by Mike Garratt » Tue Jul 07, 2009 8:19 pm
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For historical reference Bob Martin and I discussed this criteria business at length in the ‘80s when we worked with the CMC list making community before we published the 13er list in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.