Unnamed peak pages
Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2011 9:42 pm
Hi Gang,
As I've noted elsewhere, my ongoing attempts to finish the California Thirteeners often put me atop unnamed summits, and I have added a few pages to summitpost.org describing them. Some of these have unofficial names, so I use those whenever possible, surrounding them with quotation marks (as is the convention in guidebooks, etc.)
Other unnamed peaks are clearly shoulders of more prominent mountains, even though they're technically mountains in their own right (at least when objective criteria are applied). In those cases I've included the name of the major mountain within parentheses in both the Name and Query Name fields. For example, see my UTM515178 (Northwest Lamarck) (which, in my opinion, ought to be the major mountain anyway).
Finally, some unnamed peaks are quite simply unnamed peaks, and referring to some other peak from the name would still seem both awkward and arbitrary. Other summitpost.org authors (as well as guidebook authors) have referred to such peaks by elevation, but I would argue that this practice adds little for recognition purposes and is inherently unstable, particularly when only the approximate elevation of the summit is known. Instead, I've employed a compact UTM format for unnamed California peaks that is commonly used to refer to locations throughout the Sierra Nevada in R. J. Secor's The High Sierra - Peaks, Passes & Trails. This format has been criticized for not including the UTM zone. However, it would seem even more unlikely that two peaks in different UTM zones would share the same UTM coordinates than it would be for two peaks in different regions to share the same proper names (i.e., the UTM format is sufficiently specific.)
Thoughts?
- Chris
As I've noted elsewhere, my ongoing attempts to finish the California Thirteeners often put me atop unnamed summits, and I have added a few pages to summitpost.org describing them. Some of these have unofficial names, so I use those whenever possible, surrounding them with quotation marks (as is the convention in guidebooks, etc.)
Other unnamed peaks are clearly shoulders of more prominent mountains, even though they're technically mountains in their own right (at least when objective criteria are applied). In those cases I've included the name of the major mountain within parentheses in both the Name and Query Name fields. For example, see my UTM515178 (Northwest Lamarck) (which, in my opinion, ought to be the major mountain anyway).
Finally, some unnamed peaks are quite simply unnamed peaks, and referring to some other peak from the name would still seem both awkward and arbitrary. Other summitpost.org authors (as well as guidebook authors) have referred to such peaks by elevation, but I would argue that this practice adds little for recognition purposes and is inherently unstable, particularly when only the approximate elevation of the summit is known. Instead, I've employed a compact UTM format for unnamed California peaks that is commonly used to refer to locations throughout the Sierra Nevada in R. J. Secor's The High Sierra - Peaks, Passes & Trails. This format has been criticized for not including the UTM zone. However, it would seem even more unlikely that two peaks in different UTM zones would share the same UTM coordinates than it would be for two peaks in different regions to share the same proper names (i.e., the UTM format is sufficiently specific.)
Thoughts?
- Chris