The (Pedantic) Sublime
Even at the peaks of the tallest mountains, one can still find forum drama.
Written and mapped by Lillie Bahrami, 9/15/2025 | Case Study
In 2020, the mountains of Colorado shrank and grew by hundreds of feet. Long-standing peaks withered away, and new contenders appeared out of thin air. This should have been cataclysmic, considering the common annual rate of geologic uplift in a range like the Colorado Rockies is measured in millimeters. Perhaps you missed this due to other urgent news events that year-- or, more likely, you missed it because you aren't an avid follower of the USGS National Map project. That year, USGS completed a comprehensive LiDAR survey of Colorado, delivering unprecedented topographic precision. While this barely registered with most people, it proved to be a life-altering event for the residents of Colorado mountaineering forum 14ers.com.
On 'peakbagger' forums, a surprising volume of discussion revolves around determining what counts as a mountain. In CO, we have a number of 'fourteeners', mountains whose height exceeds 14,000' above sea level. The exact count depends on who's asking: arguments can be made for 53, 58, 59, or even 70. For those who care about completing checklists of mountains summited, the distinction is important. In this case, the devil in the details goes by the name of prominence.
To count as an individual peak, the summit of a mountain must be at least 300' higher than the saddle with its closest neighbor. Historically, the precise number of feet has been a subject of debate among Colorado Mountain Club members,as described by 14ers.com member gore galore:
William Graves in 1968 proposed the 300-foot rule which would accommodate all the then fourteens except North Maroon and El Diente. The Toll Rule from the early 1900s which read that “the horizontal distance in units of one thousand feet between the two points, plus the vertical distance between the lower summit and the col, measured in units of one hundred feet should equal eleven.” This rule would disqualify eight of the fourteeners including North Maroon and Little Bear. A third criteria was under Geological Survey regulations that “a mountain to qualify for the over-14,000-foot club must be at least 500 feet taller than the saddle connecting it with another peak.”
Before LiDAR, determining any of these measurements was a laborious task completed through manual surveying, and later, photogrammetry. The new data of 2020 provided vertical accuracy down to four inches. On the forum, hobbyist GIS analysts jumped into action to process this wealth of data and determine what had changed. While the collection of the data was largely automatic, its processing required quite a bit of manual classification to eliminate anomalies such as tall cairns of rocks built by hikers. After many months of work and hundreds of comments, the project reached a consensus.The lists of fourteeners, thirteeners, and even twelvers had all been disrupted, with mountains demoted and promoted due to both new summit heights and altered prominence.
Ultimately, the fallout from this event was not catastrophic. The peakbaggers were happy enough to adjust to their new lists, even if it affected their timelines. Earlier this year, one gentleman became the third to ever finish the updated list of twelvers after 55 years of work. Another lamented the need to return to a watershed previously thought completed, where wolves have recently been reintroduced. The thousands who scampered alongside marmots, pikas, and bighorn sheep continue to do so.
In the 2020s, we still follow a centuries-old tradition of mountaineering in pursuit of 'the sublime': as Edmund Burke put it, "that which holds the power to compel and destroy us." The mountains are compelling because they are so grand and objective compared to us, the animals who glissade and splitboard and ultramarathon and break ribs on top of them. At the same time, part of the human joy in anything will return to our love of and admiration for spreadsheets-- our constantly improving, doomed, fun attempts to categorize and delineate the universe. &&
