drags you along). Depending on your age, your list should include at least 2,000 peaks (more if you’re really young, less if you’re well over the hill). Futility can change your perspective on hiking (and life in general). In fact, almost all of us will go to the grave with lots of unfished goals and dreams. Better get used to it in advance—it’ll make the going easier (toward that end—no pun intended—I know of two hikers who are intentionally not hiking one peak on each list they are working on). 

• Do another activity. Bicycle, kayak, rock climb, surf—all of these activities can be turned into goal-oriented adventures.

Maine's Tumbledown Mountain--as tough and stunning as many of the better Grid-list peaks.

All in good fun folks--hike whatever makes your feet sing. --Paul-William