Skagit County Highpoint Trip Report
Date: September 9, 2008
Author: Edward Earl
When Greg Slayden and I climbed Buckner, Greg took a digital photo from the
southwest summit looking toward the rival-height northeast summit. In an effort
to determine which is higher, I performed a
pixel-coordinate analysis
of the northeast summit relative to other peaks in the background, which I identified
with the help of a panorama generated by Jonathan de Ferranti.
Thanks to Jonathan for his contribution to this project.
It appears from my analysis that the southwest summit is 15 inches higher than
the northeast summit. The error of the analysis is probably less than 6 inches.
One pixel on Greg's photograph equals about 3 inches at the distance of the
northeast summit. The root mean square residue of the least-squares fit is less
than one pixel.
It has always been suspected that the southwest summit of Buckner is probably a
foot or two higher and that the northeast summit need not be visited to claim
the county HP or the prominence, though some climbers have visited the northeast
summit just to be sure. My study provides one more piece of evidence that the
northeast summit need not be visited.