Highpointing - County Highpoints

County Highpoints

County highpointing, unlike state highpointing, is most popular in the British Isles. There are several guides covering ascents of the counties of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

There are 48 counties in England, 33 in Scotland, 32 in Ireland, and 22 in Wales. Most of these "county tops" outside of Scotland are non-technical walk-ups. Each nation in the British Isles has seen dozens of people complete their lists. Climbers have been confused in recent years by status changes in the various counties, both adding and subtracting highpoints, depending upon the criteria used.

By contrast, in the U.S., there are 3,142 counties, and no one has yet approached climbing all of them. Bob Packard is currently listed as the person with the most county highpoints completed, having ascended to the tops of all the counties of 29 states.

Rhode Island, a low state with a handful of counties, has seen the most people climb all its counties, with 40 people listed. Several states have not yet seen ascents of all their counties.

The U.S. county highpointers' club rules, as described here, are slightly stricter than state highpoint rules.

Many counties, especially flat and low-lying ones, have not been fully surveyed and thus have no single defined highest point, just multiple areas with the same highest contour line. In order to claim to have successfully climbed the county's highest point, then, it is necessary to visit ALL those areas, unless one can clearly be ruled out by line of sight from another one or by virtue of having been graded or excavated. Even if one area has an elevation indicated on the USGS map, the county highpointer must visit other areas within the same contour until and unless the maximum elevations are resolved by an official survey.

For flat counties with multiple points, county highpointing is more akin to geocaching than peak bagging, since logically only one of the points is the highpoint, and the rest are not. In this case the number of virtual 'caches' is largely an artifact of the size of the contour interval (for a given area, the larger the contour interval, the more 'possible' highpoints there will be). For instance suppose the two highest points in a county are 101 feet and 106 feet above sea level, and that neither has a spot elevation on the map. If the region is mapped with 5-foot contours, there will be only 1 "highpoint". However, if the region is mapped with 10-foot contours, there will be two "highpoints", and county highpointers will be required to visit both points to claim the county.