My lack of familiarity with traveling by bike made me unsure of how many miles per day I should do. I had no experience with bikepacking, but the novelty made it an exhilarating experience. There were no views in the two foggy days I spent in this region, and my time there was over too quickly.įrom there, I rode the bike about 220 miles north to the Seward Range trailhead on Coreys Road in the Adirondacks. The Catskills look like rolling green hills from afar, but the hiking gets steep and rocky through the cloves carved by glaciers and running water. After hiking back to the same trailhead, I biked to the Becker Hollow Trail to do an out-and-back summit of Hunter Mountain. The route started at the summit of Slide Mountain, from the Slide-Cornell-Wittenberg trailhead at the Woodland Valley Campground outside of Phoenicia, NY. The peaks share geologically recent shaping by glaciers and are discontinuous regions of the Northeastern Highlands ecosystem, with mostly northern hardwoods, northern hardwoods/spruce, and northeastern spruce-fir forests, with small pockets of above-treeline alpine areas. The Catskill peaks are simply the two in the region over 4000 feet. The New England 67 4000-Footer list requires 200 feet of prominence and evolves with updates in survey data. Modern surveys later showed four peaks to be under 4000’, but the list remains unchanged. They climbed peaks over 4,000 feet with at least 300 feet of prominence or separated from the next closest summit by 0.75 miles. The Adirondack list is composed of the peaks climbed by Robert and George Marshall, and Herbert Clark from 1918 to 1925. The criteria for the Adirondack 46ers differs from the one used for the New England 67. There are five in the Green Mountains of Vermont, 48 in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and 14 in Maine. The Northeast 115 list combines the 48 peaks of New York, two in the Catskills and 46 in the Adirondacks, with the 67 in New England. I am particularly proud of the Maine hike, as it came after a lengthy recovery from a broken leg that included two surgeries, three plates, and 13 screws. In June 2016, I became the first person to hike a similar route in Maine, thru-hiking the 14 4000-foot mountains in that state. In August 2014, I became the second person and first woman to thru-hike the Direttissima, which summits the 48 4000-foot mountains in New Hampshire. I biked about 300 miles and hiked about 1000 miles over a continuous path with about 275k’ of elevation gain to complete this journey. This trip was the culmination of years of planning, learning, training, and recovery. From mid-July to September 2020, I completed the first continuous traverse of the 115 4000-footers of the Northeast.

My 4000 footer map checklist