Wilderness HPs List

[Jeremy Hakes]

Do y'all think I should include Wilderness Area Completion in my CMC update (county completions, etc.)? I think this would be more interesting and better identified than the "Range HP's" list (which I'm going to drop).

Any input?

[DSunwall]

I'm for it, I may have one done this year. Wilderness lists have not been fully developed yet, although the likes of Mike G, Gerry R, etc. have completed a few of them that LOJ has.

[JoeGrim]

Finished all wilderness HPs in IL, IN, MI and WI. Some wilderness areas had as many as 8 different instances of the highest contour interval! So picked largest one for HP.

Next state: NH. (But probably won't get to it for a few weeks, at least.)

[John Kirk]

Thanks for all the work so far guys... I hope to integrate this stuff in the coming weeks and help out. I'm very interested in getting the best data possible for wilderness boundaries - I'll continue to look around.

[JoeGrim]

I woke up too early this morning, so I went ahead and compiled the list for the Mount Zirkel Wilderness Area. My wife and I spent our 10th anniversary hiking here this past summer; a most beautiful area, despite the devastating beetle kill. 45 total peaks: 38 ranked, 3 soft ranked, 19 named (of which 4 were not ranked). The boundary was not an issue for this one, as all peaks along the boundary were along geographical features that the boundary followed.

I have attached an Excel file with the peaks and their stats.

[John Kirk]

I did a quick check on a couple NM wilderness HPs at peakbagger and found errors. San Pedro Peaks is a pretty serious one - 10610 vs the unranked Nacimiento Peak, 9801. Bandelier is at spot 8730, whereas peakbagger has it as Boundary Peak, 8180.

I don't think the current lists are solid if the hps aren't within obvious prominence cells, so this is good to independently generate and cross-check. Just found another one - Capitan Mtns... The HP is a 3k prominence point, so scratch the prominence=accuracy theory.

[MikeRodenak]

I have already done Holy Cross Wilderness (and Eagles Nest, but Dwight already posted his) for my own list purposes at my house. What format do you want? I have it in TOPO! at home. I just have to edit it down because my map is for all of Eagle County so I have to delete the peaks not in HCW and "save as" and I can email it to John Kirk tomorrow.

Let me know if you want a list as well, I can easily type it up from my map.

BTW- The HP for HCW is of course Mt of the Holy Cross

[DSunwall]

Let me know if you want a list as well, I can easily type it up from my map.

If your Topo! map has the peaks as waypoints you can easily export the list to a txt file. If they are labels you could make waypoints pretty fast since the points are already marked.

nice, we have a good start on the Wilderness areas.

BTW I am starting on Sangre De Cristos which is basically all the Sangre De Cristo Mtns. except Blanca and Little Bear I believe. Lots of pieces to its border.

Lindsy, and Kit Carson are also not in the wilderness.

[John Kirk]

I did a quick check on a couple NM wilderness HPs at peakbagger and found errors.

In fact, six wildernesses are missing from the list altogether.

[DSunwall]

I did a quick check on a couple NM wilderness HPs at peakbagger and found errors.

In fact, six wildernesses are missing from the list altogether.

Minor details.

[MikeRodenak]

I made a TOPO and Excel spreadsheet for Holy Cross Wilderness and emailed both of them to John. I am attaching them here for people's review.

There seems to be some issues with the coordinate data on the boundary, in particular the "cherry stems" for Homestake Reservoir and the West Lake Creek Road outside of Edwards that goes to Baryeta Cabins are missing so that these roads are inside the wilderness. Also the boundary has a waypoint that crosses Homestake Road and a few other Forest Service Roads that show up on the map.

I ended up including 3 peaks that did not fall within the wilderness boundary as generated by the waypoints because the USGS maps show those peaks as being along the boundary of the wilderness area. I am not sure what John's thoughts are about that, but it seems to me the boundary waypoints are a little off and I decided to include them for now and we can review the boundary data to see why it is off and go from there.

Including those peaks, I get 51 ranked, 2 soft and 4 named unranked peaks in Holy Cross Wilderness. The 3 peaks in question are Burnt Mtn C, PT 11780 B and PT 11340 A.

[DSunwall]

Looks good, thanks Mike, I have a lot of unclimbed peaks there.

[John Kirk]

I ended up including 3 peaks that did not fall within the wilderness boundary as generated by the waypoints because the USGS maps show those peaks as being along the boundary of the wilderness area. I am not sure what John's thoughts are about that, but it seems to me the boundary waypoints are a little off and I decided to include them for now and we can review the boundary data to see why it is off and go from there.

Thanks Mike - this stuff is going to require a judgment call one way or the other since the data available from USGS is in my opinion quite poor. The boundaries don't line up with the maps well at all. I took another look at the National Atlas' map layer interface, and the polygons are in fact the same as Dwight's file and the extraction I did from the .shp file, so I was getting points that are really not there (picking points along straight lines between polygon points) - false precision.

[DSunwall]

I am starting to believe there isn't a good electronic border. Skyterrain apparently did it all manually from 4 different sources. That GIS file is way off almost everywhere.

For Sangre De Cristo Wilderness I am starting by making a Topo! route of the border following manually from the TI map, which seems to be the best source for this one, the Lat 40 map isn't as good. This is getting rather tedious but I'm about half done. It looks like the SDCW has the most convoluted long border of any of them. I wouldn't have to make a Topo! border to determine the peaks but it will be nice.

The first thing I do is determine all the counties in the area. I download the peak Topo! file for each county from the LOJ Txt file generator. I merge all the counties into one file. Then I determine the lat and long of a big rectangle that is a bit larger than the Widlerness. In the Waypoint display I sort by lat and delete everything north and south of the rectangle and then repeat for longitude. After that I have to manually delete all the wayponts that were in the rectangle but are not in the wilderness, verifying the border with a map. Using this method I should not miss any peaks. Thats my theory anyway.

I wish Topo had a tool that would lasso a bunch of waypoints to delete.

[John Kirk]

Here's the Flat Tops list