Spire Measure Gripes

[John Kirk]

I was taking a look at the CO spire measure list here:
http://www.peaklist.org/spire/lists/CO-50-abs.html

Maybe I'm not understanding something, but this list seems to have some holes in it. No Lizard Head, no Colorado National Monument, no Chimney Rocks, No Twin Peaks, No Turret Needle .

It does have North Maroon, and the Reduced Spire Measure list has El Diente - how does this happen?
http://www.peaklist.org/spire/lists/CO-50-red.html

[Layne Bracy]

My general explanation would be that those peaks, while having fearsome summits, are not ranked highly by spire measure because their steep sections are too small.

For example, Lizard Head's top 800' or so are brutal but its angle then greatly lessens.

Check out:
http://www.peaklist.org/spire/theory/expl.html

As it mentions, a pole of height H gets a spire measure of H, while a cone with height H and slope 45 degrees gets a spire measure of H/2.

So, a 200m vertical column loses to a 500m 45 degree angle peak, even though the climbing difficulty is not comparable.

[John Kirk]

I still don't get how North Maroon and El Diente would make it when either's independent rise is less than 260'.

[Layne Bracy]

As I understand it, spire measure is computed by summing the contributions from all 360 degrees.

In the cases of El Diente and North Maroon, the connecting ridges are thin. So, even though they receive little contribution in the direction of Wilson and Maroon, they make up for this with relatively high steep drops in all other directions.

Likewise, Sopris is not extremely prominent, but has the highest spire measure in Colorado because of the huge drops on the side away from its connecting saddle.

I recall reading that it is not uncommon for the point with the greatest spire measure on a mountain to not be the summit. So, a point with very little prominence can rank high if it is perched out on the edge of a coxcomb with steep drops in almost all directions.

Why the sudden interest, by the way? Thinking of adding a spire section to the various lists?

100 Most Spiry

[John Kirk]

Why the sudden interest, by the way? Thinking of adding a spire section to the various lists?

I'm much less likely to now than ever before, but yes, the thought was crossing my mind. I'll have to come up with a measure that represents what I think this category should more intuitively get to. Flagpole measure?

I think the way to go about it would be ascending breadth of a predetermined minimum # of contours - from the summit down. Not that we'd really want to create a measure that does what it is intended to do though. This would be a ton of work, so I might just leave it at that.

[John Kirk]

How about Pillar measure? Sounds safer than flagpole, right? At least from a sitting on the summit standpoint.

[TWorth]

I think Spire measure would be better if it focused more on the relief immediately surrounding a peak, rather than using an integral from the summit(or point in question) off into infinity or a great distance. Mt Ouray doesn't seem like much of a spire, but it must make the list based on its relatively high local relief over a wide area. Yet this quality is already captured by prominence. If only the terrain within a half mile or mile radius of the summit is considered, Ouray would probably not make the cut and Lizard Head would fare much better.

Another option is instead of just ignoring anything beyond a radius of a certain distance, the formula could be tweaked to give greater weight to the terrain surrounding the summit with decreasing weight the further one travels off into infinity. Sounds like a lot of work - I think I'll go climb some peaks instead.

On the theory page, it says an adjustment was made to shift focus from the area immediately surrounding the summit more towards middle distance. This is good in a way in that you don't want the list to be a bunch of 50' vertical rocks, but if something like Lizard Head can't make the list, the adjustment is perhaps too strong.

[Layne Bracy]

Tim, your suggestion makes a lot of sense to me. As an example, Mauna Kea gets a fairly high value despite being the antithesis of a spire.

[BobBolton]

The original idea that resulted in Spire Measure, which was mine, BTW, did indeed regard only the immediate terrain around the point in question. Reduced Spire Measure, which I disdain heartily, takes into consideration the surrounding terrain, which to me is entirely wrong as we already have a measure which does that, admittedly in a very different way - prominence. The idea was to combine two factors, the local relief and the slope of that relief, taking into consideration the entire 360-degree scope of the point in question. Prominence is NOTHING like this because a peak can have huge spire measure but lousy prominence when the connecting ridge to a higher summit is narrow but high.

I initially wanted to devise a measure that notices peaks with little prominence but lots of steepness and relief. The point was to be measured in complete isolation. One reason for my interest in this was that the North Cascades have so many highly impressive, steep, high relief peaks where there are nearby higher peaks with high ridges connecting them. Unreduced Spire Measure seems to work very well for this. The reason "they" didn't like it was that the computer couldn't be used to generate climb lists without help. People climb to summits, not high spire measure points, and the software calculating unreduced spire measure finds points that aren't summits. I suggested that they select summits and only measure them since that's where climbers tend to go. But their preferred solution was to mathematically enhance the isolation, which watered down the concept too much for my taste by reducing the ratings of some truly spectacular peaks far too much.

Johannesburg Mountain was one of the peaks I had in mind - check out it's topo map.

Bob

[John Kirk]

Thanks for the commentary Bob. Johannesburg looks very impressive, BTW. The use of the term "spire" is what has been throwing me off. Before investigating Spire Measure, my thought was it should generate a list of spires, which I thought would be pretty cool to add as a list since there would be few completers and the list would really highlight the "tough" peaks. Fisher Towers in Utah is a good representation of what I consider spires (The Titan is the tallest Spire in the US):

The Titan -700' tall:


Kingfisher:

[John Kirk]

For what it's worth, I asked Aaron Maizlish/David Metzler about this, and here was what David had to say:

"John---you have correctly surmised that spire measure is indeed a metric for all
mountains (in fact all topographic features), not just features that are called
"spires". Its name comes from the fact that a spire-shaped feature will get a
high rating for its overall size. However you are not the first to be confused
by the name, and Edward Earl and I are looking into whether there is a better
one. It's a tricky thing to pick a simple, suggestive, but not misleading name,
so we're still working on it, and it's still "spire measure" for now."

[BobBolton]

I should have mentioned that I don't like the name "Spire Measure" either - never have. The original discussions about such a rating system on the Prominence forum derived from what I was calling "impressiveness". My idea was that there are basically two properties of a mountain that make it more or less impressive. Those properties are local relief and the slope of that relief. Greater local relief and steeper slope increased impressiveness. The two simply needed to be factored together by a reasonable mathmatical relationship. Some people got hung up on the word "impressiveness" by confusing it with the idea of aesthetics, saying that one person may prefer a desert peak, while others would prefer peaks with forests below, steep glaciers above, and rocky summits at the top. Others would prefer big volcanoes. To me, "impressive" had nothing to do with aesthetics, only physical characteristics. Anyway, it was a long road which led to what finally became known as Spire Measure. Some people have completely thrown out the concept just because of its name, which seems silly to me. The concept is what's important, not the name. But I agree that the name can obscure the concept to a degree. -Bob

[BobBolton]

Your spires are also very impressive, however since the relief is limited, their spire measure is limited, because spire measure factors both slope AND relief. So Rainier, which looks nothing like a spire but does have some fairly steep slopes in places, scores well due to its enormous relief. And nobody that I know of would argue Rainier is not highly impressive. There's nothing magic about the formula, of course, and not everyone is impressed by the same things. For example, some might be more impressed by the Grand Teton than by Rainier.