Four-thousand Footers - Four Thousand Footer Club

Four Thousand Footer Club

A committee of the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) served as a focus for settling on the criteria and collecting the information that verifies the peaks as meeting them; it also maintains a list of the Four Thousand Footer Club's "members": those who request recognition for having climbed all of the 48, in each case travelling by foot, at least between leaving a point on a car- or truck-accessible road and returning to that or another such point. The first of these recognitions was listed in 1958.

Some climbers undertake (usually after having completed the 48) to climb them within more stringent conditions. The club maintains a second list of those who climb each peak in winter (defined as beginning and ending the hike between the time and date of the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

Other variations on climbing the 48, not officially recorded, include:

• reaching the summits in a specific order (e.g., alphabetically or by elevation),
• reaching each summit on a moonlit night,
• reaching each summit from all four cardinal compass points,
• reaching each summit in the same winter,
• reaching each summit twelve times, once in each of the twelve months (but not necessarily twelve consecutive months) (As of 2011, seventeen climbers claim this.)
• meeting various combinations of the above restrictions in the same climbs.