Mr. 576: Laconia's Josh Brooks completes hiking feat known as 'The Grid'

LACONIA — Sometime in 2020, a change happened inside Josh Brooks, a physical therapist who had taken up hiking as a weekend hobby. He had, at that point, completed the list of 48, 4,000-foot peaks in New Hampshire. He’s not sure exactly when it happened, but it did, and he emerged as a changed person, one fixated on a goal known as “The Grid,” a challenge far more daunting than hiking all 48 of the state’s highest mountains.

The Grid — “Gridiots” are those fixated on it — refers to hiking all 48 of the state’s 4,000-foot peaks in each month of the year. Do the math, and it adds up to 576 summits. Brooks completed the task on Dec. 18, with a summit of Mount Moosilauke. Once his paperwork is cleared by Ed Hawkins, the hiker who keeps the records for the unofficial scorebook, Brooks believes he will be the 133rd person who has ever accomplished the “The Grid,” finishing a little less than four years after summiting his first of the state’s 4,000 footers.

“It’s been a wonderful journey. It’s been life-changing,” Brooks said.

There are others who have done it faster, including two who have knocked off The Grid within a 12-month window, and others who completed The Grid several times over. But even with that context, Brooks’ accomplishment puts him in rare air.

The making of a ‘Gridiot’

Brooks grew up in the shadow of the White Mountains, was raised in Alexandria and is a 1993 graduate of Newfound Regional High School. But it took decades before he heard the song that so enchants hikers.

After high school, Brooks enlisted in the U.S. Army, spent a decade as a pharmacy technician, then 16 years in the Reserves, including a 10-and-a-half-month deployment to Honduras. He now lives in Laconia, where he and his wife raised their daughters, and he works as a therapist for a practice in Gilford managed by Frisbie Memorial Hospital.

“I think I’ve always been drawn to sports that you’re in proximity to other people, but it’s an individual sport,” Brooks said, such as running, cycling or kayaking. Perhaps it was his military experience, he said, that gave him an appetite for pushing himself, in the company of others who are doing the same.

“I’ve always looked for things that gave me a level of fitness but had some adventure involved.”

Yet, for many years, hiking escaped his focus. It wasn’t for lack of exposure; he would join friends and family on local trails, such as popular ascent of Mount Major in Alton, which affords a breathtaking view of Lake Winnipesaukee in return for modest effort. Even though that hike is less than 2 miles, Brooks said he vividly recalls taking multiple breaks, bent over, hands on knees, on his way up.

Looking back, Brooks points to two things that seemed to indicate a change within himself. The first was in February 2019, when a friend asked him to accompany an ascent of Liberty and Flume. Those winter hikes were far different than huffing and puffing his way up Major.

“It opened my eyes. I thought, 'I could do this,'” he said. Those two hikes ended up being numbers one and two of his 576-peak journey, though he wouldn’t know that for another year.

What he did know much sooner, though, was that he could adopt hiking in the Whites, in all seasons, as a weekend hobby. “Being comfortable with being uncomfortable” was how he described the change.

He started to “peak-bag,” as he called it, looking at the list of 48 and seeing how many he could check off with a weekend hike. He did them all as day hikes, never camping on trail, and all while working a “full time-plus” schedule. That meant mostly weekends, with a few mid-week sprints up short mountains he could drive to after work.

Along the way, he started to change. The 5-mile hikes made the 10-milers seem possible. And when those became easy, he challenged himself with 20-mile hikes. His longest was a 42-mile day, which Brooks called a “super-extended Pemi loop,” when he flew an American flag on 13 peaks on Sept. 11, 2021.

By that epic point, Brooks knew that he was on a Gridiot’s journey.

“You think about that a lot. When did I go from a hiker to a ‘Gridiot?’" he wondered. He figures it was during his second round of the 48, when he intentionally made sure he was hiking each mountain in a different month than he had initially. Another tell-tale sign to look for, he said, is “when you start putting stuff out on social media pages. ‘Does anybody need Gale Head this month?’”

For something as difficult and rare as completing The Grid, Brooks found it was a surprisingly social affair. About half of the time he hiked solo, and used the trail as a chance to push himself and measure his fitness against his previous summits. But the other half of the time, he had members of his trail family — his “tramily” — whose company allowed him to slow down a bit, share their conversation, and experience the mountains in a different way.

It’s the experience of the mountains — their timeless beauty, their wild power — that he could drink in all day, and still thirst for more.

“It’s the alpenglow, the smell of the pine, it’s the draw of these beautiful places and your body’s ability to get to them. It’s indescribable. To stand atop West Bond, or Bond Cliff, the Presidentials at sunrise. That combination of feeling beauty, feeling accomplishment, feeling suffering a little bit — or a lot bit — being rewarded with camaraderie. It’s a camaraderie that I’ve never experienced, even after 26 years in the military,” Brooks said.

As evidence of that bond, about 30 people joined Brooks for his 576th summit, a hike up Mount Moosilauke in Benton in very wintery conditions, and one of them flew up from Florida to share the experience. It's one that is difficult to illustrate to others, despite hundreds of photos on his Instagram page.

“It’s so fascinating. You step into a world of absolute simplicity, that is away from the material world that can distract us from this natural world that doesn’t judge you, but you can be judged if you don’t respect it. There’s no easy way, there’s no green trail to get to the top. You have to ascend the elevation gain no matter how you get there,” Brooks said.

“These mountains sit there, it’s simple. There’s no chairlift to get to the top, it’s a journey of the mind and the body. You’re rewarded with the beauty, the challenge. There’s definitely some sacrifice in this, to do these things, but through sacrifice comes some great rewards.”

As beautiful as the mountains can be, they have a deadly side, too. The beauty is alluring, and those who are underprepared, or who take the gamble to continue even if the weather turns, sometimes aren’t heard from again. Indeed, three hikers died in the White Mountains in the final months of 2022, one who fell from a cliff and two who were not prepared for winter conditions and waist-deep snow.

Brooks serves now as an administrator on a social media page, advising others who want to experience the mountains safely. He says it’s an experience that is open to far more people, including many who don’t realize that they could share in those mountaintop epiphanies.

If they need any evidence, they need just look at him, Brooks said. “When they see me doing a grid, or doing 30 miles, they say, ‘I could never do that.’ I would have said the same thing.”

“I think that people’s paradigm of what they can do is based on what they are currently involved in. I was playing a lot of Playstation, watching a lot more TV.” Brooks said that he never said no to his old activities, but was willing to say yes to something better. “Saying yes to a smaller hike. Small hikes turn into bigger hikes, you gain more confidence, and those smaller things drift away.”

Start small, he said, and be prepared to be surprised at where it takes you.

“I’m a regular guy who got hooked on going for a goal that seemed unattainable when I started it. It seemed like a life goal, and suddenly became possible.”