I got to the top of something in the Sierra a few years ago. A good one — long approach, thin air, ranges stacked up behind ranges going blue and then gray. It was genuinely beautiful for about ten minutes, and then I noticed I was already thinking about the walk down. That's the part nobody says out loud about a summit: it's the exact middle of your day, not the end. You climb all morning to get somewhere you cannot stay. This one is going to bother some people, so let me be fair about it. I'm not against lists, or ambition, or standing on top of things. I'm against what happens to your attention when the summit stops being a goal and quietly turns into a metric — when four-fifths of the day becomes overhead, a tax you pay to earn the one photo that proves it counted. I can't tell you the color of the rock on a fourteener I climbed in a hurry. I can tell you everything about a day in a drainage that doesn't lead anywhere, where I sat long enough to watch a bird walk along the bottom of a creek. Nobody ever came back from a long hike and said the best part was the summit. Chapters: (00:00) The ten minutes at the top (01:20) Collecting mountains off a list (02:15) A goal versus a metric (03:21) The fourteener he can't remember (04:38) Why we import the scoreboard (05:53) A valley that doesn't go anywhere (06:28) The bird that walks underwater (07:50) But the view is worth it (09:12) How he hikes now Full episode notes and transcript: https://milesofquiet.com/episodes/the-case-against-peak-bagging/ This episode is sponsored by RVGearPro: https://milesofquiet.com/rvgear