I found this excerpt in the Spring 2011 edition of The New England Journal of Hiking Psychology, in an article titled “Patterns of Trail Usage and Long Term Impacts”:
Stage 1: A New England hiker is created when an outdoor-loving person, who is goal-oriented and enjoys collecting things, discovers the 4000-footer list. The discovery usually leads to the passionate pursuit of the 48 peaks via the easiest/most-direct trails, since most new hikers need to build up strength and experience before tackling longer routes. The easy/direct trails take the brunt of the load.
Stage 2: The hiker finishes the NH4K list and is left with post-completion depression. The only cure is to begin another list. Often, the depression is so severe that multiple new lists are started concurrently, including the NE4K, NEHH and the winter NH4K, all of which are rewarded with patches and memberships by the AMC. Hikers in Stage 2 have little impact on the primary trail system, which is protected in winter, but do impact the trail-less peaks through the creation of herd paths.
Stage 3: A hiker who has completed most or all of the premier lists is at Stage 3. This stage is the subject of much current research. The steady-state theory requires that Stage 2 hikers abandon the easy/direct trails to the 4K peaks, and begin using the wider trail network in an effort to hike every trail; an activity known as Red-Lining. This shift in usage allows room for the next generation of Stage 1 hikers. Alternatively, a Stage 3 hiker may leave the trail network altogether in pursuit of one or more lists based on trail-less peaks, a variant of hiking known as Bushwhacking. In either case, the load on the primary trails is greatly reduced, and a balance is achieved.
Recently, however, the steady-state theory has come under attack due to the discovery of a previously unobserved Stage 3 behavior, known as Grid Hiking. The Grid Hiker, as he or she is currently understood, continues to hike the primary trails in an effort to reach the NH4k peaks in every month of the year. Considered a form of arrested development, Grid Hiking greatly increases the load on the primary trails while not making room for Stage 1 hikers, leading to overcrowding. In extreme cases, a Grid Hiker will complete the Grid and immediately start doing it over again; there are documented cases where this obsessive-compulsive behavior has led a Grid hiker to repeat the entire Grid as many as five times!
Some models predict that if Grid Hiking overtakes Red-Lining and Bushwhacking , in sufficient time the secondary trails will be abandoned, forcing all hikers onto the primary trails (or into the bush), and leading to such accelerated erosion that many of the current 4K peaks will actually drop below 4000 feet in elevation. This eventuality would reduce the number of 4K peaks on the list, and would transfer even greater load to the trails reaching the remaining 4K peaks, resulting in a cascade of list revisions and catastrophic erosion. However, these predictions are at best speculative.
Unfortunately, the remainder of the article seems to have been torn out of my copy.