In the spirit of optimism, looking forward to the days when I have my full license and a free week or two, I’ve been looking at the pyrenees. They’re my favourite range of mountains, and the appear to have a wealth of unactivated 10 pointers. On closer examination though, I see the odd potential issue.
It is possible that these things have been covered in discussion threads elsewhere, but I can’t easily find them now and I didn’t spot any relevant sections in the rules or association references.
Some summits appear to fail the 150m prominence requirement.
F/PO-015, L’Épaule du Marboré is a subsidiary summit (is that the correct term?) of F/PO-002, Pic du Marboré. It only rises ~60m or so above the key col between the two. Similarly, F/PO-021, La Tour du Marboré only rises ~70m above the key col between it an F/PO-002.
Assuming I haven’t made a mistake here (and if I have, what did I miss?), what’s the routine for sorting this out? Mention it here? Email the association manager? (more generally, how is prominence of a peak verified? manually? trusting lists compiled by other organisations?)
Where a summit falls into two associations (F/PO-008 and EA2/HU-009 Le Taillon, though there are plenty of examples here as the national border runs though a bunch of high peaks), does it count as the same peak, or does it become a 20-pointer after a bit of a walk over the border? I’m sure this has been asked recently as the same issue must pop up in plenty of other associations, but I can’t seem to find any sort of ‘official’ response.
It has a link to the old reflector which apparently lead to a more up-to-date discussion on the French summits but of course that link no longer works.
So points don’t get removed retrospectively if you’ve activated a summit that no longer exists? A cynical person might suggest that such a rule would encourage people to keep summit list errata to themselves!
No. You keep the points you have got even if summits are cancelled. A recent example is the ± 600 DM summits that were removed at the end of March 2016. The activators scores have not changed.
Enough to see that they do not obviously state how a SOTA participant should best report problems with the summit list, and that no mention is made of summits with multiple entries in the database.
Great area for walking. Last time I was there, I did the cirque du Gavarnie, taking in Le Taillon, Le Vignemal, the Marbore peaks then crossing the border to do Monte Perdido and El Cilindro finishing off with a walk down the Ordessa canyon to the campsite, fond memories. Enjoy whichever peaks you can. There’s only a short window in the summer when the wx isn’t too bad, but there’s a high risk thunderstorms. Good luck trying to get help interpreting the rules
It’s good you’ve read them, you’d be surprised how many people never bother.
They do say the AM is responsible for preparing the list of summits and that proposals by participant add and delete summits should be made to the AM. So by inference reports of dupes should be made to the AM. You eluded to that in your post.
Verification is an entire subject in itself. We use a variety of methods and some associations predate some of the software and data that is now used. So there will be some summits that fail P150, they are slowly being removed.
As for border summits, well the rules changed sometime back. The situation now is explained clearly in the rules, and that is there is one summit so only one reference and there are details as to how the associations that could claim the summit should resolve this. In the past they were allowed and we are slowly removing the duplicates. You may have found a piece of the world that is still be revisited. However, I thought EA2 had been reviewed so the dupes will be from the French side which has yet to be done.
The crux of the matter is, if it is listed in the DB you can activate/chase it. Do check the valid to dates just in case the summits is about to time out and be deleted. As you are new(ish) to SOTA you may have missed previous announcements.
Thanks for that; that’s what I needed to know. I’ll drop the AM an email. I have a moderate amount of free time right now, so possibly this is something I could help out with.
[quote=“G1INK, post:7, topic:13105, full:true”]
Great area for walking. Last time I was there, I did the cirque du Gavarnie, taking in Le Taillon, Le Vignemal, the Marbore peaks then crossing the border to do Monte Perdido and El Cilindro finishing off with a walk down the Ordessa canyon to the campsite, fond memories.[/quote]
Yeah, that’s pretty much the route I was thinking of, though possibly in the other direction. There’s certainly no shortage of places to go there.
I was thinking that a ski descent from the Breche de Roland into Gavarnie might be a rather good way to spend a winter afternoon… I’m not quite sure where I’d find a ski mountaineering partner willing to spend an hour or two with me messing about with a radio, however.
