World Peaks with 300 km of Isolation

Showing Jason Potkay's first ascent dates for climbed peaks (6 out of 455, or 1.32%)

Front Runners List: Click to see list completion progress by climbers that log their climbs using Peakbagger.com.

Multiple Ascents Grid: Click for a grid showing all of Jason Potkay's ascents of peaks on this list (including up to 10 rounds of repeats).

Compare Climbers: Click to compare ascents of up to 5 climbers working on this list.

List Description

This list is possibly the first attempt to create a comprehensive and accurate world-wide list of all peaks with an isolation value of over 300 kilometers. The isolation distance reported here is the “true isolation” to the nearest highest ground for the given peak.

There are undoubtedly still some inaccuracies and missing peaks on this list. Most notably, many of the low and flat coral atolls in the Pacific may contain high isolation peaks, but without centimeter-level LIDAR mapping it would be impossible to find them. The many atolls of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Kiribati, French Polynesia, and vicinity all have elevation in the range of about 3 to 7 meters, and determining which are the highest is simply not possible at present.

Pursuing peaks on this list is definitely for peakbaggers who like to travel—by definition, no two peaks are closer than 300 km, so combining ascents can be difficult. The map for this list show the apparently random distribution of peaks, and there will be summits of all difficultly levels sprinkled about.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Andrew Kirmse, who created and ran software for calculating isolation from digital elevation models, and to Jonathan de Ferranti, who helped with high-quality DEM data. Many of the isolation values for peaks on this list were determined by their process and then map checked.