About the register

Summit Register is a non-commercial reference covering 44 mountains chosen for significance rather than height alone. Some are there because they are the highest point of something; some because of the route that first climbed them; some because they are geologically or historically unusual. One is there because nobody has climbed it.

Elevations follow the national mapping agency of the country the summit stands in, and where a summit is shared, the most recent joint survey. Everest uses the 8,848.86 m figure agreed by Nepal and China in December 2020, rounded to 8,849 m. Where a peak has both a snow height and a rock height, the snow height is given, because that is what the agencies publish.

Prominence is computed against the key col, and is taken from published prominence lists rather than recalculated here. Figures below about 100 m of prominence are unreliable for peaks that have not been surveyed with modern instruments.

First ascents record the first confirmed ascent of the summit by any route. Contested claims are noted in the entry rather than silently accepted or rejected: Cerro Torre is the clearest case, where Cesare Maestri's 1959 claim is widely but not universally dismissed. Where a party stopped deliberately short of the true summit for religious reasons, as on Kangchenjunga, the ascent is still recorded as the first ascent and the circumstance is noted.

Grades are for the route most parties use, in the system local to the mountain. They describe a route in reasonable condition and are not a prediction about any particular day.

No route topos, no permit information, no commercial operator listings, and no current conditions. All four of those go stale quickly and are better served by the national alpine clubs and by local guides. The register is for the fixed facts.

Every photograph is from Wikimedia Commons under a free licence. Images were downscaled and recompressed for the web; no other modification was made. Copyright remains with the photographers listed below.

Figures move and accounts get revised. If an entry is wrong, the useful thing to send is the source: a survey publication, an alpine club journal, or a national mapping record. A correction with a citation gets applied; one without stays in the queue.

Hand-written HTML and CSS with no framework and no build step. The register page loads a single JSON file and does the filtering, sorting and comparison client-side, so there is no server to keep running. Typography is the system serif and sans stacks, which means the page renders in whatever the reader's device considers a good reading face and loads no web fonts.

The site is stored in Amazon S3 with public access blocked, and is served over HTTPS through Amazon CloudFront using an origin access control, so the bucket itself is not reachable from the internet. DNS is Route 53 and the certificate is issued by AWS Certificate Manager.