Hump Day Highpoint - Special Highpoint Commentary

I would like to begin this week's Humpday Highpoint with an apology to all of our faithful followers, fans, and readers about the periodic failures to publish a weekly highpoint commentary. Please understand that sometimes team members are quite busy doing things like earning money for future highpoint exploits and sampling tequila. We only publish if we feel that we can provide a quality experience to you, the reader. Hopefully we can be more reliable in the future but hey, this entire endeavor is based around a beverage that tends to make me quite sleepy.

Today's Humpday Highpoint does not feature the highest point of a particular state. Instead we will focus on a certain phenomenon. I have noticed during the course of my climbing and writing about state highpoints a tendency to put slightly to severely phallic structures atop mountains. Before any analysis let us first establish the point with a collage:

In addition to these obvious examples, many states have built "observation towers" on their highest points. So why the abundance of such obvious signs of "masculinity" atop these points? In order to understand this, we must delve into the early days of exploration and a field which many people don't think much about; surveying.

Surveyors are tasked with establishing the location of points on the earth's surface. Of particular interest to our current line of inquiry, they measure the elevation of mountains. Modern technology makes this considerably less difficult but it was once a major undertaking. Just look at this guy:

As you can see, surveying can really excite you. When much of the country was still unexplored, surveyors were zealously rampaging through the country figuring out how high things were. Sigmund Freud suggests an unconscious fear that all men develop early in life known as castration anxiety. This is exactly what it sounds like and I must admit the suggestion makes me quite anxious. Because of this subconscious fear, early surveyors and the people who paid them devised a plan to reassure themselves in the face of this anxiety. They would strategically place reminders around the country that everything was okay. It only made sense that these would be placed at the highest points around for all to see. Women surveyors would no doubt have thought this undertaking pointless and silly. Fortunately for those men, woman surveyor sightings are a lot like catching a glimpse of bigfoot: