Hike the Heartland: Mountains of Kansas and Iowa

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Outside Magazine March 2004

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Climb Every Mole Hill
The highest points in heartland states like Kansas and Iowa aren't much to look at, but when you knock off seven of them in a four-day, 3,000-mile blitz . . . well, let's just say the little bastards have a way of kicking back.

By Rob Story


	(Joseph Rafferty)

DAWN WAS BUT A RUMOR on the eastern horizon when our climbing team set off from base camp, heading north toward a mountain so elusive it wasn't even named until 1998. By 11:30 a.m., after a morning of steady advancement, our party of seven had gained the summit ridge. No one was showing signs of edema; we pushed for the top...

Suddenly, a large creature stormed our right flank. Crowned by a woolly gray mane, it walked erect and emitted humanoid noises. "Egad!" I exclaimed, flinching. Was this the fabled yeti, terrorizing another doomed high-altitude expedition?

No. It was retired farmwife Donna Sterler, who emerged from her white clapboard house with a hearty midwestern hello.

"Welcome to our home," she chirped. "And the highest point in Iowa!" She passed out plastic key chains that read HAWKEYE POINT, ELEV. 1,670 FT., and then pointed toward some farm buildings and a million ears of corn. "The summit is over there," she said. "To the right of the cattle trough."

We climbed six, maybe eight feet and conquered the first of the Seven Summits.

Big-time climbers will object, saying the Seven Summits consist of the highest mountain on each continent, and Hawkeye Point definitely isn't one of them. But that's a modern alpinist for you: an unthinking yes-man, toeing the company line. Do these so-called mountaineers even bother to explore anymore? It seems to me they just mindlessly follow lemming tracks up places like Rainier and Everest, blathering about European knots and turnaround times, rarely attempting anything new.

What would George Mallory think? Would he feel kinship with monkeys who climb "because it's been done—often"? Hardly. I think he'd be more impressed with seven slow-footed high school buddies who decided, for no good reason, to stage a reunion in which they claimed truly unknown peaks far off the beaten path. Namely, the roofs of Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

It was all my twin brother's idea, actually. A California-based documentary filmmaker who helmed the riveting A&E special on the history of cleavage (called, helpfully, Cleavage), Dave figured he could squeeze a film out of our still-close gang—two decades after graduation—as we schlepped around in a van, notching heartland "peaks." Though we wouldn't be the first to take on seven relatively lame summits—way back in 1987, a group of Kansans blitzed through Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma—we liked to think we would do it with a style and lack of grace all our own.

So it was that, at the start of a long holiday weekend, Dave convinced six of us—Casper, Drew, Spade, Dorrell, Steve, and me—to assemble with him at base camp (that is, our parents' homes in the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansas, where we'd grown up). There, we loaded sleeping bags, mats, climbing gear (sport sandals and Hawaiian shirts), and an ammo box stuffed with 98 Nicaraguan cigars into a rented 15-passenger Ford Econoline Club Wagon. At exactly 5:17 a.m. on a Friday, we set off for peaks that Reinhold Messner has never mustered the courage to challenge, on a journey that would demand more than 3,100 miles of motoring—and fully 17.8 miles of strolling ...er, I mean hiking and climbing.

And now, just six hours and one greasy breakfast later, we'd bagged our first peak and were ready to aim the Econoline northwest, toward the Dakotas. Triumphantly, we descended the summit ridge.

Or, as Donna Sterler called it, "the driveway."

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