14ers list by difficulty

[Lville]

Removing that list is akin to removing college basketball and football rankings. Subjective and inaccurate it may be, but I have absolutely nothing to talk about anymore. "Hey, who is the asshat who thinks that Peak X is five places below Peak Z? Everyone knows that Peak X is harder than Peak Y and Peak Y is harder than Peak Z!"

Unless you're planning on having a tournament whereby Cap takes on N Maroon and then Little Bear challenges Pyramid, w/ a final winner take all, I say put the list back up Bill. In all seriousness, that list was pretty cool ...

[highpilgrim]

Disturbance in the Force, there is.....376 voices silenced in one fell swoop. The Republic is dead.

It's an almost drumpfian purge. A dark day, indeed.

[Ptglhs]

Well subjective is all we have. We don't have enough information to divide number of fatalities by total number of summits multiplied by 10 and then add the total number of summits divided number of attempts.

350+ users subjectively self selecting to report on this website is a useful ranking. It's not generalizeable to the total population of anyone who ever hiked more than one 14er. It does allow to say that in a non representative sample, on average, people think peak X is harder than peak 2.

I liked looking at the peaks with almost no difference in their average score. If the 17th had an average score of 17.58 and the 18th was 17.87 I was interested to see what they were like to climb each and compare.

[Traveler]

Over the last 7 years only 376 people actually ranked the peaks using that page, so the data was based on a very small sampling. IMO, it really wasn't more valuable than the "Grouped by Difficulty"

"Only?" That seems like a decent number.

Yes! IMHO the only people qualified to rank the Colorado 14ers are those who have done them all. 376 of those people is quite significant. I have consulted the list on a number of occasions to try to figure out how difficult a peak is to climb. Knowing a route is 'class 3' isn't that helpful, since all it really tells you is that somewhere along the way there will be some scrambling. But knowing how it compares in difficulty to other peaks you have hiked is much more helpful in preparing.

[BillMiddlebrook]

The user-ranking page was pretty vague from the start. Some people would rank the routes based on most-difficult move (the Class) and others would rank based on their interpretation of "overall" difficulty, which would include length of the route, etc. Additionally, many of the people who used the page, simply took the rank defaults at the time.

I might just make the "Routes by Difficulty" page more detailed and rank them based on OVERALL difficulty within the route group and compared to the other routes in the group.

[seano]

It's worth looking at the history of difficulty ratings. YDS rates the hardest move. Alpine grades rate overall difficulty. Ortenburger's original intent with the Roman numeral grades was similar, but nowadays they're mostly used for length. A crowd survey might be able to do better than any of those, but that would take some thought.

[montanahiker]

I might just make the "Routes by Difficulty" page more detailed and rank them based on OVERALL difficulty within the route group and compared to the other routes in the group.

Yes please!

[Jon1702]

I might just make the "Routes by Difficulty" page more detailed and rank them based on OVERALL difficulty within the route group and compared to the other routes in the group.

That would be great! For example, there are 28 Class 2 standard routes. Knowing which might be an "easier" Class 2 versus a "harder" Class 2 could be good. How does, say, Redcloud compare to Harvard?

[bdloftin77]

The user-ranking page was pretty vague from the start. Some people would rank the routes based on most-difficult move (the Class) and others would rank based on their interpretation of "overall" difficulty, which would include length of the route, etc. Additionally, many of the people who used the page, simply took the rank defaults at the time.

I might just make the "Routes by Difficulty" page more detailed and rank them based on OVERALL difficulty within the route group and compared to the other routes in the group.

+1 I think having at least some sort of more detailed route comparison than just by class would be good

[wildlobo71]

Bill, for people with list and data co-dependencies this is akin to taping the bottle of Xanax shut. Did you need the server space for a Christmas pie recipe? Give the people back what they want.

[ezabielski]

I liked that list. But I could see how it would be vague and inaccurate the way it was.

I think there is a way to rank them that doesn't require people to have done them all. You could have a sort of automatic survey set up that asks them "Which is more difficult: Peak X or Peak Y" where it takes X and Y from the list of 14ers they completed (perhaps with some restrictions that they were done in Summer and the standard route if possible). Perhaps with some user coaching about what you mean by difficulty. Then users would be able to answer as many pairs as they wanted. This would give them a comparative ranking, but as an aggregate, you could rank all of them in order. Sounds a lot easier than asking users to rank 58 peaks in exactly the order they think. Just a thought.

[highpilgrim]

Did you need the server space for a Christmas pie recipe? Give the people back what they want.

First, it was a Savory Elk Meat Pie, perfect for the holiday festivities, so don't oversimplify the issue.

Second, this isn't like the Roman Empire..it's not a "bread and circus" kinda place anymore, if you haven't noticed. So we take what we can get.

Finally, you seem to have some familiarity with Xanax. Is it good stuff?