Highpointers go for the top in every state -- even the flat ones

More than a few of the 2,834 members of the Highpointers Club are highly goal-oriented. The rest are a diverse group of climbing nerds, enjoying a seemingly endless road trip with a vertical orientation.

In 1997, my friend Nels Akerlund, a photographer, proposed we climb all 50 and document the journey in a book. Given that we would have to stand on the high points of Florida, Delaware, and Louisiana -- not to mention a few in cornfields in Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois -- the project sounded goofy as well as expensive and impractical. Still, I liked the idea of connecting a vast geography thematically, of seeing parts of the country I had never seen en route to a bunch of picturesque mountains. I particularly liked the prospect of climbing McKinley.

Nels and I met that May in Austin, Texas, and headed west through fields of wildflowers to a remote, rugged, starkly beautiful national park 110 miles from El Paso. Guadalupe Peak, named in 1692 after a Spanish saint, is the top of an ancient reef in a long-gone sea. Standing 3,000 feet above the Chihuahuan Desert (8,749 feet above sea level), birds of prey soaring on the thermals, I felt elated. Back in the car, however, I was keenly aware that we had 49 more to go.