New Colorado 14er Discovered- East Crestone

Crestone Peak and East Crestone Peak Elevation Surveys

Eric Gilbertson¹, Elijah Gendron, Peter Kline, Ben Loftin

1. Seattle University

Abstract

Crestone Peak is a mountain in South Central Colorado that has commonly been considered a ranked 14er (meaning a Colorado peak above 14,000ft elevation with at least 300ft of prominence). Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) measurements in 2018-2019 found Crestone Peak within error bounds of the same elevation as East Crestone, a peak 418ft to the East commonly considered a sub-peak of Crestone. Knowledge of which peaks are ranked 14ers is important for tourism and mountaineering, as climbing all the 14ers is a popular peakbagging objective in Colorado. For this study, ground surveys were conducted with professional surveying equipment including multiple dGNSS (differential Global Navigation Satellite System) units and an Abney level to accurately determine which peak was taller and thus the ranked 14er. East Crestone was measured 0.3ft taller than Crestone, with greater than 99% confidence that East Crestone is taller. East Crestone is 14,299.3ft+/-0.1ft and Crestone is 14,299.0ft+/-0.1ft 95% confidence interval errors, (NAD83(2011)(Epoch 2025.7), NAVD88 using GEOID18, international feet). Thus, East Crestone is in fact a ranked 14er and Crestone Peak is a subpeak, not a ranked 14er.

Note: results have been recognized by the peer-reviewed scientific journal Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment.

Gilbertson, E., Hensley, R., Kirmse, A., Bretherton, K., Stanchak, K., “LiDAR Accuracy on North American Mountain Summits,” Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment, 2025 Link: https://doi.org/10.1177/03091333251401361 (Link to free version: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12341 )

Introduction

Climbing all the 14ers in Colorado is a popular peakbagging objective, first completed in 1911 by Carl Blaurock and William Ervin using the known list at the time. As of 2025, over 2000 people have completed the most updated 14ers list (CMC1 2025). The exact list has evolved over time, though, as surveying methods got more accurate.

The first list of 14ers was published in 1892, listing 42 peaks above 14,000ft based on surveys conducted by the USGS, published in quadrangles (Stone 1892). These surveys used traditional trigonometric surveying methods. An updated list of these peaks was published in 1925 (Hart 1925), which contained 47 peaks. A second edition of the book was printed in 1931, which listed 53 peaks.

A common definition of the 14ers list used today was established by the Colorado Mountain Club. This defines the 14ers list as all peaks in Colorado with at least 14,000ft of elevation and at least 300ft of prominence based on the most updated USGS quads, plus North Maroon and El Diente (CMC2 2025).  These last two peaks were thought at the time the list was established to have less than 300ft of prominence, but were included for historical reasons. Peaks over 14,000ft with at least 300ft of prominence are referred to as ranked 14ers. This totals 54 peaks on the list.

Challenger Point, Conundrum, North Eolus, and Mt Cameron were not included in this list because they did not have enough clean prominence based on the quads, despite being over 14,000ft tall. Clean prominence can be thought of as a lower-bound for prominence using the highest contour line at a key col if the key col is not directly surveyed on the quad. Challenger Point had an interpolated prominence of 301ft from the quads, though. This assumes the key col elevation is exactly half way between the nearest contours above and below.

When LiDAR results became widely known in late 2021, North Maroon was found to be ranked, and Challenger Point was found to be unranked. Based on LiDAR measurements, there are thus 53 ranked 14ers in Colorado, plus five additional unranked 14ers that are commonly climbed. These are Challenger Point, North Eolus, El Diente, Conundrum, and Cameron. The set of ranked 14ers plus other five unranked 14ers totals 58 peaks. Thus, currently there are three major recognized 14ers lists: the ranked 14ers based on LiDAR (53 peaks), the CMC 14ers list (54 peaks), and the ranked 14ers plus five extra 14ers (58 peaks).

Crestone Peak is located in South-Central Colorado (Fig 1) and has been commonly considered the 7th highest ranked 14er in Colorado. It was surveyed at 14,294ft (NGVD29 vertical datum) for the 1967 quad (USGS 1967). This was based on traditional methods using theodolites, and the summit was directly surveyed as indicated on the map. East Crestone, a peak 418ft to the East, was not directly surveyed, and was only given an approximate elevation between the 14,240ft and 14,280ft contours. No error bounds were given for these measurements. Based on this map, East Crestone had a prominence of approximately 40ft and Crestone had a prominence of 4,580ft. Thus, Crestone qualified as a ranked 14er and East Crestone was a sub-peak.

Crestone Peak was next surveyed at 9:54am Sept 22, 2018 by airplane-based LiDAR (Colorado 2020). For this survey, the airplane’s elevation and coordinates are known with high accuracy (horizontal one sigma errors 5-15cm, vertical 7.5-22.5cm, May 2007) from onboard GNSS units and inertial measurement units. The plane sends a pulse of light to the ground and measures the time of return to the plane. This time of light travel can be used to calculate the distance from the plane to the ground, which can then be used with the plane’s known position to calculate the elevation and latitude and longitude coordinates of the sampled location on the ground.

Sampled points in a LiDAR survey have nominal horizontal spacing 1.1ft (USGS 2025). However, in practice we have found horizontal spacing can be up to 6ft in mountainous terrain (Gilbertson et al, in review). Locations between samples are unmeasured.

The LiDAR point cloud data for Crestone and East Crestone was processed manually, and the highest sampled point on Crestone Peak was 14,302.1ft (NAVD88)(Fig 2). The highest ground point on East Crestone was 14,297.9ft. However, a point less than 1ft away horizontally from the highest point on Crestone was measured at 14,297.9ft. Based on our collective experience climbing Crestone Peak, we knew there was not a 4.2ft spire on the top. One hypothesis is that the sampled point hit a person standing or sitting on the summit, which was included in the LiDAR point cloud. Thus, the highest trustworthy measurement on Crestone was exactly the same as the highest trustworthy measurement on East Crestone, to the nearest 0.1ft. Both were measured at 14,297.9ft.

Because points between LiDAR measurements are unsampled, there is uncertainty in the elevation of the summit of a mountain based on LiDAR point cloud data. If the summit is sharp, LiDAR samples are likely to miss the summit and measure a lower point on the mountain, resulting in an underestimate of the summit height. The authors have previously measured over 177 peaks with dGNSS units and compared measured summit heights to LiDAR-derived summit heights. We found vertical accuracies of summit elevations derived from manually-processed LiDAR point cloud data for open rocky summits is +/-1.7 ft (95% confidence interval) (Gilbertson et al. in review). Thus, Crestone and East Crestone were tied for elevation based on LiDAR data, assuming the 14,302.1ft sampled point was indeed a person and not ground.

On Sept 27, 2025, mountaineer and surveyor Rob Woodall took angular measurements with a hand level from East Crestone to Crestone, and from Crestone to East Crestone (Woodall 2025). He reported the vertical difference was too small to measure. Given that the peaks are 418ft apart, if the hand level had the standard resolution of 10 arcminutes, this would be able to resolve a minimum height difference of 1.2ft. This measurement showed the peaks were within 1.2ft of the same elevation.

With this study we aimed to measure Crestone and East Crestone with sufficient vertical accuracy to determine which peak is higher and thus the ranked 14er.

Methodology

We performed simultaneous static surveys on both peaks using Trimble DA2 differential GNSS units capable of 0.1ft vertical accuracy. On Oct 5 we first climbed East Crestone and used a 5x 10-arcminute Abney level to identify the highest rock on the summit. This was a roughly 2ft x 2ft x 3ft boulder that was obviously natural and not part of a cairn. It was too large to move. We mounted the DA2 on a 1.0ft antenna rod levelled with a bubble level and stabilized with a standard Adir-pro surveying tripod (Fig 3). We started logging static survey data at 6:45am.

We next climbed Crestone Peak and mounted a second identical DA2 receiver on a 1.0ft antenna rod, levelled with a bubble level to be perfectly vertical. We stabilized it with another standard Adir-pro surveying tripod, with one leg extended with a hiking pole strapped on to reach below the cliff on the north face (Fig 3). We started logging static survey data at 7:20am.

After 2 hours and 15 minutes we stopped logging data on East Crestone at 9:00am. We then moved to Crestone and stopped logging data at 9:35am for a 2 hour 15 minute measurement.

Results

We processed data with three different software tools – TrimbleRTX Centerpoint (Centerpoint 2025), TrimbleRTX Surveytools (Surveytools 2025), and CSRS-PPP (CSRS-PPP 2025). We also intended to use OPUS (OPUS 2025), the standard processing tool in the US, but it was not available due to the government shutdown.

The three available methods are standard tools for processing differential GNSS measurements and correct for errors such as atmospheric distortion using nearby base stations. We submitted the raw t04 measurement files to each site. We used VDatum (Vdatum 2025) and TRX (TRX 2025) to convert all results to the common horiztonal datum NAD83(2011)(Epoch 2025.7) and orthometric height in NAVD88 (GEOID18) vertical datum. These are currentely the most accurate horizontal and vertical datums in this region.

All methods were in agreement that East Crestone is taller than Crestone with greater than 99% confidence. Two-sigma error bounds did not overlap for the peak elevations for any processing method. Resulting elevations and sigmas can be found in Table 1.

Table 1: Elevation measurement results for each peak for each processing method.

Peak/Method	Elevation NAVD88 (GEOID18)(ft)	Sigma (ft)	Lat	Long (W)
TrimbleRTX Centerpoint (NAD83(2011), Epoch 2025.7)
Crestone	14298.980	0.069	37.9668783089	105.585383654
East Crestone	14299.272	0.066	37.9672412453	105.584006579
TrimbleRTX Surveytools (NAD83(2011), Epoch 2025.7)
Crestone	14298.987	0.069	37.9668783095	105.585383660
East Crestone	14299.272	0.066	37.9672412453	105.584006576
CSRS-PPP (NAD83(2011), Epoch 2025.7)
Crestone	14298.961	0.035	37.96687829	105.58538371
East Crestone	14299.266	0.035	37.96724112	105.58400624

Normalized normal distribution plots for each method and each peak are shown in Figure 4. This data can also be visualized in box-and-whisker plots in Figure 5.

All three processing methods found, to the nearest 0.1ft, Crestone is 14299.0ft  and East Crestone is 14299.3ft, with two-sigma, 95% confidence interval error bounds +/-0.1ft.

To calculate the probability that East Crestone is higher than Crestone, we assumed normal distributions for each set of measurements and found the probability that P(E-M)>0, where E represents a random measurement from the East Crestone distribution and M represents a random measurement from the Crestone Main summit distribution. We calculated the sigma of the E-M distribution by using the formula

σ=√(σ_E^2+σ_M^2 )

where σ_E is the sigma for the East Crestone distribution and σ_M is the sigma for the Crestone Main peak distribution. We then calculated the cumulative density function where P(E-M)>0 for this sigma value. The final results for the mean height differences East Crestone above Crestone Main, and confidence that East is higher than Main are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Mean measured height East above Main and confidence that East is taller than Main.

Method	Height East above Main (ft)	Confidence East > Main, percent
TrimbleRTX Centerpoint	0.292	99.8886
TrimbleRTX Surveytools	0.285	99.8581
CSRS-PPP	0.305	100.0000

The height difference East Crestone above Crestone can be visualized in a bar chart in Figure 6.

The processing method with the highest confidence is CSRS-PPP. This measured East Crestone is 0.305ft taller than Crestone Main summit, and East is taller than Main with over 99.99% confidence.

Discussion

East Crestone is 0.3ft taller than Crestone Peak, and thus East Crestone is in fact a ranked 14er with over 4500ft of prominence. Crestone Peak is in fact a sub peak of East Crestone, with not enough prominence to qualify as a ranked 14er. The final elevations are East Crestone 14,299.3ft +/-0.1ft and Crestone 14,299.0ft +/-0.1ft (NAVD88 vertical datum using GEOID18, NAD83(2011) Epoch 2025.7 horizontal datum) (Fig 7).

LiDAR data over-measured Crestone Peak by 3.1ft, which is possibly because it sampled a person on the summit and misclassified this measurement as ground. LiDAR under-measured East Crestone by 1.4ft. This is likely because the summit is a sharp boulder that sticks up approximately 1.4ft above the flatter surface at its base. The highest LiDAR return missed the sharp summit and instead hit the lower rock nearby. The 1.4ft error on East Crestone is within the +/-1.7ft 95% confidence interval of LiDAR summit elevations reported previously (Gilbertson et. al. in review). The 3.1ft error on Crestone Peak is well outside this error range. Indeed, it is very rare for a LiDAR sample to exactly hit a person on a summit, and this is the only instance the authors have encountered this.

Accuracy-minded mountaineers seeking to climb all ranked 14ers in Colorado should now climb East Crestone Peak. Crestone Peak should be removed from the list of 53 ranked 14ers and replaced with East Crestone.

Data Availability

Raw measurement files (t04 format) can be accessed at https://github.com/ericgilbertson1/Colorado

References

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