A hundred and ninety peaks, and not one by accident

Komoot has a section called peak bagging. You don’t enter anything: if you cross a summit while recording, it adds itself to the list.

I hadn’t looked at it in years. When I opened it now, it said 190.

My first thought wasn’t “how many”. It was - I remember almost every one.

It isn’t about the metres

I know how it looks from outside. Of the 190 peaks, fifteen are above a thousand metres. Two are above two thousand. The median of the whole list is 560 metres.

Somebody might say that isn’t really mountaineering, then.

I don’t care. Every one of them was a day out. Getting up earlier than you need to, boots on, and that moment when the forest suddenly opens and you see how far it has carried you. That isn’t measured in altitude.

A two-hundred-and-forty-metre hill in Zagorje fog can give you more than some two-thousander in good weather, when everyone is walking the same path.

Hills that have an owner

The list holds Mađerkin Breg, Bajsov breg, Lovrekov breg, Grozijev breg, Kreačov breg, Smudakov breg, Popov breg. Seven hills carrying somebody’s surname, because somebody once had something up there - a cottage, a vineyard, a patch of woodland.

There is also Vuglec Breg. Two hundred and ninety metres.

These are hills with no summit sign, no logbook, nobody at the top. They have a name and somebody who remembers it. On this list they stand equal to the rest, and that is neither modesty nor posturing - it is the reason I go out at all.

Three different hills are called Veliki vrh. Two each are named Grmada, Straža, Stražnik and Babin zub. A grmada is a grmada, a straža is a lookout - there were as many as were needed.

There is Vindija too - the same cave from which people thirty thousand years ago went to Gaveznica for green tuff. And Kameni vrh - Gaveznica, the volcano itself, two hundred and eighty metres. Two peaks any serious list would skip.

The highest one isn’t on the list

At the top of Komoot’s list stands Kredarica, 2,540 metres.

Except Kredarica isn’t a peak. It’s a building - the Triglav hut, the last shelter before Triglav itself. And Triglav, 2,864 metres, does not exist on the list.

I was up there, with the crew from the Stubičan mountaineering club I belong to. The photo is at the Aljaž Tower and it shows everything a watch cannot record: harnesses, helmets, and people who climbed it together.

Why the summit wasn’t recorded, I can’t say for certain. Those were my early days, without proper gear - most likely the watch ran out of battery on the second day.

So the machine logged the house below the summit and missed the summit. That tells you roughly what such a list is worth if you take it at face value.

That trip deserves its own piece. It will come.

After Kredarica comes Rosenkranzhöhe, 2,120, then Monte Madrizze, 1,920, then Uršlja gora, 1,700. The highest Croatian ones are Veliki Risnjak (1,530) and Snježnik (1,510).

The sum

Add up all the altitudes and you get 110,270 metres - twelve and a half Everests, measured from sea level.

The number is a trick, of course: it adds altitudes above sea level, not climbing. But I like it anyway, because it says something true about five or six years in which going outside was the first thing on the list, not the thing left over for the weekend if there happened to be time.

Not all of them on foot

I reached some of these peaks on skis rather than walking.

Komoot doesn’t distinguish - a peak is a peak, whether you climbed it or came down it. That’s fine by me. Skiing is the other passion, the same thing with different gear, and there hasn’t been a word about it on this site yet.

There will be.

Čikat

The lowest peak on the list is Čikat. Twenty-nine metres.

A pine wood above a bay in Mali Lošinj. There is no path to the summit because there is no summit. Somebody entered it into a database long ago and Komoot now lists it as bagged.

And that is, honestly, my favourite line on the whole list. Between Kredarica at 2,540 and Čikat at 29 lies everything else - a hundred and eighty-eight places I went to because I wanted to, not because somebody was counting.

That somebody counted them anyway turned out to be a nice surprise.

The full list and map, all 190 →