by TeresaGergen » Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:57 am
Upon reflection, I could have done a better job with my post. Let me try again.
I can think of 3 main things that LOJ provides.
1. A resource of data about peaks, and groupings of those peaks into all the lists one could imagine. I suspect all of us are extremely grateful for the amount of work that has gone into providing us with this resource.
2. A place where we can record what we've done. My point was the same as John Prater's -- if we make an ascent of a peak listed on LOJ, we really ought to be able to record it, or it leads to inaccuracy and incompleteness in our own records and diminishes the point of having this ability in the first place. It doesn't really matter how contrived it looks to someone else -- if someone's training for the Hardrock by doing laps on Sanitas, they still did it.
3. Totals for all kinds of stats based on what we've checked off. As others have alluded to in this thread, the problem might be one of vocabulary or definition. I know one person who keep two separate sets of records, one counting "peaks climbed" and one counting "ascents." If he climbs Redcloud and Sunshine as an out and back, coming back over the first peak at the end, he'll count two peaks, but three ascents. That's the kind of thing where everyone makes their own rules for themselves and then wants to use LOJ the way they're used to using their own record keeping system. It doesn't become a problem until two people are competing based on their LOJ stats and then realize they have different rules or definitions. Since it's John's site, it seems fair for him to set rules for what goes into stats totals charts, especially since he's always open to our opinions anyway. I was not actually advocating that these totals charts should go away. I just think it would be a shame if this aspect of the site took precedence over the #2 aspect listed above, such that we couldn't actually get all our ascents into the database in the first place.
As an aside, the bigger can of worms for some of the stats totals in my mind is the definition of a day. "Stats per outing" is more logical, but I can't imagine how you'd determine in a computer program what constitutes someone's "outing," so again I'm not actually suggesting a change here; there's nothing I can think of to be done about the situation, other than realize that the stats totals don't tell all. Some of my outings start as soon as it gets dark and finish before it gets light. If I've climbed multiple peaks on that outing, some of them go into LOJ with the date before midnight and some go in with the date after midnight. I had one continuous non-backpacking/non-bivying outing that crossed three dates.