Derek van Westrum grew up in Golden and has climbed more than half of Colorado’s fourteeners. He has an emotional attachment to those peaks, so he’s glad — and a little relieved — that his most recent assignment with the National Geodetic Survey didn’t turn up information that would have been a bummer for his fellow fourteener aficionados.
The GDS measured the height of Colorado’s 58 peaks of 14,000 feet or higher with high-tech GPS technology, down to fractions of feet, and it released its findings on Thursday. No peaks were added to the list, and none lost their standing as fourteeners, but their rankings were shuffled.
“I was very happy that we didn’t lose any. It could have been an interesting ‘Pluto moment,’ where we demoted one of them, and people were mad at us because we got rid of one of their fourteeners,” van Westrum said, referring to Pluto’s demotion from planet to a dwarf planet in 2006. Some got close, but are still at least four feet above the threshold, “so they’re safely there.”
While there are 58 named 14,000-foot peaks in the state, the Colorado Mountain Club only recognizes 54 on its official list of fourteeners. The others — Cameron, Challenger, North Eolus an Conundrum — are subsidiary peaks connected to higher fourteeners nearby, according to that organization.
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Mount Elbert is still No. 1 on the list, but it measured 14,337.6 feet, three feet shorter than its elevation on the previous GDS survey. Huron Peak is now last on the fourteener list at 14,004.1 feet. Previously it was listed at 14,010 feet and Sunshine Peak was at 14,001. The GDS now puts Sunshine’s elevation at 14,004.5 feet.
Grays Peak, a popular summit in the Front Range near Georgetown, moved up on the list from 10th place to ninth with an elevation of 14,275.5 feet, switching places with Castle Peak (14,272.3). The peaks ranked 24th through 30th had been Kit Carson Peak, Maroon Peak, Tabeguache Peak, Mount Oxford, El Diente Peak, Mount Democrat and Mount Sneffels. Now they are El Diente, Kit Carson, Maroon, Tabeguache, Oxford, Sneffels and Democrat.
Of course, the elevations of those seven peaks are within 21 feet of each other.
Previously, mountain elevations were measured by using survey scopes and triangulating summits from known elevations below. The figures released Thursday come from super-sensitive GPS technology.
“You can go to the top of any peak and bring, I would call it a fancy GPS antenna, a real surveyor’s antenna,” explained van Westrum, who is a physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder. “You can set that at a location, like the top of a fourteener and let it run for about four hours. It will tell you your position to about a centimeter, horizontally and vertically.” A centimeter is equal to 0.39 inches.
Mount Elbert and Mount Massive, the two highest peaks in Colorado, are seen from the Leadville area on Friday, July 29, 2011. (Jakob M. Berr, Denver Post file)
That information is then adjusted for corrections in the shape of the earth and other factors to arrive at final calculations.
As much as van Westrum enjoys fourteeners, the purpose of the project wasn’t to give peak baggers more accurate information. It was part of a multi-year project measuring elevations across the nation, and there are significant financial implications. According to a GDS news release, the mapping update will lead to about $8.7 billion in “social and economic benefits” over the first 10 years.
“It allows you to do water engineering projects, to know which way water is going to flow,” van Westrum said. “That’s critical in places like southern Texas, where it’s flat but you have subtle (elevation drops) where it’s really hard to predict which way water is going to flow. For FEMA, floodplain maps are critical. That’s one of the main reasons we’ve done this for the whole country. There are more subtle things, like ports in New Orleans. If you’ve got low tide, you don’t want a boat to hit the bottom of the river there.
“In Colorado, there’s not a lot of economic benefit in knowing where the top of a fourteener is,” van Westrum acknowledged, but it allowed researchers to test the accuracy of the system with amazing precision.
“We were thrilled to see the final number is between six and seven centimeters, say two to three inches,” van Westrum said. “That’s about 10 times better than it was before. As we were doing it, we realized, ‘We’re going to get really good estimates for all the fourteeners, I’ll bet people are interested in this,’ so we published the list.”
And it was a labor of love for a native Coloradan with a soft spot for fourteeners.
“I love these mountains,” said van Westrum, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado. “If you had told me, even in grad school, that I would be an author on a paper where we have the definitive best height estimates we can get, I would have been like, ‘Really? How is that possible?’ It’s just been such a fun thing to be a part of.”