The Finest Peaks

Book excerpt: This book challenges the precedent that a mountain's worth scales with height. It is a rational synthesis of new concepts that compel one to reassess the popular "heightist mindset". The concept of prominence, loosely defined as a mountain's vertical relief, is a stiff competitor to summit height for assessing a mountain's stature and relative worth for innumerable purposes. The community of prominence theoreticians, list builders, and climbers has reached critical mass - suggesting publication of a book dedicated exclusively to prominence. Revolutions are not overnight. The heightist mindset has minimally a 100 year head start. Eventually the climbing community will embrace prominence. For the mountaineer a prominence-based peak list provides fresh goals guaranteed to satisfy. A prominence-based peak list, regardless of geographic region, incorporates the most awe inspiring and diverse mountains. Chapter I introduces prominence, being defined and contrasted with altitude as peak list generator. Chapters II and III concern peak list production. Chapter IV reviews the history of prominence, including a compendium of prominence list builders and their lists. Chapter V is about prominence oriented peakbaggers and their accomplishments. Chapter VI entails prominence-derived mountain measures - submarine prominence, inverse prominence, proportional prominence, and dominance. Chapter VII concerns the advanced, prominence-derived concepts of parentage, divide trees, lineage cells, and more. Chapter VIII concerns alternative, objective mountain measures: isolation measure; peakedness and prominence density; and height / steepness combination measures - drop measure, cliff measure, spire measure, and ruggedness measure. Spire measure quantifies a mountain's subjective impressiveness due to great angularity. Chapter IX is a search for the largest prominence unclimbed mountain - grand goal of a future, summit-discovering expedition. Appendices A to G cover various subtopics, the glossary defines over 300 terms. 48 pages of illustrations are included, with full-color versions on-line at http://www.cohp.org/prominence/publication_2005_illustrations/main.html A beautiful, hardcover edition with color illustrations is available, and is highly recommended by book reviewers. ? E-mail the author for pricing and purchase information.