The Colorado Sun originally published this story on October 17, 2025.
Scientists who hauled satellite-connected measuring equipment to the top of the Sangre de Cristos earlier this month are pretty sure it’s time for an addition — and a removal — from Colorado’s list of 58 fourteeners.
“This technology has been out there for 30 years, it’s just not really been used on top of mountains. A lot of peaks have not been measured to this level of accuracy before,” said Eric Gilbertson, an engineering professor and record-holding mountaineer who last year found Washington’s melting Mount Rainier to be more than 10 feet shorter than official measurements from 1998.
On Oct. 5, Gilbertson and a couple mountaineering pals turned their attention to the 14,299-foot Crestone Peak in the Sangre de Cristo range. They also backpacked their antennae rods, tripods and Global Navigation Satellite System units to the summit of East Crestone, a subpeak a short climb from the saddle between the 14,000-foot summits.
The satellite measuring machines set up by Gilbertson and his friends recorded measurements every second for more than two hours. And the numbers show East Crestone is 14,299.3 feet, about a third of a foot taller than Crestone Peak, which is the tallest of the four summits in the Crestone cluster of fourteeners that includes Crestone Needle, Kit Carson Mountain and Humboldt Peak.
Those 4 inches matter because of mountaineering’s 300-foot prominence rule, which holds that 14,000-foot summits must have at least 300 feet of topographic prominence. Without that rule, every rocky stub above 14,000 feet could be considered an official fourteener.
So, if Gilbertson’s survey is correct, East Crestone is the fourteener and Crestone Peak is a subpeak. The two summits are less than 420 feet apart, horizontally.
The Crestone calculations began when Gilbertson, who has a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in mechanical engineering and teaches at Seattle University, and his friends were studying official measurements of Colorado’s highest peaks. It looked like, maybe, the data collected from laser-bouncing lidar technology used to measure Crestone Peak might not be precise. The mountaineering friends suspected the wrong fourteener in the Crestone cluster was listed as the tallest.
“We thought it was a 50-50 coin toss looking at lidar data,” Gilbertson said. “If you don’t look too rigorously, you would think Crestone Peak was 3, maybe 4 feet taller than East Crestone.”
But Gilbertson is all about the rigorous way. In 2020, he climbed all of Colorado’s 100 highest peaks in 33 days and 23 hours, setting a fastest-known-time record. Then he drove to Wyoming and set a record climbing all 36 Wyoming peaks over 13,000 feet in 16 days. Then he went to Montana and climbed 27 of the state’s highest peaks. He called his 60-day, 120-peak push the Rocky Mountain Grand Slam.
Along with his twin brother Matthew — who also has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT — he’s climbed the highest point in 147 countries, “so I’m about two-thirds of the way through,” he said of the mission to climb to the top of all 196 countries.
He recently began stuffing his rucksack with GPS tools — differential Global Navigation Satellite Systems — that collect signals from orbiting satellites and can measure locations down an inch. And his numbers are often different from those listed by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Gilberston is sending his survey to a peer-reviewed geology journal, just like he sent his Mount Rainier measurement report to a scientific journal.
If his results are accepted, Colorado’s list of fourteeners will need a revision. This is not unprecedented.
Official federal altitudes for Colorado are a bit dated and as new technology considers the role of gravity and the globe’s curvature on the actual level of oceans, most of Colorado’s highest peaks have recently received a trim.
In 2021, lidar technology showed that Challenger Point, next to Kit Carson Mountain, did not have 300 feet of prominence, while over in the Elks, lidar measurements of the saddle below North Maroon Peak increased that former subpeak’s prominence to more than 300 feet. So North Maroon was moved into the list of officially ranked fourteeners and Challenger Point was removed and defined as a subpeak.
Those 2021 lidar measurements, while reshuffling the list, maintained the number of ranked fourteeners in Colorado at 53. There are five more fourteeners that most climbers still scale even though the mountains fall slightly shy of the 300-foot rule: Challenger Point, North Eolus, El Diente, Conundrum and Cameron.
The shuffling of East Crestone for Crestone Peak won’t really upset the speedy climbers chasing record times. From the saddle between the peaks, it’s about 10 minutes of scrambling to reach each summit. Don’t be surprised to start seeing people amend their goals to include climbing 59 fourteeners, keeping Crestone Peak in the mix just as they do Challenger Point.
“I don’t think it will matter much,” said Colorado mountaineering legend Buzz Burrell, who founded — and sold — the fastestknowntime.com website. “If a new summit becomes official, subsequent FKT’s will include that summit while previous FKT’s will remain valid, as the time difference is likely minimal.”
Gilbertson is not overly concerned about the record-keeping challenges that may emerge from his findings.
“I don’t know how people who make the lists are going to deal with this,” he said. “I’m just figuring out which one is taller.”
