Most Prominent Peaks in New England
by
Roy Schweiker and Andy Martin

Suppose you wanted to know which mountains stand head and shoulders above their surroundings rather than just have a high summit elevation with little rise above a ridge connecting them to a higher peak. You would first need to decide where their feet were planted, their base elevation. One choice would be to use a method similar to that used to determine 4000-footer status, which calculates the rise from the lowest col on the highest possible route to a higher point. But instead of choosing a minimum rise and then ranking peaks with at least that rise by their summit elevations as the Four Thousand Footer Club does, you would simply order them from greatest to least rise irrespective of summit elevation.

For a full discussion of the issue of prominence see the page on Topographic Prominence on the County Highpointers web site or the Prominence website by Aaron Maizlish.

Preliminary manual attempts to produce such a list were aided immeasurably by Edward Earl who used a computer algorithm on digital elevation data to produce a tentative list of New England peaks with over 1000 feet of "prominence", which is the term he gave to this calculated rise. Unfortunately the digital elevations are taken on a grid that may not hit the actual high and low points, so the results must be adjusted manually using paper topographic maps.

The following is a list of the 50 most prominent New England peaks as obtained by Roy Schweiker and Andy Martin. Note that most of these are well known as highest in their area even if they are not among the highest in their state. As shown in the table, half the contour interval is added to peaks and saddles where the map does not give an exact elevation. The list would contain the same peaks in slightly different order if "clean" prominence was used.

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