Oregon Complete

[BobBolton]

Another interesting analysis would be county residents per P300 and P1K. King County, WA would run away and hide with that stat!

[John Kirk]

Another interesting analysis would be county residents per P300 and P1K. King County, WA would run away and hide with that stat!

As in Most Residents per peak?

Here's some quick p300 analysis...

King County:
1,859,284 pop and 351 p300s = 5,297 persons per p300

San Francisco County:
812,241 pop and 6 p300s = 135,374 persons per p300

Least Residents per p300 - my guess would be Sublette County WY:

7,925 pop and 329 p300s = 24 persons per p300

[Al Sandorff]

How about the most populated county with no ranked peaks? I'm going with Sacramento county out of the states that are so far listed. On a seperate note, if you've climbed the county highpoint in a county with no ranked peaks, shouldn't that count as a completed county?

Al

[BobBolton]

Another interesting analysis would be county residents per P300 and P1K. King County, WA would run away and hide with that stat!

As in Most Residents per peak?

Here's some quick p300 analysis...

King County:
1,859,284 pop and 351 p300s = 5,297 persons per p300

San Francisco County:
812,241 pop and 6 p300s = 135,374 persons per p300

Actually I was thinking of something different, but I'm not sure exactly what! The general idea was to factor the number of peaks with the number of residents to come up with a number that could be ranked against other counties. Simply multipying the two numbers would be one way I guess, but that wouldn't be mathematically elegant. Anyway, a combination of lots of people and lots of peaks should put King County way up there.

[Mike Garratt]

Now that peak logging exercise is complete it is time to bring up the obvious question.
Did we use the correct criteria????

The criteria for all these 50,000 “ranked” peaks somehow got to be a 300 foot rise above the saddle with a higher peak.

Why hasn’t anybody asked, is this criteria reasonable, logical, appropriate?

Well this was indeed a BIG question in the Colorado Mountain Club in the mid-1960s.
Why then? Well, that was when the USGS got serious about producing topographic maps for 100% coverage of the 50 US states.
And, no surprise, this mapping exercise brought into question the then accepted list of the Colorado 14ers.
Some shrunk, like Grizzly by Independence Pass and Stewart by Creede and others grew like Holy Cross.

So an engineer type (no surprise there), Bill Graves (love the name too) starting looking into what the Colorado 14ers had in common that made them ‘unique’ peaks. He published a article in Trail and Timberline in the mid ‘60s with suggested criteria.
One was the 300 foot rise above the saddle with its higher neighbor. The second was a distance from nearest peak of ½ mile.
The second criteria was to knock out the bumps on a ridge candidates like Massive’s summits and what later became Challenger Point being a bump of Kit Carson.
Notice this was the ‘60s when no one in America was thinking metric, yet not even the USGS, with 20, 40 and 80 foot contour intervals on various scale maps. The 1:100k maps were a much later idea after the American scientific went metric so they could collaborate with other scientists around the world.
Bill even went on to publish the first list of the Colorado 100 highest in T and T using these same criteria.

The candidate criteria worked fine with the exception of two peaks.
North Maroon failed both criteria as it is a bump on the ridge of South Maroon. El Diente failed the drop criteria but passed the distance criteria.
But no one had a problem with this as no one can deny North Maroon sure looks like a mountain from Maroon Lake where you start the climb from and El Diente’s ridge with Wilson is difficult enough to make it worthy of being a separate peak.
But the criteria worked well. It eliminated extra credit peaks like Cameron.
The criteria led to the eventual acceptance of Elingwood Point though it got a second class name, that is, Point, rather than Mountain or Peak just like Challenger.

For historical reference Bob Martin and I discussed this criteria business at length in the ‘80s when we worked with the CMC list making community before we published the 13er list in the Colorado High 13er book. There was a lot of discussion about the distance criteria. Should the ½ mile be air distance or follow the ridge line? It was complex enough that Bob and I dropped the distance criteria to simplify things for the 13er book. Since the 13ers are similar in geographic geology and topography to the Colorado 14ers, Bob and I did not think it was a stretch to use the same criteria 300 foot criteria.

It was a complex enough issue that Walt Borneman, the 14er guidebook author and our publisher at Cordillera Press, was reluctant to include the lists in the book.
Since it was the ‘80s and America going metric was in flux another individual published a Colorado peak 4000 meter book with peak lists which of course cut off right above Lizard Head.
But that list died when America rejected the metric system.

In my hiking experience beyond the 13ers and having visited an inordinate number of innocuous bumps, makes me skeptical about the continued use of the 300 foot criteria at lower elevations even in Colorado.
I believe the 1000’ prominence list development was a direct response to the proliferation of insignificant objectives.
It addition it leaves an appalling number of wonderful climbs in the dust bin of the cursed ‘unranked’ like Lone Eagle, Little Matterhorn, The Index, ‘put your favorite here….’.

Now we have these ‘convenient’, ‘after the fact’ Colorado 14er criteria applied to every peak in the western US and Alaska and Hawaii. When and how did that get decided? Wow!

And amazingly no one has ever asked the simple question “Why?”
“What are the alternatives?”

Certainly, there must be other criteria for similar lists developed independently?

In areas with no glaciation like southern AZ and CA, the zillions of little lumps of rocks leads to a simple excess of peaks.
The Southern AZ hiking Club based out of Tucson solved the problem by making lists with all named peaks with public access within 25, 50 and 100 miles of downtown Tucson regardless of drop. Seems reasonable since most folks like to climb something with a name.

Do areas with recent uplift and little history of glaciation like Pacific rim in WA, OR and Northern CA deserve differing criteria? I have heard that the Seattle Mountaineers use a 500 foot criteria. That explains why no one from the northwest climbs the lower 14er bump, Liberty Cap, on Rainier with its 492’ drop.
I know I didn’t.

Other hiking clubs in other geographic areas have likely dealt with the same issues as the CMC did with the 14ers in the 1960s.

Where is the discussion??
The silence is strangely deafening.

[John Kirk]

Washington uses a 400' criterion (clean prominence, meaning no interpolation/extrapolation).
John Roper's nice historical perspective is detailed here:
http://rhinoclimbs.com/

There is no claim on this site that 300' is the only way to look at things. It is the standard adopted for lack of anything more established. It hadn't been done at any interval in the majority of Western States other than at 2000'+ prominence, so there isn't much of an established convention that I'm going against. In fact, Washington is the only completely listed state independent of this site that has climbers adhering to a rule for peak inclusion using a prominence threshold below 1000'.

The only path the argument can take is that we should list more peaks by going lower than 300' for unnamed, because all other thresholds > 300 are already included by extension. If someone wants to do so, I'm not stopping them.

Making lists of only named peaks has obvious problems. The physical properties of peaks exist independently of someone attaching a name to them. The physical properties have and will continue to endure far greater lengths of time than the names that may or may not become arbitrarily attached to them. A minimum rise rule is a quantifiable measure rather than an opinion, and yields comparable data when the same threshold is used for all lists, whereas using different standards gives rise to data sets that can't be combined or used for comparison.

You could ask Ryan about the reasons for the development of the 1000' list, and I don't think it had much to do with a disdain for p300 lists.

[Layne Bracy]

In my view, the P300 list is just data. If you like it for a given area, use it. If you prefer to use P400 or P2000, then John's lists can provide you with that info, too. By tweaking the software, John could create custom prominence lists for anything from 300' up. If you want to create a P200 list, go for it; it's just extra information.

As noted, not everything worth climbing has much prominence, Lone Eagle being a great example. Of course, the rock climbers tell us that repeatedly, happy to go up fine routes without regard to whether the top of the route is a summit or not.

I don't really see a need for consensus on what should or shouldn't be climbed. Deciding whether El Diente, Lone Eagle or Liberty Cap are worth climbing are individual decisions. The lists just give data to help you decide.

[Mike Garratt]

To a user of LOJ.com, the walk does not follow the talk.

The ‘being flexible’ talk sounds good, but the LOJ site tallies and publishes all stats based on the 300’ criteria.
XXers completed, quads completed, county points completed, etc.
Even the CO unclimbed peaks only list 300’ ranked peaks.

The unranked peaks are included in the data base and one can log their ascents but the stats largely ignore these data.

It’s hard to not say the web site is officially endorsing the 300’ criteria as the national standard.

This bothers me because of how Bob Martin handled the 300’ thing.
After the 14ers he never set foot on an unranked peak.
His only goal became the 2000 ranked highest in Colorado.
It became his CO religion; which sets one up.
Kind of like saying “I never climbed a private peak without permission.” When….
It is ironic because Bob climbed all sorts of unranked stuff in AZ; but then he was active in the Southern AZ Hiking Club, which had their own criteria.

It appears the web site is taking a similar tack on the 300’ criteria without saying so by the way it is programmed to provide recognition.

So this is kind of gentle prodding before LOJ get cast as the “Son of Bob”.

Regards, Mike

[RyanSchilling]

This bothers me because of how Bob Martin handled the 300’ thing.
After the 14ers he never set foot on an unranked peak.
His only goal became the 2000 ranked highest in Colorado.

Don't Bob's stats on this very site belie this notion? Surely he focused on 300' rise peaks, but you don't collect 474 unranked peaks by patently avoiding them.

I think the priority for John was listing the Western peaks. I was irked, for example, when there was an effort by A. Maizlish to list the CA peaks -- but only to 500'. I agree with Layne's statement that by listing to 300', the bases are covered. Lists with greater prominence thresholds are easily created from there.

Now that this effort is complete, should he choose, John could program the site to utilize a prominence threshold of the user's preference, with accompanying customized stats.

PS - Challenger's name is "Challenger Point," so it's in the same boat as Ellingwood.

[Al Sandorff]

I think it would have worked well had the prominence criteria been a % of the height of the peak with a fixed minimum, such as 5% or 10% with a minimum prominence of 300 feet for peaks under 3,000 or 6,000 elevation depending on which variables were adopted.

[JoeGrim]

I love this site! It gives me a good excuse to go out and climb some pretty neat unnamed bumps that I likely would have otherwise overlooked. And I don't have to go through the work of finding the ranked peaks myself. I have definitely climbed some great named but unranked bumps out there (some of which fall just short of being ranked.) And there are some other unnamed bumps I have climbed for my own purposes (one example and another example). It would be neat to have a side list of particularly impressive unnamed and unranked bumps, but I'm not interested enough to put in the work to do this. :-) I think LOJ provides an objective measure for peaks, and if LOJ becomes the standard-bearer for peak ranking, then I think it reflects all the work and dedication John has put into it. I think it's good to discuss this, although personally, I like how John has chosen to classify things. I must admit, I don't have even close to the hiking experience of many others on this site, so the weight of my input should only be weighed by my 4 years of hiking experience in Colorado. (I hiked the hills in Indiana for many many years, but I don't think a one of them were ranked!)

[RyanSchilling]

I believe the 1000’ prominence list development was a direct response to the proliferation of insignificant objectives.

This would be an interesting question to pose to the Yahoo Prominence group, but having played a minor role, I can say that my motivation was certainly not b/c of dissatisfaction w/ 300' lists. Many of my favorite peaks have been those with lower prominence values, for example, Milwaukee Peak or Truro Peak. And despite my work to fill out the CO 1K' list, I've not felt any compulsion to place a focus on high prominence peaks.

Of course, I can't and don't speak for all parties, but my feeling is that 2K' & 5K' prominence lists were developed because of an intrinsic interest in the concept of prominence and also as an attempt to identify the major peaks of this country and the world based on that metric. To list the world's peaks at 300' of rise would be an impossible task given varying levels of map quality, but higher cutoffs were doable, and thus were achieved.

[Mike Garratt]

[quote]Don't Bob's stats on this very site belie this notion? Surely he focused on 300' rise peaks, but you don't collect 474 unranked peaks by patently avoiding them. [/quote] from Ryan S

Believe me I hiked with Bob in CO on 13ers and 12ers.
He only did an unranked peak in CO if he was going over it on the way to another ranked peak.
The only unranked peaks he did in the 12ers and 13ers were the two CO county high points.

Some of his unranked peaks in the 474 are county high points where again the 300' rule is not used.

Most of his unranked peaks were in AZ where the 'peak bagging rules' were different.

[RyanSchilling]

Don't Bob's stats on this very site belie this notion? Surely he focused on 300' rise peaks, but you don't collect 474 unranked peaks by patently avoiding them.

from Ryan S

Believe me I hiked with Bob in CO on 13ers and 12ers.
He only did an unranked peak in CO if he was going over it on the way to another ranked peak.
The only unranked peaks he did in the 12ers and 13ers were the two CO county high points.

Some of his unranked peaks in the 474 are county high points where again the 300' rule is not used.

Most of his unranked peaks were in AZ where the 'peak bagging rules' were different.

Fair enough. I only had the pleasure of speaking with Bob one time, so I don't know his climbing style.

I was hoping you'd address my idea:

John could program the site to utilize a prominence threshold of the user's preference, with accompanying customized stats.

I'm curious -- would such a setup allay your concerns?

[John Kirk]

.

It’s hard to not say the web site is officially endorsing the 300’ criteria as the national standard.

For this site it is the standard - anyone is free to develop their own lists and develop their own stats. If you don't like it, don't use it. Considering the site is free, I'm surprised there are complaints.

The walk and talk comment isn't really relevant because what you're really getting at is peaks should count the same regardless of prominence, which I fundamentally disagree with. Call me a SOB (Son of Bob), but a single closed contour doesn't belong in the same category as p300s. This is the age-old question, "what is a peak?", and you'd like there to be no minimum standard. That avoids the question and throws the matter into subjectivity.

I don't have a problem with unranked peaks not counting toward my minimum standard totals, and in a way I'd be ashamed to intentionally bolster my totals by adding for the most part a bunch of tiny bumps that someone arbitrarily decided to name.