Joe: Thanks for the comment, I agree, it will be interesting to see which peaks score well. Highest score I've seen so far is for a peak in the Gore Range.
John: Yes, we'll have to go over some of the finer points. As you probably found, developing a set of "radius coordinates" isn't too difficult - simple trigonometry with an adjustment for longitude distance based on latitude. Getting the elevations for each coordinate pair - a bit tougher. I used a GIS program(
http://www.globalmapper.com/) to export elevations from 1/3 second NED data in .BIL file format. It's a slow, multi-step process, and the ASCII output files are somewhat large(100+ MB), but its much easier than going quad by quad and the elevations seem to be accurate. The NED data is available at
http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.htmThe third step is to plug the elevation differences into a formula with correct weightings. So far so good on that, though assigning the weightings wasn't simple, as adjustments had to be made for varying distances of the intervals(25m - 200m).