2024

En route to Cerro Bolson 5550m, P3250m, Argentina - photo Ken Jones

(released under the GNU Documentation license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html) 

Lifetime Achievement Award:  David Purchase 

Four decades of peak-bagging; compiling the Scottish Donald Dewey hill list; Recorder for the LDWA Hillwalkers’ Register for a decade.

David Purchase, a well-known name in British bagging circles, was born in 1943, read Mathematics at Cambridge, and chose an actuarial career.  Lake District holidays in his teens started his hillwalking interest, but a hiatus followed until the mid-70s.  By the end of 1979 he had climbed 19 Munros and set himself the target of climbing them all during the 1980s:  this he achieved on Stob a' Choire Odhair on 3 June 1989, and was pleased to be assigned Munroist number 643.

David’s overseas activities were limited, but scattered.  His most distant hill is Ben Lomond – the New Zealand one (1748m P1168m).  His highest and most prominent is Wildspitze, Austria (3767m P2260m).  But he says the highest he has ever been, was over the Atlantic – on Concorde!

In 1994, David’s career came to an abrupt stop.  Fortunately, he was self-sufficient and could enjoy more hillwalking.  He completed other lists including the Donalds, the Hewitts in England and Wales, the Wainwrights, and the County Tops in Great Britain and Ireland.  Most were completed on a June 3rd, his ‘Munroversary’.  He also visited all the Marilyns in England and Wales.

He was active at his desk too.  He compiled the list of Donald Deweys (Scottish Southern Uplands >500m <610m, P30m):  one of his walking regrets is that he never completed them.  He was the Recorder for the LDWA (Long Distance Walkers Association) Hillwalkers’ Register from 2012 to 2021.  His paper ‘On the Classification of Mountains’ was published in the SMC Journal for 1997.  It was the first attempt to devise a basis for distinguishing between Mountains and Tops which also worked for lower hills.  It was also one of the first to use ‘distance to nearest higher ground’ rather than ‘distance to nearest mountain summit’.

David also compiled extended lists of British and Irish Islands (not suitable for bagging purposes) and lists of County Summits based on prominence criteria (unpublished).  He co-authored ‘Hidden Paths and Secret Gates’, a book of full-day walks near Bath.  He was a frequent visitor to Cambridge and the University Library, where he pored over maps and Admiralty charts in search of hill and island data.  In part as a result of this, in 2006 he was elected as a Fellow of his Cambridge College, Sidney Sussex – perhaps his proudest moment (after his Munro compleation, of course!).

His final bagging achievement was a second round of the Wainwright Outlying Fells on his 30th Munroversary.  But by then age had caught up with him, and there were no more.  

Peak-bagger of the Year Award: Petter Bjørstad 

For being first to achieve a P2000m Emerald award (>150 peaks) in 2024. He was also first to achieve Emerald for P1500m (>400 peaks) in 2023 and has led that category since 2011. He is also well known for his expeditions, some of which are listed in the BwB Achievements Register. Now in his 70s he continues to seek out peaks with no previous logs, often in quite obscure and challenging locations.

Petter climbed the Norwegian national highpoint, Galdhøpiggen, 2469m, P2379m in 1961, when he was 10 years old, with his Dad. The next big peak was Mont Blanc in 1974 with two good student friends. They could not afford lift tickets and walked from the centre of Chamonix.

Petter did cross country ski racing as well as a bit of running (34 minutes for the 10K), including orienteering races when still young. He needed to move to California (PhD from Stanford) before he succeeded winning a ski race in the Fischer-Swix High Sierra Cup.

A professor of Computer Science and Mathematics, he spent a year in Boulder, Colorado and did the Colorado 14ers. At that time, 25 years ago, he decided to pursue prominence-based mountain lists. These peaks have good views when the weather is nice and they are more scattered than what you get with a focus on elevation.

Petter has organized and led mountain expeditions to the Arctic (many first ascents in Greenland), Alaska, Canada, Africa and Asia. He enjoys planning trips almost as much as doing them. The highlight was perhaps his plan to climb the most prominent peak on earth with no known ascents – Mount Boising, Papua New Guinea (4150m, P3710m). This took 3 years and 5 weeks deep in the PNG jungle before he succeeded.

He maintains a blog describing his ascents, at www.prominent-mountains.no.

In 2010, he established a foundation to support mountaineering in Norway. There are about 30 local mountaineering chapters, they may all apply for financial support to stimulate more activity as well as running sessions to establish best practices for mountain safety. The foundation currently supports such activities with approximately 100.000 Euros each year.

Petter has been married to Heidi for 48 years. They have two sons, Tor and Pål, and one grandchild Idun (Tor's daughter). Petter is currently professor emeritus at the University of Bergen.

HoFMeisters’ Award: Daniel Patrick Quinn 

For his tireless work in driving the Ribus Project forward, and being by far its biggest contributor. 

The Relative Mountains of Earth: The Ribus, Pedantic Press, was published in 2024 .

Dan is a writer, researcher and cultural odd-jobber originally from northern England and now based in Scotland. He became interested in hiking as a teenager, quickly completing the Wainwrights before turning his attention to Marilyns and Hewitts. While teaching in Indonesia, the extraordinary tropical landscapes inspired a long-term project to better understand and classify the region’s mountains. With Andy Dean, he co-founded Gunung Bagging, an online resource for Indonesian and southeast Asian peakbaggers, and published a regional list of peaks with 1000 metres or more of topographic prominence, named Ribus from the Indonesian word for “thousand.”

In recent years, Dan has painstakingly coordinated the expansion of the Ribu concept into a fully global system, working with a wide network of international collaborators. This culminated in the publication of The Relative Mountains of Earth in 2024 by Pedantic Press. The book offers an unprecedented survey of all known 1000m prominence peaks on the planet. Blending geography, philosophy, cartography and occasional dry wit, it is already regarded by many as a defining work in modern mountain classification.

This landmark volume is the first in what is now planned to be a trilogy. Dan is currently collaborating with Oscar Argudo and Jim Singh on research for the second instalment, provisionally titled The Ribu Bagger’s Guide to the Solar System, a pioneering analysis of Ribus on the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies. The final volume, still many years away, will dive beneath the oceans to explore Earth’s vast population of seamounts. Due to sparse and inconsistent bathymetric data, this third part is not expected for at least another decade.

Outside of mountains, Dan is known for his experimental music, most notably with the group One More Grain and through several cultural crossovers with Javanese gamelan.  

Contribution to Peak-bagging Award: Andrew Kirmse

For the Peakbagger App used by many BwB members, also his far reaching and ongoing worldwide isolation and prominence research . 

An old family photograph proves that Andrew’s first climb was Whiteface Mountain, 1482m, P950m peak, New York state in 1977, when he was 4 years old.  Since then he has climbed many prominent peaks in the western USA.  In the meantime, he received undergraduate degrees in physics, theoretical mathematics, and computer science, and a masters in computer science under future Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov, all from MIT.  He worked for over 10 years at Google, where he led the development of satellite imagery, Google Earth, Maps for Android, and other projects.  At one point he had likely seen more of the Earth’s surface in high resolution than any human in history. 

In 2014, Andrew’s chance notice of Edward Earl's signature in a summit log on a county high point eventually led to a collaboration with Edward and Jonathan de Ferranti that resulted in the first global-scale identification of every mountain in the world along with its prominence and isolation, published in 2017.  He has continued refining this work on ever-better data, adding over 100,000 Lidar-derived peaks to the Peakbagger database in 15 countries.  His code for efficiently computing prominence is an open-source project that has been used by governments and researchers alike.

Also in 2014, Andrew launched the first version of the Peakbagger mobile app for Android, followed by the iOS version in 2015.  This free app has been used by thousands of climbers to research and plan trips, record and follow tracks, and log ascents, even when offline.  It includes cross-references to the peaks in the Lists of John database (USA) and the Database of British and Irish Hills.  Thanks to the work of volunteers, it is available in 11 languages.

Andrew is currently a graduate student at Stanford University, where he raids the libraries to scan topographic maps in order to improve the Peakbagger database.  He has reviewed and corrected tens of thousands of user-submitted peaks, so that more than half the peaks in the database are now outside the USA.  He is publishing research on the accuracy of Lidar measurements of mountains .