New Peak Index on my Web Site

[RoySwkr]

Here's how it works for Mt Washington in the flooding metaphor. ... My guess is that most of the Great Plains (Mississippi River valley) stays flooded much longer, so you never get close to having a path to the Rockies. Stop draining the minute you've got a continuous dry path from Mt Washington to any one of your candidate Peak Bs. The spot that last emerged is the "key saddle"for which Mt Washington's prominence must be measured.

Actually the key saddle near Chicago is substantially higher than the Hudson River saddle. If you want to get into this as deeply as the "prominence" group on Yahoo, you call the highest point of the island you join the "parent". The parent of Mt Washington is not Mitchell, Elbert, Whitney, or Denali, but Aconcagua! That is, the Hudson key saddle is low enough that nearly all of North and South America have joined into a big island before Mt Washington joins that island.

So I've made a nice list to check off NE 50 Finest as I hike them, and I found that I only have 21 to go!

When the list first came out, there were at least 4 people who had done 49. It took 2 years for the first 2 to get 50, and the other 2 apparently still haven't, so not everyone values completion as much as PB.