Genre Legend
Language English
Country of Origin United States
Informant Terren Klein
Date Collected February 23, 2018
Collected by Robin Jayaswal
Informant Data
Terren Klein grew up in New York City and is an alum of Dartmouth College, having graduated in 2017. He is currently still in Hanover, New Hampshire pursuing an entrepreneurial venture. During Terren’s time as a student at Dartmouth College, and continuing today, he has loved hiking in the area and been on many hikes. Terren is also among the special group of hikers who have completed the annual hike called ‘The Fifty’, as he completed it in his senior year.
Contextual Data:
When I asked Terren about the hiking culture at Dartmouth, he quickly turned the discussion to one hike in particular, known among Dartmouth students as ‘The Fifty’. This event is organized annually by students, and as the name implies, is a fifty mile hike, beginning on the Dartmouth Campus, and ending at the peak of Mt. Moosilauke. A wide variety of students complete this hike. In discussing the people who do the hike, Terren seemed to assign a certain aura to one group of students in particular. This was the Nordic Ski Team, who are known to run the entire fifty miles every year. This is apparently a long standing tradition, and a piece of folklore in and of itself. What struck me as particularly interesting however, was not the folklore within the Nordic Ski Team, but the folklore surrounding the team which Terren said was known and maintained by all the hikers he knew.
Item:
“The Nordic Ski Team once ran The Fifty in X hours”
There is no official time keeping for The Fifty, and no historical books on it. Hence, the all time record is not known by any one authority. Rather, it is maintained as folklore among the hikers. Terren said that most hikers believe it is somewhere between eleven and twelve hours, but he has heard the legend retold with numbers as low as nine and as high as fifteen. As Terren remarked himself, no single one of these retellers of the legend are wrong or right.