I've been thinking a lot about goals recently and how I'm going to attain them. Some of the goals I have come up with are short term things and others are very long term. Most of my goals center around one of my hobbies.

After doing my first Nebraska county highpoint over the weekend (check out this exciting summit...), I got to thinking about this hobby and I decided to set a goal of completing one state highpoint for each year old I am, and maintaining this up through age 50.

I'm behind by five states! I'm currently 28 and I have completed 23 state highpoints. My shorter-term goal along these lines is to get caught up by age 30. So in the next 1.5 years I need to complete an additional seven states.

The two closest uncompleted state highpoints are Mt. Elbert in Colorado and Humphries Peak in Arizona. Both of these are straightforward dayhikes and could be done in a weekend from my home. I'm assuming I'll have both of them done in time. The other 5 states, however, are going to have to come during some trip to somewhere far away.

The trouble with western states highpoints is that they are almost all serious technical climbs (not to mention that the states out here are huge and it takes forever to drive from one state HP to another). In order to catch up 5 states, I'm going to have to draw from the reserves of easier midwestern and northeastern states.

Luckily, there are two well-placed travel destinations that I have a relatively high probability of visiting in the next 1.5 years. One is Cambridge, MA, where I will be returning for my thesis defense. From there, I could easily get to the highpoints of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and possibly New York without too much trouble. If I stoop to driving up Mt. Washington, I could probably knock off ME, NH, and VT in a single weekend.

The other travel destination is St. Paul, MN, where my parents live. From there I have relatively good access to the highpoints of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa. These are farther away but they're also not the real climbs presented by Maine, New York, or Vermont. A few days with long drives and I could grab all four.

Some combination of the two will get me to 30 by 30. And it will still leave me the Illinois/Indiana/Ohio/Kentucky block to do on some other trip (maybe if I visit my sister in Chicago) when I need to get ahead on states. With only the western states remaining (and the non-continentals), each highpoint will be a serious trip and getting one done every year might be a challenge.

But it's a challenge that will keep me travelling and doing some spectacular mountain climbs. Though the Denali expedition that I was a member of sort of evaporated, climbing the 20,320' top of North of America is still one of my big goals in life - and climbs like Granite Peak, MT, and Mt. Ranier, WA, will be awesome training for it. As much as I find peakbagging to be rather silly, it certainly does get me out there climbing the rocks.