News

Peak Performance

January 11, 2007
By Bill Woolley

OK, so a baker, a librarian, a social worker and a metal fabricator are climbing a mountain, see ... No, seriously, folks.

Sunday morning came early for a handful of hardy Salem-ites who set their alarms for about 5 a.m. and rose with the sunny, but chilly, dawn to ascend Mt. Monadnock in Jaffrey, N.H.

“I asked about eight of my friends to come with me. Women, men ... and they all said they thought I was crazy,” said Diane Jordan, of Lafayette Street. “Sloth. That’s all it is. They were probably all just staying home to watch the Patriots.”

The trip was sponsored by the Park and Recreation Department and led by local fitness fiends Brandi and Steve Dion. The drive to the mountain takes about 90 minutes, just about the same amount of time it takes anyone with two good legs and a healthy heart to scale the 3,165-foot summit.

In the larger scope of things, it wasn’t extraordinary to think that the humble group from Salem would tackle Monadnock. It’s said to be the most climbed mountain in the world (having unseated Mt. Fuji in Japan after a chair lift was installed there years ago), and during the 1990s one dedicated hiker made the climb on 2,850 consecutive days.

Still, considering the relatively tiny turnout at Mack Park for the start of the trip Sunday morning, you have to give the gritty group a little credit for getting their butts out of bed, slapping together lunches, and stuffing their backpacks to take the trek.

Granted, the early-morning alarms triggered some temptations to roll over, pull up the covers and start a series of tests on their snooze buttons.

Jordan, a spirited 40-year-old, who works with special needs children through the Cerebral Palsy Association of Eastern Massachusetts in Salem, admitted she’d had second thoughts about making her second trip up Monadnock (the first having been with a boyfriend five years earlier).

Amy Bruce, a librarian at a Boston law firm, had punched up nearly an hour’s worth of snooze time before her feet hit the floor.

“I’d pretty much talked myself out of it,” admitted the 38-year-old Derby Street resident, who manages to master Monadnock once a year. “I got to 6:20 [a.m.] and I told myself I had to do it ... that I’d regret it if I didn’t.”

Over on Boardman Street, 47-year-old Mary Wetmore, who works at the Higginson Book Co. on Washington Street and runs the Little Biscotti Bakery on the side, was in bedside negotiations with her significant other, Dana Brown.

Sunday was the second anniversary of her father’s death and she’d been planning to visit his grave site.

“I was telling Dana I wanted to visit the cemetery, but then I realized my father isn’t really there,” said Wetmore, who hadn’t climbed Monadnock since she was a teenager. “Dad never climbed, but he went for walks in the woods, so I decided to go on the Monadnock trip.”

Also, a mountain climb was one of 365 things Wetmore had on a list of things to do with Brown, with whom she’s been for a year-and-a-half.

Brown went along with his partner’s plan, despite not having tackled a climb since Mt. Chocura in upstate New Hampshire some three decades ago. A metal rod once inserted in his leg after a motorcycle accident made the climb tougher still, and he lagged well behind Wetmore on the ascent.

He caught up with her at the peak, however, and made the decision to climb Mondanock more than worthwhile for Wetmore.

“He was struggling along, but totally surprised me at the summit when he whipped out a picture of me and my father he’d put in his pocket,” said Wetmore. “Then he took a picture of me of me holding that picture. It made perfect sense, I thought, because I was closer to my father at the summit than I would have been in the cemetery.”