Help

What counts as a summit

• Your track reaches a known summit — within about 250 m of the top and no more than 30–50 m below it, so a trail that passes underneath doesn’t count. Anywhere within 50 m of the top always counts.
• Fenced summits: where the very top is off-limits, the spot where everyone stops (a hut, a bench) counts as the top.
• The climb shows in your elevation profile. We smooth out GPS noise first, so a drive to the top or a jittery reading doesn’t count.
• Repeats: to count the same summit twice in one activity, you have to go most of the way back down in between.

Which activities are checked

Runs, hikes, trail runs and other on-foot activities with at least 50 m of climbing. Walks, rides, e-bike rides and virtual rides aren’t checked.

A summit is missing

Start with your Activities page: it lists every activity we checked and what we found on it. For activities you upload from now on, when your route passed close to a peak we didn’t count, it says so — for example “Passed about 310 m from Black Mountain” — which shows whether the track really reached the top.

The usual reasons, most common first:

• The activity is recorded as a Walk or a Ride.
• It has less than 50 m of climbing, or the GPS track stops short of the top — more than about 250 m away, or well below it.
• The peak isn’t on the SOTA list or in OpenStreetMap. We refresh our copy of OpenStreetMap every month, so a summit added there shows up here within about a month.
• Summit Tracker can’t see your activities — your Strava permissions changed since you connected. Your Home page will ask you to connect again; when you do, the activities you uploaded meanwhile are checked automatically.

We check summits against our own copy of OpenStreetMap’s peaks, so detection doesn’t wait on an online map service — that’s why most activities are tagged within seconds. In the rare case a check can’t be answered, we retry the activity automatically later — you don’t need to do anything.

What we add to your Strava description

One line at the end of the description, for example:

We only ever add or update our own line. Your title, your own text and other apps’ notes are never changed. Choose what the line includes — Hurt Index, stats, streaks, SOTA — in Settings once you’ve connected.

Climb Pace Trend

Optional: compares your climbing speed with your own average on the same peak, e.g. “↑9% vs your avg”. It appears once you’ve summited that peak at least twice before.

Hurt Index

A score for how much an activity cost your body. It adds up the work — distance plus climbing, with every 80 m up counting like an extra kilometre and steep ground counting more — and how hard you pushed it per hour, over the time you were out there. Altitude matters too: with less oxygen you have less to give, so the same effort costs more up high. It barely changes things at 3,000 m and matters a lot at 6,000 m.

It’s a doubling scale: Mission Peak from Stanford Avenue is about 4, and every 4 points means twice as hard. A marathon is about 6, a 100-miler about 10, Everest about 24. Climbing the same hill faster still scores higher.

What changed (September 2026): the Hurt Index used to rate only the climbing, so a long run with little climbing scored near zero. The numbers on your past activities in Summit Tracker have been recalculated; descriptions already on Strava keep the old number. Your hardest recent efforts are on your Home page — only you can see them.

Badges

Your profile awards 34 badges for milestones — summit counts, total climbing, seasons, early starts and more.

SOTA mode (for radio amateurs)

Turn on SOTA tracking in Settings to see which Summits on the Air references you’ve reached, the activation points they’re worth, and create a QSL card for each activation. Retired SOTA summits still count as summits but aren’t shown as SOTA.

Your data

• Nobody else sees you here. Public pages on this site show counts only — never your name or your activities.
• Peak data comes from Summits on the Air and © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
• We store your summits, not your routes. GPS tracks are read when an activity is checked and aren’t kept. For each activity we keep which peaks your route came close to and roughly how close (for example “about 300 m”), and whether a watch or a phone recorded it — never the track itself. Only you can see your Activities page.
• Leaving: remove Summit Tracker in your Strava app settings and we delete your data.
• The details (what we store, who handles it, your rights, a copy of your data) are in the privacy policy.
• Units: switch between metric and imperial in Settings; it also changes the units in your Strava line.