The “average” hikers are looking for this kind of experience when they set off into the Catskill High Peaks:

The forest and I stir awake with birdsong beginning to fall from the canopy. In the dawn’s half-light I lounge in my bed for a delicious moment and tell myself: This is good. Right now, indeed for each moment of this endeavor, I am a rich man.” (Bob “Grey Dog” McElroy, from “The Hard Way to Peekamoose Mountain”)

Or maybe this:

I lay down, looked up at the starlit night, and realized how much a night hike has to offer. You see eyes shining in the dark forest and you are never sure what they are. Everything is so quiet—all you hear are owls and occasional coyote yelps howling in the cold crisp night. (Ralph Ryndak, from “Cave Dog in the Catskill High Peaks”)

What they may encounter, however, is something more like this:

I think about what I’ll do after I finish my 3500 winter mountains, when all of a sudden—in a flash—I find myself buried in snow up to my neck. For a few seconds I’m in shock, paralyzed, my mind totally blank. Then my instincts for self-preservation propel me into action. I try to get out by using what resembles swimming strokes, but I cannot move my lower body. I am trapped. … I am in the middle of a blizzard. Spirals of twisted snow rise up as though dancing into the clouds, energized by the strong, howling winds rushing loudly through the trees. (Manuel A. Peraza, “Engulfed by Nature”)

Or worse, something like this:

My foot slipped on the ice and I fell backwards and headfirst down the crack between the outer rock and the main cliff. I was wedged upside down, looking down two hundred feet to treetops and up at the bottom of that outer rock. My partner couldn’t reach me; I was too far away and the rock was too icy. No ropes, no other people on the trail, no help.” (Steve Boheim, from “A Real Cliff-Hanger”)

But it won’t take you too many pages into Carol Stone White’s new book, Catskill Peak Experiences: Mountaineering Tales of Endurance, Survival, Exploration & Adventure from the Catskill 3500 Club (Black Dome Press), to realize that the true stories she presents are not from your average run-of-the-mill hiker. These are goal-oriented, achievement-driven adventurers on a quest, and some of the risks they take and the discomforts they endure in pursuit of their quest may seem, well … frankly, a little crazy to the casual hiker who only ventures into the woods when it’s not too cold, not too hot, with little likelihood of rain and not a chance of a thunderstorm, a snowstorm, subzero temperatures or freezing rain—and, even then, sticking solely and safely to clearly marked and well-trodden trails.

Not these men and women. Their quest is to summit all thirty-five Catskill Mountain peaks that are over 3,500 feet high, which gains them entrance into the rarefied atmosphere of the Catskill 3500 Club. Adding to the challenge, four peaks must be climbed in winter, and thirteen of the peaks are trailless. (One mountaineer whose story is told in Catskill Peak Experiences, Ted “Cave Dog” Keizer, hiked all thirty-five high peaks in just two days, fifteen hours, and twenty-four minutes, a marathon hike of 135 miles and 37,000 feet of elevation gain, stopping a couple of times a day for fifteen- or twenty-minute catnaps.)

Checking off a list of those mountains one has summited and aiming one’s sights on those not yet conquered is called “peak bagging,” a term some mountaineers find objectionable because of the implied connotation that the hike is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. “Peak bagging” conjures images of hikers methodically, almost mechanically (even humorlessly), trudging along with their noses in their maps, not stopping to smell the flowers or savor the moment, summiting one peak and trudging joylessly on to the next without pause.

The lyrical writing of the 88 authors of the 101 stories in Catskill Peak Experiences puts that misconception to rest, however. Although some of the tales have titles like “The Hike from Hell,” and there may be more stories of mishap and misadventure than of epiphany and ecstasy, one must bear in mind that close calls with disaster and episodes of terror and extreme discomfort stay always fresh in the mind, while the less dramatic “everyday” time spent reveling in far-reaching vistas, the peace and beauty of a wilderness pulsing with life, the sheer animal pleasures of exercised muscles relaxing before a hot meal cooked over a crackling campfire on a cold night under starry skies in clear high-altitude air, tend to recede and blur together into a collective memory combining the thousands of hours spent in relative comfort, security and bliss.

And that, of course, is what brings these hikers back for more, and more, and more. They would be out in the woods anyway, somewhere. The quest for the Catskill 3500 Club badge just gives them a blueprint, a scaffolding, on which to build their outdoor adventures, and takes them to summits they might not otherwise have experienced. It’s not about bagging the peaks; it’s the pursuit of peak experiences.

And it’s about being alive and feeling alive in this age of vicarious living, of “virtual” reality. If you sit around and wait for life to happen, it never will. Michael J. Molinski, in his story “The Escarpment Trail: A Journey,” summed it up best: “I have covered almost exactly twenty-four miles in the last thirty hours. I have gained over 5,800 vertical feet and descended about 5,300. That’s like taking the stairs up and down the Empire State Building four times—with the added weight of a pack and boots. In conclusion, this trip has changed me a little. I can’t explain why I do the things I do; Sometimes you just have to pick up your things and go. Life won’t wait.”

On April 12, 2008, in Kingston, New York, the Catskill 3500 Club will hold its 43rd annual dinner and meeting (the club began in 1962, but the first annual dinner was not until 1966, the year the club was chartered). New members will be inducted while many of the over 1,700 current members will renew acquaintance and no doubt swap new stories of their outdoor adventures and misadventures. Some members will receive their winter badge, which means they have summited all 35 peaks in winter.

This year Carol Stone White, a regular and winter member, will be there as usual with her husband, David White, also a regular and winter member as well as the club’s membership chair (Carol is the club’s conservation chair). In addition to the club’s regular business, Carol will be autographing copies of her new book, surrounded by many of the people whose stories she collected in Catskill Peak Experiences.

The Whites are “hikers’ hikers.” They are also members of the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), David serving as a Director from the Iroquois Chapter. They are members of the Adirondack Forty-Sixers Club, having summited the forty-six Adirondack peaks over 4,000 feet, and became Winter 46ers in 1997. Carol served from 2003 to 2007 on the Executive Board of the Forty-Sixers Club. They are members of the Four Thousand Footer Club of the White Mountains, having completed climbs of the forty-eight peaks over 4,000 feet in summer in 1999, and in winter in 2006. They are 111ers of Northeastern USA, having completed climbs of the New York-New England 4,000-footers in September 2000 (then 113 peaks). They have climbed eight of the 14,000 footers in Colorado.

Carol received the sixth Susan B. Anthony Legacy Award in 2007 when she appeared with polar explorer Ann Bancroft and long-distance cold-water swimmer Lynne Cox on a panel entitled “Daring the Impossible: Strong Women Take on the World.” Carol is also the editor of Women with Altitude: Challenging the Adirondack High Peaks in Winter, published by North Country Books in 2005. Her next book, Adirondack Peak Experiences, will be published by Black Dome Press in 2009. She and David are authors of Catskill Day Hikes for All Seasons, published by the Adirondack Mountain Club in 2002, and are editors of ADK’s comprehensive guidebook, Catskill Trails, 3rd Edition, volume 8 of ADK’s Forest Preserve Series. They measured 345 miles of Catskill trails by surveying wheel to update the guidebook.

One reviewer of Carol White’s book Women with Altitude wrote, “‘That’s pretty good for a girl’ is not the kind of thing you’d want to say to the women you’ll meet in this book.” And it’s certainly not the sort of thing you would ever want to say to Carol Stone White, or she just might leave you in the dust (or the snowdrift) as she steadily ascends to her next high-peak experience.

Catskill Peak Experiences: Mountaineering Tales of Endurance, Survival, Exploration & Adventure from the Catskill 3500 Club, edited by Carol Stone White, foreword by William Rudge, Natural Resources Supervisor, Region 3, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Paper, 6 x 9, 320 pages, map & photographs, ISBN: 978-1-883789-59-6, $19.95. Published by Black Dome Press, 1 800 513 9013, www.blackdomepress.com