What happened to G/LD-002?

Activation Reports Pre-Planning
1

I noticed this peak code has been “retired” and wondered what is the back story on it.

Did a modern day glacier trim it down to a one pointer?

Paul

2

It was measured inaccurately and so appeared to be P150 when it wasn’t. A few days after SOTA started, the RHB group who produce the UK lists of Marylins, realised the measurement error and deleted it and so it was deleted from SOTA.

You can see it only lasted for 4 days from its entry on the DB.

http://www.sotadata.org.uk/SummitReport2.aspx?summitid=1273

3

You’re almost entirely wrong there Andy.

What you described is pretty much the case with every other now-deleted former GB SOTA summit, but not the case with G/LD-002 Scafell.

This was always known not to be P150, but was included, subjectively, as a one-off, by Alan Dawson in the original book “The Relative Hills of Britain”. The justification given was that the saddle route between the two was only for highly skilled mountaineers, and for the vast majority of hillwalkers, the drop between would easily exceed 150m.

I think he realised eventually that such subjectivity could be applied to thousands of situations in the UK alone - and sensibly decided to amend the criteria to 100% objective - either it’s P150, or it isn’t.

Now whether this happened a few days after the start of SOTA, or whether the then MT / G AM discovered this deletion a few days after the start of SOTA, I am unsure.

1 Like
4

Well that does surprise me that he included a subjective hill originally. I had a look to see when it was deleted and that happened in Nov 1995. At least it was spotted early and deleted before anyone bagged it.

5

Thanks Gents and an interesting bit of SOTA history.

Paul

6

Similar story for SB-002 and SB-003 both valid from 02/03/2002 to 06/03/2002 and no one managed to activate either in those 5 days.
Jim

7

Reading that surprised me since I have scrambled up Broad Stand from Mickledoor several times, so I checked and it is indeed graded as a rock climb of Difficult standard. As I remember it, it was just a scramble with a couple of slightly more thought provoking moves such as a boot jam in a corner crack, but perhaps something has fallen off since then!

8

hopefully not someone

interesting piece of history. I’ll definitely be keeping clear of that route on Sunday

9

While SB-002 and 003 only existed for 4 days, which peaks in the Scottish Border area are they?

I’m just curious as I’m hoping to activate SB-001 in a few weeks.

Paul

10

Paul check the G Association ARM

http://www.sota.org.uk/ARMViewer/G

It list all peaks both current and deleted.

Peter
G1FOA

11

“Use the database Luke” as Obi-Wan never said in Star Wars.

http://www.sotadata.org.uk/summitReport.aspx

Follow the prompts. Every summit that is, or has ever been part of SOTA is there.

12

Good tip and had forgotten about consulting the Oracle.

I looked at the"Most Popular Summits" section for the first time and noticed that almost 90% are in UK. That fact alone makes for an interesting discussion.

Paul

13

Peter

The ARM did indeed answer my question and also rather helpfully alerted me to correctly calibrating my 2m FM expectation on SB-001.

Paul

14

[quote=“W6PNG, post:12, topic:15147”]That fact alone makes for an interesting discussion.[/quote]I suspect some of that is down to there having been UK Associations for a long time. I wonder how the list would look if it was based on an average taking the length of time the summits have been valid into accout, or on the number of unique activators, or including the number of chasers, or…

(Various ways of juggling the counts come to mind, and some might make a big difference to the “most popular” ranking.)

15

Do you know Rick, I don’t think I have ever opened up the source to that page of the DB. I shall have a tinker now and at see what it looks like if it gets some time awareness.

16

I suspect that you will find that it is more complex than just the longevity of the Association. I don’t think that there is any Association with more participants than G, the USA has more than twice as many in total but spread over many Associations. As a result there is more user pressure on summits in G than elsewhere. The DM Association has a good number of participants, but with twice as many summits so less user pressure. Anyway, it will all level out in time!