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Language: en

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I'm at the summit of Mount Evans
in Colorado, USA.

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It is one of the Colorado Fourteeners,

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meaning I'm more than
14,000 feet above sea level.

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As Americans measure it.

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For the rest of the world,

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that is 4.3 kilometres above sea level,

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or about half way to an
airplane's cruising altitude.

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And the air up here is thin:

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I'm only getting about 60% of
the oxygen that I normally do

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each time I breathe in.

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And let me tell you, this
was a difficult climb.

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At least, the last bit of it was.

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Because this is also the most
American mountain,

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becacuse there is a road to the top of it.

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The highest paved road in North America.

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And this summit here counts as the
41st highest mountain in North America.

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But how do we count that?

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Just over there, the wonderfully named
Meyer-Womble Observatory

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is on another, slightly lower summit.

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But it's surrounded by lower ground:

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why doesn't that count as the 42nd highest?

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And you might say, well,

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the answer's obvious,
it's part of the same mountain.

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But where does that end?

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This summit, Mount Evans, is just
a smaller part of a big mountain range,

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so you could try and make the case
that this is just a bump

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on the way to the tallest peak in the Rockies,
Mount Elbert.

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Or you could take it to the extreme and say

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that there's only one mountain
on each land mass,

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that every other peak in North America is
just a small bump

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on the way to the enormous continent-sized
mountain called Denali.

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Now that's ridiculous, most people would say.

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It's obvious.

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That's a mountain.

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And that isn't.

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But in formal terms, we solve it
by measuring prominence.

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Prominence works like this:

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imagine if you could raise sea level up
to where I'm sitting now.

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How many meters would it have to drop
before you could connect

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this mountain to another, taller one

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and walk there without getting your feet wet?

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For Mount Evans, that is 839m down,

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or about one-fifth of its height
above sea level.

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That observatory summit?

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It's not prominent.

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Sure, you have to walk downhill from it,
but after a few meters

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you're going uphill again.

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So where do you draw the line?

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Well, there are several different lines,
because of course there are.

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The International Climbing and
Mountaineering Federation defines a mountain

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as needing 300m of prominence,

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which is actually only the height
of the Eiffel Tower,

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which... doesn't seem like much to me?

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Other folks disagree,
and say it should be 500m,

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or that prominence should
change with altitude...

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it's a mess.

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I'll be honest, even after researching this,
I'm not sure about it.

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Even the folks I asked
to check my script went,

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"eh, well, I guess, basically, but technically..."

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This is one of those times that the human need
to categorise and catalogue everything

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runs up against messy reality.

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There are always edge cases, and pretty much
every mountain is an edge case.

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I'm going to go back down now before I get
altitude sickness(!)