Why write the book?

When I started the quest in 2009 to climb a mountain in every state, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I might ever make it into a book. Nor did the idea come to me during the five years of lackluster progress that followed, during which I reached only 11 highpoints, most of which were “easy.”

With the new year approaching in 2015, I decided it was time to revive this project. As I lay in bed one morning, contemplating the upcoming road trip with my daughter and her friend from the Netherlands to Louisiana’s highpoint, the idea of the book came to me. When it did, I knew immediately - I’d do it. I write a lot in connection with my work on international family planning – academic articles, field reports – so it wasn’t a foreign idea. But I’d never written on anything outside work. ​

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Starting with Louisiana in January 2015, I began writing up each highpoint soon after completing it. I found it far easier to write these accounts when things went wrong, and Louisiana – despite being the third lowest highpoint in the U.S. at 535 feet – provided me with good material. To this day, friends can’t imagine that we “failed” to reach Louisiana’s highpoint on the first attempt.    
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It was harder to go back and retroactively capture the highpoints completed during those first six years. Fortunately, my sister Liz had written in her journal every evening for the past 40 years, and she was able to re-create the scene for three of those states: Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Thanks to her journal, we were reminded that we had doubts if we’d actually reached the highpoint in Maryland (we had not), creating the story line for a return to that state with my husband Bill seven years later.