WESTBROOK – At 1:04 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 18, Westbrook resident Patrick Noonan and two friends were very, very tired.
They should have been. The trio had just finished hiking the three tallest mountains in northern New England, and all within 24 hours. Once or twice, Noonan said, he and his friends wondered if they weren’t a little crazy for trying it.
“The undercurrent of this whole event was, ‘Man, this is such a great idea, but I’m not sure it’s humanly possible,’” Noonan, 29, said this week.
Noonan and his friends – David Williams, from Ohio, and John Glinsman, from Colorado – proved it was possible to hike up and down Mount Katahdin in Maine, Mount Washington in New Hampshire and Mount Mansfield in Vermont, all to raise money for a trip Noonan plans to take to Europe to do Christian missionary work.
Noonan belongs to The Navigators, a nonprofit group led by non-denominational Christian ministers. Noonan visited Europe in 2007, at age 25, which he regarded as little more than a special, post-college adventure after graduating from Cedarville University in Ohio, where he minored in Bible studies.
While in Europe, he visited Latvia, a tiny coastal nation of 2.2 million people squeezed in among Estonia to the north, Lithuania to the south and the Russian Federation to the east.
“It was just one of those divine coincidences that wound up meaning a lot more than I thought it would,” he said.
His desire to do good works has motivated him to want to return to a country that he feels needs a helping hand.
“It’s a small country. It’s under the radar. It’s been hit extremely hard by the recession,” he said. “There’s just not a lot of hope right now.”
Noonan hopes to travel there in February 2012, so to help raise money, he, Williams and Glinsman, whom he knows through work with The Navigators, created their own event, which they dubbed the New England Three Peaks Challenge. The name, Noonan said, was inspired by similar events held in the United Kingdom.
Noonan, who has lived in Westbrook since 2001, had hiked Katahdin and Washington before, and Glinsman and Williams were experienced extreme-sports enthusiasts, so the trio felt they could handle the hikes. But making the trip to all three, and hiking them, was a real challenge, which Noonan said required “a lot of logistics work in planning it out.”
Another friend, Dr. Eric Gunnoe, who goes to church with Noonan at Christchurch Evangelical Covenant in Portland, agreed to do the driving, giving the trio time to sleep between hikes.
It was still a long day. They began at Katahdin, near Millinocket, at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 17. Using their digital cameras equipped with time and date stamps, they recorded their progress, finishing hiking up and down Maine’s tallest mountain by 7:36 p.m. Saturday.
Then, they rushed to Mount Washington, in Sargent’s Purchase, N.H. and arrived in time to begin the ascent – at 2:35 a.m.
“It was just pitch dark, and freezing cold for that hike,” Noonan said.
While they were ambitious, Noonan said, they were not fools. For all the hikes, they carried maps, compasses, lights, and knowledge of the trails. That knowledge, and the lights, were particularly useful on Mount Washington, Noonan said.
“I didn’t want to be stupid about it,” he said.
As they approached the top, they braced for the worst. Mount Washington is the site of the single worst day of weather ever recorded. Just two days earlier, winds had been clocked at over 80 mph, and the day before Noonan’s hike, observers had recorded freezing fog.
But at the top, at the halfway point of the entire trip, there was no frozen fog, and winds were a balmy 10-15 mph.
“We got the most perfect weather you could have, given the time of year,” Noonan ssid.
The sun was just starting to come up, but the group had little time to enjoy the view. They returned to the base by 7:30 a.m. Sunday, then dashed off to Mount Mansfield, near Stowe, Vt. The last hike began at 10:30 a.m. Sunday.
“On the way up, there was a lot of huffing and puffing,” Noonan said.
But once they crested the top, they started to believe they would actually make the self-imposed deadline. They hurried down the other side, motivated in part by a lasagna dinner Noonan’s mother promised the trio when they finished.
And finish they did, at 1:04 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 18. According to the time stamps, Noonan said they finished the entire event in 21 hours and 34 minutes. They hiked a total of 23 miles, and covered just under 400 miles on the road.
“We were pretty tired,” Noonan said.
They bathed in a nearby stream, then, on the drive home, stopped at the Ben & Jerry’s headquarters in Vermont and engaged in a little un-Christianlike gluttony before returning home to celebrate the accomplishment.
Noonan needs to raise enough money, in single donations and pledges of monthly support, to pay the approximately $6,000 per month it will cost him to live and perform the missionary work for four years in Latvia. Noonan, who is not an ordained minister himself, will be performing Bible study classes and other missionary duties, trying to give hope to others. Right now, Noonan has about a third of the money he needs, and continues to receive new support.
“I’m really encouraged by the response,” he said.
As to completing the hikes, Noonan said, there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong, but considering what cooperated, such as the weather, conflicting work schedules, and many other factors, Noonan is sure some sort of divine influence gave them a gentle hand.
“I can’t even begin to list the things that fell into place for us,” he said.
Patrick Noonan, right, joins his friends, John Glinsman, center,Send questions/comments to the editors.
