Challenger Point is Not Ranked!

[BillMiddlebrook]

Yessir

[Stratosfearsome]

Yessir

Hi Bill,
When all the dust settles, do you plan to update peaks on 14ers.com to reflect LiDAR data?
Cheers,
Robert

[CheapCigarMan]

Yessir

What's the logic for keeping it?

[gb]

As well as provide an easier route by going over Challenger vs. going over Columbia. The traverse from Columbia to Kit Carson is no joke: Hard to keep it to Class 3 and has a high amount of exposure.

Having a separate, standard trailhead for Kit Carson also distributes the hikers more so South Colony doesn't get even more trashed than it already does.

Very true as far as spreading out hikers.

It's funny, I can barely remember climbing (not skiing) KC. I remember we camped, and I remember that we did Humboldt the same day, but I don't remember the climb being that hard, at least compared to the Crestones, which I vividly remember. Pretty funny reading my old weathered Borneman Lampert book that I would have been using then and seeing the whopping 3 sentences that are devoted to the KC climb. I was pretty young, so maybe I was young and dumb enough not to notice, ha!

[dwoodward13]

Yessir

What's the logic for keeping it?

Its named (ie same as Cameron, El Diente, N Elous, Conundrum and (formerly) N Maroon).

[Mtnman200]

Yessir

Hi Bill,
When all the dust settles, do you plan to update peaks on 14ers.com to reflect LiDAR data?
Cheers,
Robert

Rob, it’s buried somewhere in one of the threads, but Bill said when the LIDAR project is complete he’ll update 14ers.com to be consistent with LoJ.

[HikerGuy]

There is also a new datum coming out next year, https://geodesy.noaa.gov/datums/newdatu ... pect.shtml, and it looks like Colorado will be in the 1 to 2 foot lower range. Not sure if that will affect any peaks at the cutoff elevations or not.

[nmjameswilson]

But from South Colony lakes is way more fun.

Exactly. With a basecamp in Colony lakes you can climb all 4 and skip the subpeak. That was the standard way for years until a few people decided to count the subpeak as a 14er.

As well as provide an easier route by going over Challenger vs. going over Columbia. The traverse from Columbia to Kit Carson is no joke: Hard to keep it to Class 3 and has a high amount of exposure.

Having a separate, standard trailhead for Kit Carson also distributes the hikers more so South Colony doesn't get even more trashed than it already does.

It is a lot of fun though ... I really enjoyed it.

[CheapCigarMan]

There is also a new datum coming out next year, https://geodesy.noaa.gov/datums/newdatu ... pect.shtml, and it looks like Colorado will be in the 1 to 2 foot lower range. Not sure if that will affect any peaks at the cutoff elevations or not.

Is this part of LiDAR or a different and separate project entirely?

[bdloftin77]

There is also a new datum coming out next year, https://geodesy.noaa.gov/datums/newdatu ... pect.shtml, and it looks like Colorado will be in the 1 to 2 foot lower range. Not sure if that will affect any peaks at the cutoff elevations or not.

Yep, any peaks barely above an elevation threshold might be affected. John might either choose to keep the lidar elevations, or he might choose to do a mass-update on any lidar-updated peaks. Since the new datum will affect peaks and saddles mostly equally, the prominences should remain the same for most peaks (other than possibly peaks very far from their saddles eg. Elbert). Haven't talked about that yet.

There is also a new datum coming out next year, https://geodesy.noaa.gov/datums/newdatu ... pect.shtml, and it looks like Colorado will be in the 1 to 2 foot lower range. Not sure if that will affect any peaks at the cutoff elevations or not.

Is this part of LiDAR or a different and separate project entirely?

This would probably be a different project entirely. Would probably involve querying a website to find the elevation difference between the current datum and the new one for a given location, then doing mass-updates on any peaks that have lidar elevations.

[CheapCigarMan]

There is also a new datum coming out next year, https://geodesy.noaa.gov/datums/newdatu ... pect.shtml, and it looks like Colorado will be in the 1 to 2 foot lower range. Not sure if that will affect any peaks at the cutoff elevations or not.

Yep, any peaks barely above an elevation threshold might be affected. John might either choose to keep the lidar elevations, or he might choose to do a mass-update on any lidar-updated peaks. Since the new datum will affect peaks and saddles mostly equally, the prominences should remain the same for most peaks (other than possibly peaks very far from their saddles eg. Elbert). Haven't talked about that yet.

There is also a new datum coming out next year, https://geodesy.noaa.gov/datums/newdatu ... pect.shtml, and it looks like Colorado will be in the 1 to 2 foot lower range. Not sure if that will affect any peaks at the cutoff elevations or not.

Is this part of LiDAR or a different and separate project entirely?

This would probably be a different project entirely. Would probably involve querying a website to find the elevation difference between the current datum and the new one for a given location, then doing mass-updates on any peaks that have lidar elevations.

Will people need to choose which data to follow, the new Datum or LiDAR? Trying to think through this to see where this is headed. From your above thoughts it seems these two projects people wouldn't need to choose between the two. That they wouldn't be in conflict with each other but instead will be used in conjunction with each other or support one another somehow to determine accuracy. Is that correct?

Second question. It seems a "Final" list won't be known until the new Datum is released and then reassessed with the LiDAR data?

[bdloftin77]

There is also a new datum coming out next year, https://geodesy.noaa.gov/datums/newdatu ... pect.shtml, and it looks like Colorado will be in the 1 to 2 foot lower range. Not sure if that will affect any peaks at the cutoff elevations or not.

Yep, any peaks barely above an elevation threshold might be affected. John might either choose to keep the lidar elevations, or he might choose to do a mass-update on any lidar-updated peaks. Since the new datum will affect peaks and saddles mostly equally, the prominences should remain the same for most peaks (other than possibly peaks very far from their saddles eg. Elbert). Haven't talked about that yet.

Is this part of LiDAR or a different and separate project entirely?

This would probably be a different project entirely. Would probably involve querying a website to find the elevation difference between the current datum and the new one for a given location, then doing mass-updates on any peaks that have lidar elevations.

Trying to think through this to see where this is headed. From your above thoughts it seems these two projects wouldn't be in conflict but be used in conjunction to determine accuracy. Is that correct?

Second question. It seems a "Final" list won't be known until the new Datum is released and then reassessed with the LiDAR data?

As long as the lidar data from the Colorado Hazard Mapping website and The National Map continues to be released in Geoid12 (or 12A, or 12B), or Geoid18, we should be good. If during the analysis project they suddenly start releasing tiles in the new datum, then we'll have a vertical conflict by a couple feet, depending on the specific location in Colorado. This would complicate things, and we'd have to eventually do more conversion to compare apples to apples (eg. all peaks are eventually in the same vertical datum). However far in the future, if all the peaks are converted to the new datum, extremely fringe peaks that barely make an elevation range cut will probably be dropped (eg Peak R: https://listsofjohn.com/peak/819). But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it - they're still in the process of developing the new datum, so we don't know exactly how much lower everything will turn out. In the meantime, know that all the lidar elevations that you see will be probably a couple feet shorter in the end, assuming John does adopt the new datum for his website.

The new datum wouldn't involve any more analysis for specific peaks. It would be a general elevation drop for all Colorado peaks. If John did adopt this datum, all the peaks/saddles could theoretically be autonomously updated via a script. The accuracy of the peak elevations would still be the same, matching the accuracy of the lidar surveys that were used in the first place. Assuming the datum calculator on a website is correct, you would still retain the original accuracy when switching back and forth between any datum.

*IF* John and Bill adopt the new datum, then yes, a final list would depend on converting all the peak elevations to that new datum. Again, this would only affect peaks that are only a couple feet above X-thousand feet using the datums of the current lidar. So it would probably only affect a few 13ers that would show up on LoJ or on 14ers.com. As far as I can tell, the 14ers are safe, as a couple foot drop wouldn't demote any of the lowest ones to 13ers. The final list(s) wouldn't have to be re-assessed/re-analyzed using lidar data - they would only have to be converted from one datum to the other.

Since we don't know A) if John and Bill will switch to the new datum when it finally comes out, and B) when exactly the new datum will come out or how much exactly it will differ from the current datum, I don't see any problem with continuing to determine peak elevations using the current Geoid12B and Geoid18 datums.

I hope this made sense.