Longtime Vermont sportswriter Garry Harrington first climbed Mount Mansfield, the Vermont state highpoint, in 1978 as a freshman at St. Michael’s College in Colchester. It would spark a passion that was reignited more than 20 years later when he suddenly lost his job as the sports editor of the Keene (NH) Sentinel. Since that day in 2004, Harrington, now 56, has been on a peak-bagging mission, climbing every mountain he could check off a list. The result is his latest book, “Chasing Summits: In Pursuit of High Places and an Unconventional Life,” released in August by AMC Books of Boston.
Harrington, a Bellows Falls native who graduated from St. Michael’s with a journalism degree in 1982 and returned to his hometown paper, the Brattleboro Reformer that fall, worked as a sportswriter and later became the sports editor there until his departure in 1996. He became the sports editor at the Keene Sentinel in 1998.
“Chasing Summits” chronicles Harrington’s transformation from a newbie hiker on tiny Mount Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire to what he terms a “peak-bagger extraordinaire,” climbing all the 4,000-footers in New England before moving on to the 14,000-footers of Colorado and beyond. He continually upped the stakes until the summit of the mountain he had dreamed of climbing as a child stood beneath his feet: the famed Matterhorn in Switzerland. Along the way he honed his skills on the high volcanoes of Central America and other European country highpoints. He also completed all the Lower 48 state highpoints and the remaining 14,000-footers in the Continental US, recently becoming only the 13th person ever to complete all the 14ers in the Lower 48.
The book is available in book stores, on Amazon and through the Facebook page Chasing Summits. Harrington continues to bag peaks at an alarming rate, as he currently is in the Adirondacks of New York finishing off the 46ers. While he still counts Keene, NH, as his home base, he has lived in his van for the past two years, traveling North America in search of new peaks to climb. He can be reached at [email protected].