Pat Barkman Joins 4,000 Footer Club

By Dottie Evans

When longtime Newtown resident Pat Barkman climbs another 4,000-foot mountain, she is not thinking about keeping score. She would rather say she does it for fun, for exercise, for companionship, to be outside surrounded by nature, to escape, and to refresh.

Nevertheless, on Sunday, October 5, Ms Barkman achieved something quite remarkable, and she was willing to talk about it over tea and biscuits with a visitor during a recent interview at her Taunton Lake Road home.

After spending nearly 40 years climbing the major New England peaks with friends and with her husband, Leon Barkman, she had reached the top of her 115th mountain –– it was called Mt Abraham (4,050 feet) one of 14 4,000-footers in Maine.

This would be Ms Barkman’s last in a series of mountains in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the Adirondacks known the Four Thousand Footers. The moment she reached the summit of Mt Abraham, she automatically became a member of an elite group of 7,100 who have officially climbed them all. The “Four Thousand Footer Club,” formed in 1957, keeps records of the names and dates of these individual achievements.

Although Ms Barkman is probably not going to send in for the patch automatically bestowed upon club members, she is glad to have done it.

When her husband Leon and their regular climbing buddies, Bruce Rowe and Susan Hoffer, and nephew Dave Craven, celebrated at the summit of Mt. Abraham by opening a bottle of champagne in her honor, she was pleased.

“In a way, I didn’t want to finish this goal,” she remarked.

This was because in her mind, the real goal is always the next trail and the next climb. She does not intend to stop climbing any time soon. In fact, one of the pleasures she and her husband look forward to is returning to favorite mountains, like Mount Marci in the Adirondacks where they and some friends will go this coming December 27.

How The Barkmans Keep On Climbing

Even though climbing mountains is not a competitive sport, the Barkmans do keep track of which peaks they each have scaled that are more than 4,000 feet.

“Leon has only three more to go –– Seward, Seymour, and Allen –– all in the Adirondacks,” Ms Barkman noted. When those are accomplished, he’ll be a “Four Thousand Footer,” as well.

Over the years, the couple has developed a routine.

“If the mountain is too far from available lodging, we camp out. We try to hit the trail at 4 am so we’ll be off while it is still light. You absolutely do not want to run out of daylight when coming down a mountain,” Ms Barkman said.

“If you find yourself hiking in the dark, you can tell when you’ve gotten off the trail by how it feels. We always take a flashlight. But once it wouldn’t work on the trail. Then when we got back to the parking lot, it worked. You never know what will happen.”

She was asked to tell what she thinks about when she climbs.

“When I’m going up, I think about the view, the peaks and the scenery, and the exhilaration of the climb. I’ve noticed that the steeper it gets, the quieter we get.

“When I’m going down, I think about a hot meal and a hot bath in the motel room,” she said.

They always bring walking sticks or sturdy poles.

“We use them for balance crossing streams. And you can use them to put a little less weight on your knees. Carrying a stick helps work the arms, too. That helps prevent swollen hands, because you’re not always swinging your arms like pendulums while walking.”

What do they eat on the trail?

“We’ve found tomato bisque soup is great. There is something about the juice of tomatoes at altitude that just hits the spot,” Ms Barkman said.

You need a lot of stamina to complete a climb, she admitted, but “a lot of what it takes is in your head. To keep in shape when I’m not climbing, I try to do three miles around the loop [Taunton Lake] a couple of times a week. Then there is my garden and digging and pulling weeds. Gardening is like a whole yoga thing.”

When asked what they bring along, Ms Barkman listed a guidebook, compass, maps, and she makes a list ahead of time of the clothes needed for various degrees of coldness.

“You forget how many layers you need to have between five and 15 degrees F., how much of a difference there is between 60 degrees and 80 degrees F., and what you need to wear for a wind chill of minus 40.”

For severe cold, she wears lots of layers, along with her balaclava hat, wind pants, and down parka. And she never forgets mittens with strings.

“If you lose a mitten in the wind, you could freeze. It’s hard to pull a candy bar out of your parka and take off the wrapper without removing your mitten,” she said.

Drinking water is critical, she said, because “my mind can go ka-flooey without it. I don’t think clearly.”

Has she ever become lost?

“Yes, once I was hiking with a student and we got totally lost. When he looked at the map and the compass, somehow it suddenly clicked where we were. That was really lucky.”

From Canadian Rockies

 To Adirondacks To Al’s Trail

Looking back, it seemed to Pat Barkman that she had been climbing mountains nearly all her life, certainly ever since her early years as a college student traveling in the United States and Europe.

She grew up and lived until she was 18 in Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada “on the 100th meridian,” where she said, “There is one mile of shoreline for every citizen,” and where you had to take a train to the nearest town, named Churchill, 33 hours away.

She became a high school science teacher earning $3,000 a year, and saved enough money to go to Europe in 1966, where she lived for a while and where she met Leon. Then she returned to the United States and spent the next 30 years teaching both full-time and part-time. She spent six years at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., as an assistant professor in technical communications.

Since 1968, the Barkmans have kept Newtown as the home base from which they have worked and followed their climbing avocation. Six years ago, they moved from their West Street home into a home alongside Taunton Lake, and Ms Barkman recently retired from teaching.

Also a fine artist, she paints in oils and watercolors, and is a member of the Society of Creative Arts of Newtown (SCAN). She is also an organizing force working to create local hiking trails as a member of the town’s Ad Hoc Open Space Task Force that was formed in 1999. She is currently helping realize a task force vision for a seven-mile, continuous hiking trail through Newtown open space called “Al’s Trail,” named after longtime local resident, engineer, and mapmaker Al Goodrich. The group has targeted the Tercentennial Year 2005 for its completion.