Hiker begins year with 1,000th summit of Bear Mountain

SALISBURY — The celebration was brief, just long enough for a congratulatory hug and a handful of photos before the winter wind could blow them off the mountaintop.

Instead of champagne, Joel Blumert and his hiking companions feted Jan. 1 with Entenmann’s doughnuts. And it wasn’t the new year they were toasting, but Blumert’s 1,000th ascent of the state’s tallest peak.

The 76-year-old Salisbury resident has been hiking Bear Mountain twice a week, with only sporadic lapses, for nearly a dozen years. On New Year’s Day, Blumert reached the goal he set a few years ago of 1,000 climbs.

He has hiked it in the wintry cold and the summer heat, amid the splendor of the autumn foliage and even in the middle of a daunting tornado.

Joel Blumert, right, followed by Trish Walter, of Collinsville, and Linda Huebner of Halifax, Vt., climb the ridge leading to the summit of Bear Mountain on New Year’s Day. Photo by Steve Barlow

“It’s just been one step at a time and one climb at a time,” said Blumert, a musician who performs mostly at area nursing homes.

Blumert and his wife, Theresa Carroll, moved to Sharon in 1985 and to Salisbury in 1987, in part for the outdoor recreation the Tri-State region offers. But after their two daughters, Shayna and Denali, were born in the 1990s, Blumert’s exercise regimen started to lag.

In 2000, his doctor reported he had “ridiculously high blood pressure.”

“I decided if I was going to die of a stroke, it was better to die in the woods than sitting around the house,” Blumert said.

He began hiking again and rebuilt his endurance. In March 2014, he summited Bear Mountain, which at 2,316 feet is the highest peak in Connecticut. (The state’s highest point at 2,380 feet lies on the south slope of Mount Frissell at the border with Massachusetts.)

It was Blumert’s first hike up Bear in several years. As he gazed at the Twin Lakes shimmering below, he said to himself, “I love this mountain. I’m going to do this once a week.”

He grew to love the hike so much that after a year he doubled it to twice a week. Since then, Blumert has stuck to his weekly ritual with only occasional pauses for out-of-state trips or illness, along with one 13-week stretch when a pulled ligament in his pelvis planted him on the couch.

He knows the 2.9-mile route intimately, from the Undermountain trailhead off Route 41 to the intersection with the Appalachian Trail and on to the summit. In his sojourns, he has seen porcupines, deer, a timber rattler, a pair of copulating copperheads (“Or maybe they were milk snakes; I didn’t interrupt them to find out”), owls and redtail hawks — yet not a single bear.

Soon after he began hiking Bear regularly, Blumert made another vow: He would be cheerful and friendly to every hiker he met on the mountain. “I’ve developed trail friendships with 20 to 30 people,” he said.

One of them is Collinsville resident Trish Walter, who became a regular hiking buddy and has now climbed the mountain with Blumert about 70 times over the past five years.

Walter and her friend, Linda Huebner, of Halifax, Vermont, joined Blumert for his milestone hike on New Year’s Day. With 4 inches of snow having fallen the night before, they set foot shortly after noon and reached the top just before 3 p.m. The trek back down took half that time.

Aside from the blustery wind approaching the summit, they enjoyed a spectacular day of bright sunshine and blue skies.

The weather hasn’t always been so cooperative. Blumert was once nearly struck by lightning on the upper ridge. And this September, he hiked down in what he described as a tornado.

“It came right down Undermountain Trail,” he noted. “Trees were swishing back and forth. Branches were flying everywhere. There was grape-sized hail. It was scary.”

Now that he has reached his goal, Blumert plans to cut back to one hike of Bear each week. That will free time for other climbs in the area, a recumbent bicycle he has bought, and yet another mountaineering goal.

“I want to complete the 4,000-footers in New Hampshire,” Blumert said. “There are 48 of them, and I’ve done 23.”