The Colorado Sun originally published this story at 5:30 AM on April 18, 2024.
Toss out your tourist brochures and climbing guides, Colorado. NOAA shows up today with some high-tech scissors to give all your fourteeners a 2-foot haircut.
No need to despair, though, Lake City. Sunshine Peak, long rumored to be on the fourteeners’ chopping block when a more precise measurement put the San Juans beauty in its place, is safe at 14,004.5 feet, NOAA says.
In fact, Sunshine got a promotion, leapfrogging Huron Peak at the bottom of NOAA’s 58-entry fourteeners list. Huron now checks in at 14,004.1 feet, the shortest Colorado giant, temporarily humbled but remaining in academic good standing among the Collegiate Peaks.
Now, since the NOAA sea level measurement overhaul touches every inch of Colorado, high or low, here’s a sop to regional tourism officials: So far, there are no major shocks in store for the Instagram-famous places. Pikes Peak remains majestic at 14,107, if 2 feet lower than the dusty listing on 14ers.com. (Tallies of how many peaks qualify as fourteeners in Colorado have long varied, depending on who is doing the compiling, from the low to high 50s.)
But some town welcome-sign elevations will need repainting, and the social media star Capitol step marker at a mile high has to go up two spots. Bookmark a ceremony in the last year of the Polis administration, sometime in 2026.
“We reached out to the governor’s office to let him know about the new height change,” laughed National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration physicist Derek van Westrum, one of the leaders of the yearslong updating of the National Spatial Reference System. The culmination of the sea level reconfiguring was announced Thursday morning in the “Journal of Geodesy.”
NOAA and other physicists and geologists figured the past sets of measurements were only good to within a couple of feet by the time you got to the top of a fourteener. The new dataset is now within a couple of inches, or up to 20 times more accurate, NOAA’s paper says.
The new stats come not from unseen clashes of tectonic plates or ancient peaks worn down by eons of partisan politics. Instead, NOAA’s ocean office combined years of more precise GPS measurements with a more sophisticated understanding of how gravity and curvature of the Earth affect the “actual” sea level. Imagine digging a trench from San Francisco to Denver, van Westrum explained, and now being able to precisely set the top of any peak or formation from the theoretical surface of the water down below.
Personally, as a big fan of fourteeners and the storied guidebooks of mountain climbers like Gerry Roach, van Westrum found huge relief in rescuing Sunshine Peak from relegation and keeping Colorado’s bragging rights intact.
“Sunshine was definitely on the bubble,” van Westrum said.
“I don’t expect anybody to get too bent out of shape” in the calibration, van Westrum said. “I think Torrey’s and Quandary swapped places.” (He does admit to a fleeting moment of devil’s advocacy: Being “the guy who took down Sunshine” might have produced more publicity for the new science and “been better for the agency,” van Westrum chuckled.)
We can measure Lloyd Athearn relieved, as well, as the chief of the trail-fixing nonprofit Colorado Fourteeners Initiative. The group has learned a thing or two about joking around with mountain heights, Athearn said.
A few years ago, the Fourteeners Initiative tried an April Fools’ Day fundraiser warning that as the result of some hugely ambitious rock leveling and trail repair at the top of some of Colorado’s most popular giants, a few would have to be reclassified as 13ers.
The sound they heard back from the wilderness was *crickets*.
“Some people saw the humor in it, and some people got unbelievably mad, ‘What do you mean, you can’t make a 14er a 13er!’” Athearn said.
“It’s good to know that all of the fourteeners are still going to have their coveted status of being over 14,000 feet,” he said. He suggested any irritated hikers take the wisdom of Roach and other play-it-as-it-lays climbers: If they want to achieve the heights of the old, outdated lists, start a couple of feet back in the parking lot.
“Every mountain is its own unique challenge,” Athearn said. “And some people really geek out about lists and height and speed and how long and how many vertical feet … our point is we’re trying to protect the alpine resources on these mountains so that people can responsibly enjoy them.”
The NOAA exercise, of course, is about far more than letting the physicists play around in the sea-level wading pool. Updated calculations have towering implications for all kinds of fields, van Westrum said — for all-important commerce, but also just for more bragging.
"Conservatively. I would give it about 10,000 years before sea level has risen enough before somebody’s fourteener is in trouble. Pikes is going to be fine."— Derek van Westrum, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration physicist
Death Valley is actually getting a couple more feet below sea level under the new system.
California’s Mount Whitney, the high fourteener that gives the Golden State a claim to equalling Colorado’s views, is losing about 3 feet.
The old measurements were accurate in flat Florida and got further and further off reality as the researchers moved northwest, leaving the biggest changes on the map around Seattle.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency will have more accurate estimates of flood dangers, as will insurance companies worried about sea level rise.
Ports in flat spots that worry about ocean tides and river estuaries as shipping channels will welcome the new precision.
“There’s a reason we’re in the Commerce Department,” van Westrum deadpanned. “It pays the bills.”
Will those rising sea levels from climate change eventually mean a shorter distance from that imaginary Colorado ditch and the heights of purple mountain majesties?
“Conservatively,” van Westrum said, “I would give it about 10,000 years before sea level has risen enough before somebody’s fourteener is in trouble. Pikes is going to be fine.”
New list of Colorado 14er heights
Ordered by height.
