Now define that. Consistently. For all participants. For all 180,000+ summits. For summits with multiple routes of access. For participants with accessibility challenges. For participants who live next to a mountain range versus a person who lives in the flatlands of their association and has a 10 hour drive to summits. It’s a really easy statement to make - plenty of people have made it - but it’s a really hard thing to define in any consistent way that makes it meaningful.
Is the SOTA scoring system perfect? No. Could it be better? Maybe. Has anyone been able to answer my question above? Not yet.
As someone who does SOTA activating just for the pleasure of hillwalking, the technical challenge of operating radio in the wild often under adverse conditions, and the mental & physical health benefits gained, and who doesn’t care about the SOTA points, badges, awards & rankings obtainable, I feel I’m probably a bit more detached than more competitive activators about how the latter are attributed. That’s doesn’t mean I don’t care, I care a lot about fairness in an unfair complex world but it’s often difficult to create.
Reading this topic and similar ones in the past on the same theme, I get the impression:
Some feel genuinely aggrieved about how summit points are determined in their Association or Region compared to elsewhere, and have very specific suggestions (not always widely shared) on how to improve the system.
As I understand it, the altitude threshold for each point band is determined at the association level but within the framework of the general SOTA rules,
There are widely different opinions as to what would constitute a ‘fair’ system especially when topology varies so wildly even within one continent (e.g. Switzerland vs the Netherlands),
I don’t speak for the MT but I would imagine the issues are:-
In considering any proposed change to the current long-standing rules, is there a very large consensus for that change? (and how the heck do you even determine that body of opinion), and
Would that rules change undo the validity of points previously attained for those summits?
The old maxim probably applies: You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
Sorry if it’s appropriate, but I still have the impression that this is just the kind of filler you get in the daily newspapers during the summer months.
If not, then enjoy it to anyone who likes that sort of thing.
Operator-related issues should have no impact on the scoring system, imo. Whether a person has one leg or two, or whether they live 10 minutes or 10 hours away from a summit, should not matter. Points are according to the summit itself.
What I imagine is to use a single coefficient for each association, rather than adjusting points for every individual summit. The summit list and point values would remain unchanged. The coefficient could be determined quite easily by considering factors such as the average altitude of the 10-point summits, the overall road accessibility of the trailheads within the association and the latitude.
Example:
DM/BM: x1
F/AB: x2
KLF/DE: X3
I’m not personally chasing points or rewards, so I have no personal stake in this change. Still, I find it somewhat amusing that some people get so triggered whenever someone suggests adjustments to make the hobby “fairer.”
How do you quantify the effort involved for summits that have never been activated ?
It’s not realistic to apply such adjustments to every individual summit, but it is feasible to do so at the regional level. For example, in my own region, the Pyrenees, most trailheads are easily accessible by car. Summits are generally snow-free in summer and fully snow-covered in winter. On average, the 10-point summits require about 1700 meters of vertical ascent for an altitude of 3000m. Based on this information, it would be straightforward to adjust the coefficient mentioned above.
Would you advocate applying the same coefficient to the one-point summits? 8-point summits? Where should it start? What if the different regions in an association need different coefficients? Would that coefficient also apply to summits with ski lift or gondola access, or a road?
Just the height difference from the trailhead to the summit has little bearing on difficulty. Would it be “fairer” to figure in the difficulty of the ascent? Walk, scramble, rock climb -and what grade of rock climb? Then there is the actual walk-in from the trailhead. Some of the GM summits involve a round walk of 40+km on rough tracks with bridgeless river crossings, and you don’t even get ten points - should that be factored in?
This is an old debate, older even than SOTA (it started when SOTA was being planned!) It flares up from time to time and will probably still be going on when we are all dead! The current system has all sorts of unfairnesses built into it, but it has the virtue of being simple and easy to apply - though you may not think so when you see what goes into sorting out the point boundaries for new associations! I think we should stick with what we have and let the summit team concentrate on updating old associations and developing new ones. KISS!
I don’t think it’s realistic to evaluate each individual summit in detail to decide whether it’s a simple drive-up, a ski-lift approach, a normal day hike or a full alpine climb. A regional multiplier is probably the fairest and most practical solution.
A 20 to a 40 km round walk in GM/ES doesn’t drastically change the level of difficulty, it’s still doable in a single day with ordinary hiking shoes. On average, the 10-point summits in GM/ES involve roughly 1000 m of ascent over about 20 km. I’ve noticed you usually refer to them as ‘hills’, that says a lot, isn’t it ?
But what about the average summit in KLF/DE or BE for example? Many of them are probably hundreds, if not a thousand kilometers away from the nearest road or settlement, in a harsh arctic climate. I think it would be fair to apply a multiplier for that region.
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Sure, and humanity also managed for millions of years without electricity. But I don’t see many people arguing we should go back to that
“The hills are alive with the sound of music” but that line in a famous musical was sung to an alpine backdrop! To us Everest is just a big hill. “Mountain” originated as a Norman French inport, English is a magpie language, replete with inported borrow words, many of them not too accurately applied.
Put like that it suggests that those summits are not very steep, which is often far from the truth. Think of it as more like a 10 - 20km approach over rough country followed by a 1000m ascent.
Stop talking about it and actually try to come up something concrete. Send it to the MT contact form on Summits on the Air . Not an idea, but an actual worked example for say 100 regions. It’ll have to be regions, not associations, because there’s quite the variance in many associations (eg, ZS, VEx, VKx/ZLx off the top of my head) I’ll bet that whatever you come up with is both more effort than you realise, and going to be just as subjective as the current approach.
The approach we take is roughly 10% of summits in an association will be 10 point summits. Roughly the same will be 1 point summits, and the rest will be roughly evenly spread, with bands separated on a “round” number of metres altitude. The only caveats to that are:
1 points generally will not start lower than 400-500m in altitude. This usually results in low associations having much more 1 point summits. There are counterexamples to this that are either historic or have reasons.
10 points will not start higher than 3500m in altitude. This results in high associations having a disproportionate amount of 10 point summits.
Indirectly, this applies both an incentive for people by providing at least some nearby 10 point summits that won’t require having to travel to far-flung regions of the world or perhaps require mountaineering experience to activate, and not overly reward lower associations where the difficulty, perceived or otherwise is generally lower, while also giving high associations with their comparative increased perceived difficulty more 10 pointers.
It avoids having to characterise different regions and make subjective determinations of the perceived difficulty of a region. It’s simple to explain, and therefore keeps the inevitable arguments simple. And every time someone has suggested that something better needs to be made, and we ask for an example, the example never appears.
Prove me wrong. Be the first that actually offers something tangible that we can assess. I’m genuinely interested in how this might work.
Yes I believe you, I’ve climbed some in GM-ES and GM/WS.
Rules are changing, everywhere, all the time…
DM/BM has a load of 10-point summits, they are only 100–200 m of ascent and about 2 km of walking, set in peaceful forests.
Well, to be honest, people are really not encouraged to bring up this particular topic, the reactions are almost always rather bitter, on this forum. But I hear you, I will come with a detailed example later.
As a representative of above-referenced ZL# (and hey - that should be ZL3 - we have to climb 40% further for our points than those oh-such-an-easy-life ZL1 lot)
So if I want to get 10 points, I need to don crampons, carry an ice-axe, be very confident of the weather, spend a day approaching the summit, a day summitting, and maybe a day returning, carry tent, InReach (there will be no mobile signal), sleeping bag, food, stove, … And with one exception (a skifield summit) I need to climb at least 1800m from the nearest roadend.
If I were in some not-to-be-named European countries, I could drive or take a chairlift, sit at a picnic table, and have a drink and meal at the mountain-top cafe.
How on earth are you ever going to capture all that in a single scoring system? Your example may be a spoof, but it is accurate in that a real-world fair scoring system would be just as complex and just as prone to unfair, unintended loopholes and exceptions.
So as the OP presumably intended to point out, let’s not bother!
I know what a ZL3 10-pointer is worth - in terms of effort and skill. You know what a DL or G 10-pointer is worth likewise. The fact that the two are not directly comparable is not really important. We all set our own goals, challenges, and we all measure our own progress against them.
That is more than cancelled out by your use of on site power, instead of taking proper batteries or a bio-diesel generator.
It is however clear that the scoring structure is completely contradictory to the carbon free environmental goals.
The new scoring system should be based on how close the summit is, and how little energy is required to ascend, with a bonus for using the lowest carbon motive power - e.g. riding an ebike or fresh Swedish vegan**.
