There are forty-eight peaks above four thousand feet in the state of New Hampshire. To finish them is to climb every one to its summit at least once. The list is unforgiving: Washington, with its weather that has killed more than 160 people. Adams and Jefferson, exposed and rocky, hours above the treeline. Owl's Head, deep in the Pemigewasset Wilderness, eighteen miles round-trip with no view at the top. Isolation, well named. The Bonds, accessible only by long backpacking traverses. Carter Dome and the Wildcats and the Tripyramids, the Hancocks and the Kinsmans and the long ridge of the Franconias. Forty-eight summits, scattered across the White Mountains, totaling something on the order of 1,500 miles of trail and 460,000 feet of elevation gain to complete them all.

The Appalachian Mountain Club has kept a register of those who finish, since 1957. It is called the Four Thousand Footer Club. To be inducted, you submit your peak list to the AMC's Four Thousand Footer Committee, which verifies that you have, in fact, summited every one. Your name is then printed in Appalachia, the AMC's journal of record. Frisky the family dog can be inducted too, if Frisky has walked the miles. The AMC has always honored the dogs.

There are three generations of McGaws on the AMC's permanent rolls.

The first generation

My grandfather, David E. McGaw, completed the 48 peaks somewhere in the late 1950s or 1960s, with his three sons — Douglas, Eric (my father), and Philip — and the family dog Frisky. The exact year is recorded only in Appalachia magazine, page 166, in the September entry of one of those years, alongside the names of others who had finished that month. The total membership of the Four Thousand Footer Club at the time of the McGaw induction stood at 129.

That number is worth pausing on. The Four Thousand Footer Club was founded in 1957. By the time the McGaws finished, the entire club had 129 members. That places their completion in the very early years of the program — somewhere between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, when finishing the 48 was still an achievement undertaken by a small, mostly New England-based community of serious White Mountains hikers. Today the club has tens of thousands of members. When the McGaws finished, total membership in the history of the program was smaller than the population of a small village.

My grandfather brought his sons up the 48 because that is what he did. The McGaws were a hiking family. The White Mountains were not a vacation destination for them; they were where the family went on weekends and summers. A father with three boys — David, Douglas, Eric, Philip — would pack the car, drive up from wherever in New England they were living, lace up boots, and walk. Frisky came with them. Frisky walked the miles. Frisky is in the journal.

This is the part of family history that I have never been able to pin down precisely. I do not know what years exactly. I do not know which peak they finished on, or who else was on the trail with them that final day. I know that David Mayo's name is recorded on the same page of Appalachia, in the same September entry, and was likely a family friend who summited alongside the McGaws on that final day. I know that the names of the McGaws — David, Douglas, Eric, Philip, Frisky — are listed together on a single line, the way the AMC always recorded entire families when entire families finished together. That line of print, in the journal, is the documentary record of an American boyhood I never quite saw.

The second generation

My father, Eric, was inducted in that family group as a teenager or young man. The mountains stayed with him after he left them. He went to college, worked as a professional dive master in Brunei and the Philippines, married my mother Elena in Manila, took up rowing at the Manila Boat Club, became Boat Captain, raced internationally, took a job at ICRISAT in 1989 and moved the family to India. He founded the Hyderabad Hash House Harriers in 1990. He ran every Sunday for the rest of his life that his body allowed.

Blue Ridge Parkway, (c. July 1960)

But the White Mountains were always there. The 4000 footers were always there. He talked about them. He compared every range he ever hiked back to them — and he hiked a lot of ranges, because his work for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa took him to the highlands of Ethiopia and Kenya and Rwanda, and he would always say something like, "the Bonds are harder." He missed New Hampshire. He missed the way the cold smelled at five in the morning at the trailhead. He missed Frisky, by then long gone, and his father, and the simplicity of carrying a pack up Mount Madison with the people you were related to.

The third generation

My brother John, my sister Rachel, and I have each, in turn, completed the 48 ourselves.

Three more McGaws on the AMC's permanent rolls. Three more lines in Appalachia, in three different issues, in three different years, recording three more induction lists. The mountains my grandfather climbed with his sons in the late 1950s or 1960s, the mountains my father climbed with his father and brothers and dog as a boy, the mountains my siblings and I climbed in our turn — they are the same forty-eight peaks. The summit cairn on Mount Washington is the same cairn. The view east from Lafayette is the same view. The wind on Madison is the same wind.

John on Mount Washington (c. June 1996)

Three generations of McGaws on the same mountains. Three lines in the same journal, separated by decades.

What inheritance actually looks like

My father's life, as I have been writing about it on this site, was extraordinarily international. He was an American who lived more of his life outside the United States than in it. He spent decades in the Philippines, decades in India, years in the United Arab Emirates, years in Kenya and Ghana. He raced for the Philippine national rowing team after he had moved his family to India for a job. He was Chairman of an international event in Goa hosting hashers from kennels around the world. He photographed Kofi Annan in Ghana and Norman Borlaug in Patancheru. He stood in Rwandan fields after the genocide and quietly told an international magazine that the country still needed help.

All of that. And underneath all of that, the New Hampshire kid who had walked Mount Madison with his father and his brothers and his dog before he was old enough to drive.

This is what inheritance actually looks like in a family like mine. It is not money. It is not property. It is not even, really, tradition in the formal sense. It is mountains. It is the choice that my grandfather made, somewhere in the 1950s or 1960s, to drive his three sons and his dog up Mount Washington, and then up Adams, and then up Jefferson, and to keep doing it until they had done all forty-eight. It is the choice my father made, decades later, to pass the same expectation to his own three children, even though we lived in India, even though we grew up half a world away from the White Mountains, even though we had to fly back to the United States and find time and trail partners and good weather windows to do the climbs ourselves. It is the choice my brother and sister and I made, in our turn, to actually do it.

Three generations on the mountain. A bunch of McGaws and a dog in the original line in Appalachia. Three more McGaws in the lines that came later. The journal is still being printed. The peaks are still there. The 4000 Footer Club continues to induct new members every season.

My father is gone. He died in March 2016 in Looc, Cebu, my mother's hometown, at the end of a long fight with ALS. His ashes are not in the White Mountains per se, but a small part of his soul lives on those peaks. His grave, properly speaking, is in the Philippines, in the country he had made his home. But on every one of those forty-eight summits in New Hampshire, his name is in a journal in the AMC archive. So is his father's. So is mine, and my brother's, and my sister's.

The mountains do not forget. The journal does not forget. We do not forget.

Xerxes and Aara on Canon Mountain, (c. 2024)

Sources

AMC Four Thousand Footer Club — Appalachian Mountain Club. Appalachia journal, p. 166 — induction record of David, Douglas, Eric, Philip, and Frisky McGaw, total club membership 129.