High On A Wing

At the 1995 Honda Hoot in Asheville, North Carolina, my wife and I bought two engraved plastic items. The one for Jeri’s jacket explained her ”Hairdo By Honda,” and the other was a map of the U. S. for our 1994 Honda Gold Wing, Interstate, with the words, “On A Wing And A Prayer” along with our names. That was our first trip outside Michigan on our new Gold Wing, but as I started gluing glass diamonds on the states we had just passed through, Jeri said, “It seems that we should accomplish something in a state before you claim credit for having been there on our Wing.”

“Something like visiting the state capitol?” I said with a bit of sarcasm in my question. She dislikes downtown riding as much as I dislike downtown driving.

“No, but just being on a stretch of road through a part of the state is not much of an accomplishment. Did we even stop in Virginia or Tennessee?” she continued.

We had been on US23, which crosses only about 60 miles of the western tip of Virginia and maybe 70 miles through Tennessee. She had a point, and I recalled the saying, “Appear stupid by saying nothing, rather than opening your mouth and removing all doubt.”

Jeri was looking at my Road Atlas as she continued to make a point. “Your maps identify capitals, largest cities and highest points. In North Carolina, the highest point is Mt. Mitchell, which isn’t far from here. Didn’t we go there with the boys in the late ‘70s?”

Her memory has always been better than mine, but even I recalled the photographs we took of our boys wrapped in beach towels, the butterfly on the trail, and it seems like someone was buried at the summit. I wasn’t ignoring her by not answering her last question. I think I was still trying to figure out if we had stopped in either Virginia or Tennessee, so I was just a question behind.

“The highest point would usually be a hill or a mountain, but what about states like Florida?” I still had a bit of sarcasm in my voice.

She flipped the pages of the atlas to Florida. “It says it’s just 345 feet and in Walton County.” She located the coordinates and said, “Here it is. It’s marked with a little triangle, gives the elevation again, and says highest point in Florida.”

That’s how Jeri started it, and like a blood hound given a scent, I began the quest for going to the highest natural elevation in each of the contiguous states, a goal that occupied most of my available time for the next two years. If you have ever been involved in planning a big event, you understand how plans evolve. Early in the process I had called State Tourism Departments to request information about their highpoints. The term, highpoint, is generally accepted as, and used in this book to refer to the highest natural elevation of a state as officially recognized by the U. S. Geological Survey publication, Elevations and Distances in the United States. I was surprised that information was not easy to discover, but as my quest continued, some interesting information started coming in. I discovered the Highpointers Club, which allows membership to any individual interested in climbing or promoting climbing of the highest point in each of the fifty states. Members are called Highpointers and receive the Apex to Zenith (A to Z) Newsletter quarterly. The mailman was becoming a more welcomed visitor than normal, and I visited our local library as if working on a college term paper.

The first of nearly 100 newspaper articles I researched for this book had one minor error. I discovered that newspapers are often in error, so whenever possible I have attempted to verify the information I used. That first article was in the Detroit Free Press of October 25, 1993, where Emilia Askari reported that until 1992, maps incorrectly listed Mt. Curwood in Baraga County as Michigan’s highest elevation. A few months after making that note, I looked at my parents’ old Road Atlas from 1988, which showed Mt. Arvon as the highest point. How could that be? Simple, just one digit in the article was wrong. It incorrectly reported 1992 instead of the correct year of 1982!

Finally the basic plan of visiting each of the 48 contiguous state highpoints on one six-week trip was in place. Jeri would stay at home to coordinate plans and be the one point of contact while I was getting high on our Gold Wing.

One day while picking out interesting history and trivia about highpoints and sharing it with Jeri, she said I should write a book about my trip to share the information I was uncovering. Jeri not only started it, but has also given me the occasional encouragement to follow through on this monumental, but very exciting project. I have a new appreciation for any writer who gets his book published and could not even guess how many hours have been spent to give you what you hold in your hands. ENJOY!