On October 13, a report was published on Country High Points that makes the claim that there’s a new 14,000-foot mountain in Colorado – not ‘new’ in the sense of a new peak being formed, but ‘new’ in the sense that more accurate measuring may have pushed another point above a threshold to be considered a peak.

The peak in question is East Crestone – a point located 418 feet to the east of Crestone Peak in the Sangre de Cristos, commonly referred to as a ‘sub-peak’ of that mountain. A report authored by Eric Gilbertson, Elijah Gendron, Peter Kline, and Ben Loftin draws the relationship of these two peaks into question, posing that East Crestone may in fact be the higher point with Crestone Peak serving as a sub-peak.

The conversation stems from LiDar measurements of 2018 to 2019 that revealed the elevation of Crestone Peak and East Crestone were measured within the same margin of error. In follow-up, the more recent study that’s included in this report utilized ground surveys with professional surveying equipment including multiple dGNSS (differential Global Navigation Satellite System) units to determine which peak was actually taller.

The full report can be found here, but the punchline is that East Crestone was measured at 0.305 feet taller than the Crestone Peak summit, thus is the taller peak with 99.99 percent confidence – taller by about four inches. This would mean that East Crestone is the true fourteener and Crestone Peak is the sub-peak.

Results of the aforementioned report have been submitted to the scientific journal Progress in Physical Geography for peer review.