Even an expert hiker can fall. Mark Kelley is more seasoned than most, so on a recent balmy, sunny day on a flat trail, he was quick to point out a patch of ice. “Don’t fall,” he warned. “That’s one thing I learned: you can fall anywhere. I fell all over the mountain. It’s inevitable.
Kelley has had his share of slips and falls, both metaphorically and in real life, but he’s the kind of person who focuses on getting back up. Over the past 10 years, the Burlington resident has summited Mount Mansfield and Camel’s Hump 1,787 times. For no other reason than pure joy, he returns again and again to these same two mountains. No other hill need apply.
Kelley’s ascent tally began a decade ago, when he was 48 and in the midst of a midlife crisis. His mother had died when she was that age, and the survivor’s guilt of having lived longer weighed on him. Add that to job dissatisfaction and the end of a long relationship, he said, and “I was in a rut. I hit a wall and I just didn’t feel good about it. my skin.”
Already a casual hiker, Kelley was descending Mount Mansfield one morning in early 2012 when he made the decision to hike the same trail 99 more times that year. “That’s where this whole odyssey started,” he said. His original intention was not to hike the pursuit of his life, but over time, it happened. Although they started out as a physical challenge, the hikes quickly became something more spiritual.
At first, Kelley timed himself. Initially, his goal was to “hit them,” he said, and make each hike faster than the last. “It was good for a while, but then it got too intense.”
Age, fear of injury, and the realization that adding a competitive edge to something that was more and more mental than physical drove him to new priorities. “I’m trying to make it more sustainable,” he said. “I’m trying to make it more holistic and engage more with my surroundings.”
Now that he’s no longer sprinting up the mountain, Kelley, who has good eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, a beard and an easy laugh, has more time to pay attention, both inside and out. ‘outside.
“I take in the sights, the sounds, my animal interactions, my human interactions. I feel like I’m really in the moment, and for me that’s cathartic,” he said. “It ticks all the boxes: mental, emotional, spiritual well-being. Like you mean, I hit all those moments on the mountain.”
Even when Kelley is in this zen zone, his hikes aren’t leisurely strolls with a picnic and a bluebird on his shoulder. He called them “a cross between challenging hiking and trail running.”
In the days when he pushed it, he went up and down Mount Mansfield in an hour; these days, he tackles the Laura Cowles Trail, which begins at Underhill State Park, in about an hour and fifteen minutes. It does the Sunset Ridge Loop from Mansfield and the Burrows Trail from Camel’s Hump in 1.5 hours.
(Alltrails.com, the hiking website, rates the two “difficult” trails and rates the 4.5-mile round-trip hike Laura Cowles at three hours and 32 minutes, and the Burrows Trail at 5.3 miles at three hours and 41 minutes.)
On days when everyone is in bed with the blankets over their heads, Kelley, whose day job is driving for the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, is the most motivated to get out and up the mountain. “I’m one of those weird people, because I really like extreme weather days,” he said, “because I know it’s kind of like cheating; no one else ‘ll go on those days, and invariably you’ll have the trail to yourself.”
Kelley said the solitude was precious to her and could be the reason for all the hiking. He hikes alone 99.9% of the time and prefers it that way. “It’s really all about headspace,” he said. “It’s my sanctuary; it’s where I go to understand and process things.”
Covering the same terrain over and over again can feel boring, but Kelley said her familiarity with every tree branch and every bend in the trail actually allows her to notice just how profoundly different each day can be. The mountain is like a spouse or a best friend. The more you know about it, he says, the more you are attuned to its subtle changes and nuances.
“I never felt like I wanted to do anything else,” Kelley said of hiking other mountains. “People ask me this all the time: why just those two? I’ve never been bored once.”
He said he notices everything from the new position of a rock to changes in flora and fauna from season to season. “What’s great is that it’s the same thing every [time]”, he said. “But it’s never the same at all.”
Kelley also noticed the long-term changes of the climate crisis. When he first started hiking a decade ago, he said, there was still significant snow accumulation in late winter. Now, he said, the trails are more likely to be difficult to use as frequent thaws create a hard-to-navigate ice base.
“You can hike for two months in the winter with the occasional spring thaw,” he said. “It’s rare to go three weeks now without some sort of catastrophic weather event that will decimate the track.”
Where some pundits can get overconfident or arrogant, Kelley exudes a relaxed vibe.
These are things that do not do bothering Kelley on the mountain trails: people wearing headphones; hikers with enough gear to conquer Mount Everest; a troop of volunteers from the Vermont National Guard; bears, skunks, porcupines and coyotes; people taking selfies while doing instagrammable things at the top. Kelley wants everyone to enjoy the mountain, even if he doesn’t necessarily want to see them when he’s there.
These things bother him: litter, the climate crisis and off-piste bushwhacking, which can harm a mountain.
Even Kelley’s approach to gear is laid back. On a sunny late winter day, he gestured to his thin midlayer jacket and gray sweatpants. “What you see is what I wear,” he said. “I bring my car keys and my smartphone. That’s all.”
When it’s particularly cold, Kelley adds gloves and a hat. Even in snow feet, his shoes of choice are the Altra Escalante 2.5 running shoes, sometimes with spikes attached for ice hiking.
“They’re light and very flexible,” he said of the shoes. “They have a low drop, which keeps me in contact with the ground, and they have minimal cushioning. They also have virtually no tread or lugs, which I think works better on the wet or lichen-covered rocks.” It goes through two pairs a year.
A crossroads in life can lead someone to decisions they may later regret; looking outward to fix something that’s broken on the inside is a risky move. For Kelley, it paid off.
“That might be the biggest piece of it all,” he said. “Nothing has ever given me the joy I get from it. It’s my passion. It’s what I want to do.”
Even when Kelley crawls up an ice-covered rock face and the wind pushes him aside, he says, he’s having the best time of his life.
“You are a self-contained world,” he said. “For me, it’s a happy world. I live my life on my terms, and what’s better than that?”
