Help & FAQ.

Summit Tracker is a peak-bagging analytics platform for Strava athletes. It connects to your Strava account via OAuth and automatically tracks when your activities reach mountain summits — logging completions, computing intensity, and updating community leaderboards. We also enrich your Strava activity description with a summary of your achievement.

Getting access is instant and open to everyone:
1. Connect with Strava — Click the "Connect with Strava" button on our homepage.
2. Authorize — Log into your Strava account and authorize Summit Tracker.
3. Tag Summits — Go out and hike, run, or walk. We'll automatically track your summits in the background.

To prevent GPS drift/jitter from triggering false positives, we apply an SMA-2 (Simple Moving Average) smoothing algorithm with a strict climb threshold. You must actually ascend the mountain to trigger a summit — driving past it won't count.

Only foot-based efforts are currently tracked: Run, Hike, and Walk. Cycling and motorized activities are excluded to maintain leaderboard integrity. Private activities are supported and tracked for your personal stats, but they remain hidden from public leaderboards.

We append a single, clean line of data to your activity description. It looks something like this:
🏔️ Mission Peak #12 (YTD: 2) | 🧗 Hurt Index 4.2 | summittracker.net
You can customize exactly which modules (Hurt Index, Stats, SOTA) are included via your Preferences page, complete with a live preview.

No. We safely append our metadata to the very bottom of any description you've already written.

The total elevation gain accumulated by all Summit Tracker members across all tracked summits. It represents the combined vertical effort of the whole community over all time.

The Peak Registry is the official record of every peak discovered by our community. It organizes all discovered peaks into three elevation-based categories (Low: <1000m, Medium: 1000-1500m, High: >1500m) for easy browsing. Each peak card shows the pioneer who first tagged it, along with the discovery date.

A Pioneer is the first athlete to successfully log a verified summit of a specific peak in the Summit Tracker system. Pioneers are permanently recorded in the Registry with their name and discovery date.

The Wall of Hurt is a 30-day rolling leaderboard ranked by the Hurt Index (v3)—a performance-aware metric. Unlike static difficulty scores, V3 rewards Vertical Velocity (VAM). This means a 1-hour "sprint" up a mountain will score significantly higher than a 2-hour hike of the same peak. It is a measurement of pure "Grit" and intensity.

An Ascent Streak tracks consecutive weeks in which you have completed at least one tracked summit. If you miss a week, your streak resets to 1. Streaks of 2 weeks or more are displayed in your Strava activity descriptions if you have enabled the option in your Preferences.

An Advanced Streak (Peak Blitz) rewards high-frequency summiting by tracking when you bag 3 or more summits within any rolling 7-day window. When enabled, your activity description will proudly display: ⚡ Peak Blitz: 3 summits in 7 days! (or higher).

Hurt Index Benchmarks track your all-time highest grit score. If enabled, we compare your calculated intensity against your historical best and automatically append the (All-Time PR! 🏆) badge to your Hurt Index tag when you set a new record.

Your profile dynamically tracks your climbing history to award specialized achievement badges. There are 34 unique badges across 9 categories. Your profile displays only earned badges for a clean, achievement-focused view with a counter showing your progress (e.g., "12/34 Unlocked").

Power Users are athletes who have opted into our beta testing program to access experimental features before they're available to everyone. It's your chance to try cutting-edge features and provide early feedback. Join anytime — there's no commitment.

Visit your Preferences and scroll to the "Power Users" section. Click "Join" to opt in. You'll immediately get access to all experimental Power Users features.

Yes. Visit your Preferences and click "Leave" in the Power Users section. You'll lose access to experimental features, but you can re-join anytime.

Head to your Preferences. Changing units immediately updates your past and future dashboard stats, as well as the format used in your Strava description updates.

You can revoke Summit Tracker's access anytime from your Strava App Settings ↗. This stops all background webhook processing immediately.