Author: user

We just went live with 2 new topo maps: Natural Atlas for the US, and OpenTopoMap for the entire world. Combined, these new maps provide a whole new level of detail for your outdoor adventures.

Stop what you’re doing and GO CHECK OUT THESE MAPS. They’re that good.

Natural Atlas (US)

When we first saw a snapshot of Natural Atlas, we assumed it was a custom-made map for just a small area. The design quality was so high, styled like a US National Park map but with contours and tons of additional outdoor details and points of interest.

Then we discovered… this amazing map covers the entire US! Indeed, Natural Atlas has been on a mission to make the best outdoor map ever, working hard on a million details for the past few years. It’s loaded with relevant info for mountain hiking: trails with mileages, campsites, waterfalls, glaciers, lookout towers, vegetation, and tons more. Just check out these screenshots; click any of them to see the full detail:

OpenTopoMap (WorldWIDE)

For peaks outside the US, we’ve been searching for a comprehensive topo map with a high level of outdoor-related detail. OpenTopoMap delivers. An effort by a team of map enthusiasts to make OpenStreetMap look more like the celebrated TK25 German topo maps, it shows vegetation and terrain detail (forest, meadows, scree, etc.) and a long list of outdoor points of interest such as mountain huts, shelters, viewpoints, campsites, and more. Here are some screenshots:

 

CHECK ‘EM OUT!

You can see these maps on peakery’s main Map page (choose the map type in the upper right) or on any peak page. Also, when you add a GPX track, it’s now featured on these great new maps. An example log:

 

We just launched a batch of improvements focused on making the peakery website easier to use across desktop, tablet, and mobile.

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Better Logging

We cut out several steps to make logging your climbs easier.

• Sitewide ‘Log a climb’ button: at the top of every page on the site

• Log directly from your GPX tracks: peakery will automatically match the peaks.

• Multi-peak logging: when you climb multiple peaks in a day, now you can choose to log them together:

 

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Better Notifications

The old News page is no more. But its contents live on in 2 places:

• a new Notifications area for just the news involving you: 

• a new ‘Members you follow’ filter on the Latest page for news just about those you follow:

 

 

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BEtter Navigation

We rethought the site’s navigation to make it more intuitive, better organize features, and surface important parts of the site that were buried.

Some of the changes:

• icons next to links
• homepage is now called Latest
• new Peaks dropdown with options to view peaks by Map, List, and Regions:

• moved all of the hard-to-access links from the old footer into a More dropdown (and added a Contact us link):

• access all of your pages from your profile photo:

• search is now more prominent
• completely new mobile nav; now includes all of the same links as on desktop:

 

How do you like these new features? Find any bugs? Please let us know by emailing us from the Contact us link or messaging us via our Facebook page.

 

And PEAK MONTH 2018 is a wrap. Here’s a quick recap…

It began on Aug 1 in the wooded hills of New Jersey with the summit of 750 ft Campgaw Mountain by wacbravo.

1422 summits later, on Aug 31 Culater stood atop Mount Belcher in the islands of British Columbia, capping 4 weeks of mountain adventures by peakery members around the globe.

Some PEAK MONTH stats

Along the way, peakery members overcame many obstacles, such as:

Impolite weather

“In Canada, even the mountains are polite. I have never been kicked out from the mountains in such a way: two hail and thunderstorms within just 2 or 3 hours[…] the wind gusts were somewhat up to 80-100km/h. In some places had to really hold onto the rock in order not to be blown away[…] Had to hide in a hole between camp site’s stonewall and a boulder for quite some time.”  — Longs Peak, Colorado by alexp

Crevasses

“We teamed up with another party of 2, using all 4 of the pickets and belayed each other up the steep snow. After passing the crux it was easy going and super gorgeous. We got to the summit around 10. I can’t imagine having better views. Sean and I had the top to ourselves for 15 minutes then made pretty good time heading down.” — Mount Baker, Washington by MatthewWinterberg

Emergency caving

“Six of us were stuck in a cave for three hours on 8/4/18 about an hour below the Lunch Counter. Severe hail storm with lightning. No warning. We were instantly wet and cold.” — Mount Adams, Washington by blindskov

 

Ornery wildlife

“The hike/slog up was mostly uneventful, except for an ornery bighorn ram. We gave it a very wide berth, walking well around the three rams hanging out, but it kept approaching us. Mike and I took out our bear spray (safety too!) and we all stood together behind a tree clacking our poles together and against the wood. We yelled. Nothing!” — Mount Nestor, Alberta by leigh-annewebster

 

Bad ideas

“After stopping at the archway for a photo, the hiker we picked up was climbing down from the arch and decided to toss his bag for extra mobility. The bag ended up rolling through the archway and all of the way down the sheer north face of Tyrwhitt never to be seen again[…] had to give the guy a lift back to calgary as he had no keys or wallet in order to get home.” — Mount Tyrwhitt, Alberta by MarkJPerkins

 

Chupracabra & agro running dudes

“…darkness fell and I had to descend the rough Harris ridge in the dark from memory as my beam of light barely helped me. I was followed by a group of glowing eyes to add to the drama. Probably squirrels but my imagination thinks chupracabra. Very special day owning the mountain. I have very strange experiences when I pass some men on the trail. 2 times today guys tried to chase me down (with no success) and left their group to do it! Crazy!” — Harris Mountain, Nevada by paula.raimondi 

 

Flimsy footwear

“Started walking with boots I found in the garage and tested while cutting the lawn. After half an hour the rubber sole of the left boot came loose… on the way back the right sole fell off. Not possible to rent boots at hut. We’re here now, put on sandals, more grip than other shoes.” — Bovški Gamsovec, Slovenia by Pieter 

 

Exhaustion

“Third peak of the Castle Peak 100K. After summiting Crow’s Nest, we navigated the craziest, most insane part of any race I’ve ever done[…] a series of fixed ropes would aid our ascent to the summit. The 1.5 mile section would take nearly 45 minutes, and by the time we reached the summit I was spent. I had to sit for a few minutes sipping ginger ale and energy gels before I could continue.” — Lincoln Mountain, California by rsnipes 

 

Tedious footing

“Loose rock galore, but firm enough to give you hope. I didn’t really enjoy this one, neither did my cousin, more of a chore than a fun day on a mountain. Alas, the views were good despite the smoke. Frozen lake is absolutely beautiful…. I won’t be back!” — Mount Fox, Alberta by jakefinnan

 

Bees, snakes, & sharp plants

“Several people were getting stung (I got it twice) at around the 3.0 mile mark. Then on the way back down, yep, got stung twice more. Also had a rattlesnake kindly “warn” me of his presence! The sharp yucca plants and sharp thorny-plants also can be a pain (literally!) so long pants wouldn’t be a terrible idea. But then with the bees and snakes, stormtrooper armor might be better…” — Strawberry Peak, California by Marc 

 

Type 2 Fun

Those are just a few of the many tribulations experienced by peakery members during PEAK MONTH. Some people (most?) may read these stories and think “no way, that’s not fun.” It seems like a natural response.

But there are those of us who not only endure these challenges but keep coming back for more. Call it Type 2 fun. A desire to embrace gentle sufferings and in spite of it all stand on a high spot and see the world from a different perspective.

Next time you look at any of the thousands of summit photos on peakery be sure to notice a certain gleam in the eyes, a sense of elation beaming through. “I made it!” those faces joyfully proclaim. But then take a closer look and you’ll also find things a little rough around the edges — the sunblock not totally rubbed in, the sweaty hair, the deep fatigue set around the eyes. It takes a lot to make it to a summit, both physically and mentally. And to many, even the rewards of views, adventure, challenge, and natural beauty aren’t worth it. But to those that feel the pull of the mountains, successfully journeying to a mountain summit and back is one of the best feelings in the world.

Have fun, and be safe, in the mountains,

– the peakery team

 

Join for peakery’s first ever PEAK MONTH!

Based on popular demand we’ve extended the annual PEAK WEEK into 4 weeks of mountain adventures.

To join in on PEAK MONTH:

1. Go summit peaks during the month.

2. Then log your climbs on peakery to share with everyone.

In the past we’ve given out peakery stickers to all participants, we might do that again but no promises…

Why PEAK MONTH? Because we hope it’ll give you a little extra push to make some mountain plans before summer’s end.*

We look forward to seeing your photos & following along with your adventures in the mountains.

-peakery team

 

* OK, for southern hemisphere peakery members, let us know if you’d also like to take part in a PEAK MONTH SOUTH in, ahh, let me think… February??

 

A few weeks ago, we started fiddling with Mapbox and quickly got excited about their developer-friendly outdoor maps. Now we’re excited to feature these great maps on peakery; they’re purpose-built for mountain exploration.

Mapbox’s next-generation vector maps highlight info important to hikers and climbers, such as topo lines, trails, streams, terrain shading, and park boundaries. The best part about these maps: since they’re vector-based we can adjust every map element, tweak the design, add data layers, and build new interactive features. Example: a new button that instantly toggles all contour lines between feet and meters. We hope to keep improving these maps in the future.

These new maps complement the 2 other excellent topo maps currently featured on peakery, Outdoors and Topo (US/CA/NZ) from CalTopo.

peakery now offers 5 map options:

1. Terrain: a detailed, worldwide topo map. See contours, trails and other relevant details at much closer zoom levels than Google Terrain view. Use the “first-ever-in-the-history-of-the-web” toggle at the top to change the contours between feet/meters.

 

2. Outdoors: a second worldwide topo map that provides an alternate view

 

3. Topo (US/CA/NZ): detailed government-produced topo maps for the US, Canada, and New Zealand provided by CalTopo

 

4. Satellite: imagery with info layers

 

5. Satellite Topo: imagery with contours, trails, and info layers

Go check out the new maps

 

We just completed a second major update to peakery’s underlying peak data (the first being our recent clean up of regions).

Now featuring 587,000 peaks!

This update adds 250,000 new peaks to the existing 337,000 for a grand total of over half a million peaks. Some countries gained a huge number of new peaks. Here are the top 25 countries that gained the most peaks:

Russia	31,816 total peaks	+ 24,687 new peaks
Spain	20,533	+ 18,969
Italy	22,607	+ 17,405
Germany	19,585	+ 16,930
China	15,474	+ 13,321
Australia	14,072	+ 10,027
Chile	14,399	+ 10,005
United Kingdom	12,512	+ 7,771
Czech Republic	6,978	+ 6,107
Brazil	6,384	+ 5,748
Morocco	9,068	+ 5,297
Norway	9,461	+ 5,206
Colombia	6,051	+ 4,918
Poland	6,065	+ 4,573
Austria	10,455	+ 4,538
Saudi Arabia	5,196	+ 4,389
Turkey	8,144	+ 4,225
France	7,216	+ 4,180
Argentina	7,666	+ 3,948
Slovakia	4,665	+ 3,503
United States	71,168	+ 3,296
Sweden	4,919	+ 3,164
Greece	4,448	+ 2,761
Bulgaria	3,058	+ 2,669
Indonesia	16,965	+ 2,608

Overall we added peaks to 195 countries and territories; go to the Regions page to check out any of these. We plan to add more peaks over time.

Improved summit locations & elevations

Since the launch of the new peakery, we’ve also fixed the locations of over 72,000 peaks and the elevation of more than 16,000 peaks. This is on top of the 1000s of valuable contributions from the peakery community.

Other tweaks

• added country and region names to every peak’s URL
• changed all existing unnamed peaks to the default ‘Peak 1,234 ft’ or ‘Peak 1,234 m’ naming-scheme
• fixed bug in Log climb date picker (Windows/Chrome)
• fixed the summits that show up on Challenge > Members pages
• fixed the summits that show up on Profile > Map

Why we’re doing this

peakery’s long-term goal is to become the world’s ultimate resource to plan, collect, and share your mountain hiking & climbing adventures. An important ingredient in this is accurate and comprehensive info for every mountain in the world. It’s going to take years of constant improvement to get there, but with your help we plan to keep chipping away at it.

Join for the 2nd Annual PEAK WEEK!

Go summit a peak from Aug 1 to 7, 2017 and then log your climb on peakery.

During last year’s first ever PEAK WEEK, peakery members climbed 359 summits around the world. We’re hoping that we can all beat that this year.

So start gathering up your friends for some great mountain adventures.

Use Google calendar? Quickly add PEAK WEEK to your calendar by clicking here:

peakery’s long-term goal is to become the world’s ultimate resource to plan, collect, and share your mountain hiking & climbing adventures. An important ingredient in this is accurate and comprehensive info for every mountain in the world. It’s going to take years of constant improvement to get there, but with your help we plan to keep chipping away at it.

Huge cleanup of regions
In line with that, we just released a major cleanup of peakery’s worldwide regions info. Previously, over 1,000 peaks had no country and over 60,000 had no region. Even worse, a huge number of peaks were assigned to outdated or incorrect regions. We fixed all of that in 249 countries/territories and almost 4,000 regions.

Country maps come to life
Now with updated regions, every country’s geochart shows its regions fully colored in. A few examples of how much better these look:

Faster loading region pages
While we were in here, we greatly reduced the loading time of all of the regions pages. If you experience a really slow regions page (> 5 sec to load) please let us know and we’ll take another look.

Streamlined peak approval
With the new regions in place we’ll be able to respond to new peak submissions much faster. Before, we’d often need to manually assign regions to submitted peaks, but now they’ll be auto-assigned.

Meanwhile in bug land…
• fixed issue that wasn’t showing non-member companions in summit logs
• fixed issue that prevented removing non-member companions from your logs
• in summit logs added hover tooltips over Companion and Like avatars showing member names
• improved UI for adding companions to a log
• added checks to prevent losing data in logs when user doesn’t hit ‘add’ button in some sections
• added a peakery mobile app icon for when you save peakery to your homescreen on iPhone/iPad for quick access. DO IT NOW! Here’re the steps:

1. load peakery.com in Safari on your iPhone/iPad

2. tap the share icon at the bottom

3. choose the 'Add to Home Screen' option in the bottom row

A good topo map is essential to understanding mountainous terrain. And as any map lover will tell you, it’s just fun to look at. Thanks to CalTopo, peakery members can see highly detailed topo maps in the US, Canada, and New Zealand. Just select the Topo (US/CA/NZ) view on the upper right corner of the map:

But what about the rest of the world? For this we’re excited to offer a new highly detailed topo map view: Outdoors. In many countries, the Outdoors map view provides vastly more details on peaks, trails, and mountainous terrain than the existing Google Terrain view. Here’s a quick comparison (click to see full details):

Along with other recently launched map features of the new peakery— Summits & Difficulty filters, bigger map views, mobile and tablet support— we hope that this global topo map makes peakery’s maps even more useful as you plan your next mountain adventures. Please let us know at feedback@peakery.com if you have any ideas to make peakery’s mountain maps even better.

After February’s massive release of the new peakery, we knew there’d be some issues — even after fixing over 50 bulleted pages of bugs before launch. But we still underestimated the bugginess.

Thank you to the many peakery members who didn’t get too mad and reported issues. Over the last few weeks we’ve fixed over 100 annoying issues (most of them discovered by members).

We plan to keep fixing bugs. If you find any more please let us know. You can reach us on Facebook or email at feedback@peakery.com.

For those that want the details, here’s the full list of bugs we’ve fixed since launch:

Summit logs:
1. improved photo uploading that fixes errors, doubles upload speed, allows multiple photo selection, and automatically senses file errors before fully uploading.
2. improved elevation gain calculations with smoothing of tracks and minimum uphill/downhill trends concept to smooth out tiny fluctuations on a rolling route
3. fixed incorrect metric units conversion in logs
4. fixed 500 error when submit elevation or prominence in meters
5. fixed datepicker UI issues in Windows Chrome and Edge browsers
6. fixed new routes not available to select when logging a climb
7. fixed 500 error when adding a new route to a log
8. fixed errors logging and editing logs
9. fixed issue with saving edited logs
10. fixed issue with save button being inactive when add a route to a log
11. fixed error when trying to upload a GPX file
12. fixed issue preventing removing a log
13. fixed error when trying to remove a GPX file
14. fixed issue preventing removing distance, elevation, and time values from logs
15. fixed issue preventing removing photos from logs
16. fixed issue that showed uploaded photos on site even when a member abandoned logging part way through
17. in comments linked usernames to the member’s pages
18. fixed issue causing all hearts to always show up red on a peak’s Summits page
19. fixed issue with photo captions not showing up in the fullsize photo viewer
20. changed all GPX tracks to red color to be consistent throughout site
21. added the “Elevation start” stat to the Elevation box
22. fixed issue that didn’t show photos that had spaces in their filenames
23. fixed issue that didn’t allow save of photo captions when editing a log
24. fixed a bug in how handling some GPX files that prevented uploading them
25. fixed peak map markers infowindows on mobile
26. replaced the red peak marker with the orange version to be consistent throughout site
27. fixed a timezone issue that caused the number of days shown on logs to sometimes be wrong
28. fixed issue to update stats when remove and re-add a GPX file
29. fixed the order of photos shown in summit logs

Member profiles:
30. fixed error with Days since last climb always showing 0
31. fixed peak photos not showing on “Nearest to home” goal
32. changed the info page to only show photos from your summit logs (instead of all photos you contribute)
33. fixed incorrect Home Basecamp location mappings
34. fixed issue with map not centering on home basecamp when click the name of the Home Basecamp or the Completion radius box map
35. changed when click the Completion radius stat now goes to Peaks table view
36. removed case sensitivity in member page URLs
37. changed definition of Winter to include all of Mar 20 since some users weren’t getting Winter grid credit because the Vernal Equinox time varies every year
38. fixed issue showing multiple badges for the same peak
39. fixed issue with badge images not showing up because of spaces in image names
40. fixed issues with badges showing incorrect King of Mountains
41. fixed issue showing First Ascents on badges when multiple members logged a peak on the same day
42. fixed members’ Challenge maps not showing the correct completed peaks

Peak pages:
43. fixed server errors preventing some peak pages from loading
44. fixed some characters in the filename causing some peak pages not to load
45. fixed thumbnailing broken for peak photos with spaces in filenames
46. fixed issue with Edit peak and Add peak submitting slightly incorrect peak locations
47. fixed nAn showing up in Prominence input box
48. fixed slow loading of peak pages by optimizing cesium.js 3D view loading
49. fixed issue with Highlights input boxes not showing all of text (even when paste in text).
50. fixed error when clicked ‘edit highlights’ on some peak pages
51. fixed the date of photos to be the date of the summit logs (if they’re part of one)
52. fixed pagination issues when filtering the Summits page (and rest of site)
53. fixed flickr photo attribution links in fullsize photo viewer
54. when editing the peak, if peak outside of US select the meters unit for elevation and prominence by default
55. fixed error with Most liked filter on Summits page

Homepage:
56. fixed issues with caching of homepage
57. fixed issue with the same summit log showing up twice
58. fixed issue with missing peaks photos
59. fixed issue that keeps World selected on the homepage if navigate away and come back.
60. fixed issue of vertical orientation photos being scrunched

Region pages:
61. fixed continent/country/region timing out when > 5000 peaks,
62. fixed Region > Challenges not showing all challenges
63. fixed missing pagination on Continent/Country/Region > Challenges pages
64. fixed last country at bottom being partially hidden on Regions > world
65. fixed Country > Map on mobile to show the correct filter icon

Add missing peak:
66. fixed bug related to not specifying a peak name when adding a missing peak
67. changed format of auto peak names to Peak 1234 m (or Peak 1234 ft in US)
68. unlinked the other peak markers on the map to prevent leaving form
69. use meters by default for elevation and prominence if the Map page was previously centered outside of US

Routes:
70. fixed distance to summit showing 0.0 when added a route GPX and then adjusted
71. fixed a bunch of errors when adding GPX files
72. removed the constraint that a GPX must require time data
73. fixed routes showing incorrect number of summits
74. added link to Google Maps directions in the Getting there section of route detail pages
75. if peak outside of US, select the meters unit for elevation and prominence by default when adding or editing a route
76. fixed issue with some characters causing errors in Route Highlights

Peak Challenges
77. fixed broken challenge links in “Want to add a peak challenge” modal
78. fixed on Challenges > members if 0 peaks climbed in 2nd round, don’t show the bar for the 2nd round
79. fixed issue on Challenge > Info page with clicking the moving peak photos linking to incorrect peaks
80. fixed attempts being counted as summits in Challenges
81. Challenge > Summits: fixed pagination issue showing incorrect number of summits on
82. Challenges >Members: changed the text to always say ‘last peak’ regardless of if summit or attempt
83. Challenges > World: linked ANTARCTICA to the continent page, not the region page
84. fixed issue with missing main photos for some challenges
85. fixed issue with search not working on Challenges > Peaks page

Search/Peaks page
86. fixed non-alpha characters breaking search
87. fixed error in number of You summits shown
88. fixed bad scrolling behavior when clicking pagination link
89. fixed error when searched for a peak name and US state name

Members:
90. linked the entire header of each member card to their profile
91. fixed error when viewing some pages
92. added pagination to members list

Maps:
93. fixed infowindows popping up at wrong locations when map area shows the international date line
94. Prime Meridian Bug™: fixed bug when peaks vanish when map shows both the PM and IDL
95. fixed issue with some challenge maps not showing all peaks in the challenge
96. fixed issue with bad character in a peak name causing no peaks to load in Challenge map
97. fixed issue pushing zoom buttons off edge of screen in Windows Chrome

Other:
98. fixed reset password to first check if email account is registered with peakery
99. fixed members without passwords not able to reset password (members who signed up with Facebook)
100. changed the focus to the username field when login on desktop
101. don’t show a News item when a user likes their own summit log
101. added a 500 Internal Server Error page