Appalachia interview with Gene Daniell on 50th anniversaty of FTFC

[Mohamed Ellozy]

Fooling around with Google I found this article (from the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of Appalachia) online: AMC Four Thousand Footer Club Turns 50. I hope that some will find it interesting!

Apologies if someone had already posted the link.

 

[jniehof]

Thanks. That's a great article...the other interviewee is interesting to hear from, as well.

There's another fine article in the White Mountain Guide Centennial Retrospective (or whatever it's called), a several page essay by Gene. Good stuff, and worth requesting from one's local library.

 

[woodsxc]

No apologies needed- I'm new on Views and have never seen that article before. Thanks for sharing, it was a very interesting read.

 

[Puma concolor]

Great article and great insights. I kind of fell asleep a little when they got talking about the NHHH but there were some good one-liners in there and some good insight about the personal history of a New England icon.

I really liked this exchange:

"GD: The thing is, this is a game. It is not to be taken all that seriously, in my opinion. If you take it too seriously, you get compared to certain parts of the body that have less than glamorous functions.

ME: Unless you’re with someone else who takes it seriously.

GD: I mean, you know, people who are competitive by nature get competitive about these things. They care about whether they’re fifteenth or seventeenth or something like that. To me it’s always been a game. We have our peculiarities, which we can chuckle about, and if you can’t chuckle about it, you’ve got a little bit of a problem. I mean, I’m as OCD as almost anyone in this game."

Anyway, thanks for posting.

 

[RoySwkr]

I also found that article while doing a search that also turned up this one:
http://alumnet.simmons.edu/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=1163
Maybe ME should do some Boston history interviews to complement those in the North Country by Orestes & Mayer.

There are two things that I thought were omitted, perhaps for lack of space:
* Trail work - at one time Gene tried to encourage 4kers to do or contribute towards trail work but that doesn't seem to be mentioned
* NH 3K and NH 200 lists - before making the NE 3K list Gene released a NH 3K list, and several of the early finishers did not go on to the NE 3K. This is not surprising, in the customary progression of NH 4K -> NE 4K -> NE 100 or NH 4K -> NE 4K -> NE 111 or NH 4K -> NH 100 the number of new peaks for the next list is similar to the number already done and yet there is a huge attrition at each step. Going from 100 peaks to ~180 peaks is a much more reasonable step than to ~450 peaks. (The Mud Pond Ridge story in the article actually relates to a NH 3K list the guy made as I don't think he ever did the NE 3K.) When I climbed Howe Peak with Shelburne Moriah in February 1980 there were people on that trip who knew it was a NH 200 peak because of another of Gene's lists - some finishers of this list ~20 years later apparently weren't aware of the previous version.

I saw Gene at the grocery store today and got his take on the NH 3K list. He doesn't mind driving all over the Northeast and didn't see the appeal of a geographically-limited list, although 2 of the first 3 NH finishers didn't go on to NE. He did remind me that at one time people were chasing the 3700-footers and the 1000-meter peaks with 100-meter cols but these lists didn't catch on. He thought that the 3500-footers might have made a nice goal but maybe anybody who did the NH 100 had become such a committed bushwhacker that they just wouldn't stop.

Of course even dedicated bushwhackers stop somewhere, the Northeast 3K and New England 1000 haven't attracted very many. And Gene had more personal cachet and met a lot more hikers than the other list-makers which may be why it was his list that was chosen.