About Peakbagger.com

Contact Information:

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(Note that Peakbagger.com is not a 501(c)(3) charity and and PayPal gifts made here are not tax-deductible in the USA.)

About This Site:

Peakbagger.com is a free web site that is both a hobby and a place for me to post some of the mountain-related information I have collected over the past 30 years.

History and Sources

The database at the core of this web site began with handwritten and typewritten lists of mountain peaks I made as a child.  By 1987 the first of these, a list of high summits in the Northeastern U.S., had made it onto a computer as an elaborately formatted text file.  Over the years I added more and more to this list, which by 1994 was in a spreadsheet format and had over 1000 mountains all over the world.  I added peaks by hand, or from large public-domain databases like the GNIS and BGN gazetters.  Eventually the list was moved into a real database system, and supporting information about ranges, lists, prominence, and isolation was fleshed out into full-fledged sub-systems.  I have verified and modified data by checking what I have against a wide variety of sources, including standard reference works as well as internet newsgroups and web sites.

Peakbagger.com was launched in 1997 with a very limited amount of content, and mainly served to host various trip reports of some of my climbs.  The new and re-designed site, launched in April, 2004, preserved the old content, added lots more, and hooked up with the master database to provide a huge array of dynamic web pages for peaks, ranges, and lists of peaks.

The Peakbagger database is now being updated by many site users who add and correct peak data, all curated by a hierarchy of power users.

The Database

Currently, the core of the site is a database table of thousands of mountain peaks, with over 100 information fields that could be filled in for each one.  Of course, only a small percentage of the millions of possible data cells have real data in them, but every peak in the database has at least a name, elevation, country, continent, mountain range, latitude, and longitude.  I won't add a peak to the data without at least these fields.

The database also contains a table of over 2,000 mountain ranges, arranged into a consistent hierarchy called the "PEMRACS", plus many other pieces of information that support the core peak and range tables.  The list of peaks on this site are dynamically generated by queries against the database.

See the Site Statistics page for a current count of content items currently in the database.

Bugs, Errors, and Problems

There are certainly many thousands of errors in the master database and the accompanying text that together make up the content of this site.  The previous verison had about 1% of the content of this new site and I still received a fair amount of e-mail reporting errors.  I am aware of how "dirty" much of the data and content is, but I feel it has reached the point where the usefulness of what is good outweighs the deficiencies.  I fully acknowledge any errors you may find, and feel free to e-mail me and I should be able to correct them.

Climb Tracking

As of 2005, this site has allowed anyone to sign up for an account where a climber can track their climbs and progress towards completing peakbagging lists.  See the Login page for more information.  Once you are signed up and have entered your ascents, the site will automatically create a set of web pages with reports, summaries, charts, and maps that chronicle your hiking and climbing activity. These pages are all accessed from your personal home page that is set up for you when you register.