About Pin the Peak
Pin the Peak is a daily mountain guessing game. Five photos, two questions each: which peak is it, and where does it stand?
Play today's peaksHow it works
Every day at midnight five new photos go up. Three are Colorado fourteeners, the fifty-eight peaks in the state that top 14,000 feet, from Mount Elbert and Longs Peak to Capitol, Little Bear and the Maroon Bells. Two are famous mountains from the rest of the world: Everest and K2, the Matterhorn and the Eiger, Fuji, Kilimanjaro, Denali, Aconcagua, Fitz Roy and more. They usually run from easiest to hardest.
For each photo, start typing a name and pick the peak from the list. Then tap the map where you think its summit is. The map starts on Colorado for fourteeners and on the whole world for the rest, and you can zoom in as far as you like. You can lock in a pin without naming the peak.
Scoring
The right name is worth 500 points. The pin is worth up to 500 more, falling off the farther you miss. Fourteeners are judged tightly because they sit so close together: a pin within about half a mile gets full marks, and one about 5 miles off keeps half. World peaks are judged on a wider scale, keeping half their points about 140 miles out. A perfect day is 5,000. When you finish, Share copies something like this:
Pin the Peak No. 1
3,840 / 5,000
1. ✓ name 0.8 mi off 998
2. ✗ name 14 mi off 155
...
Where the photos come from
Every photo comes from Wikimedia Commons and is free to reuse under a Creative Commons license or the public domain. Each was checked to make sure it shows the mountain itself, rather than the view from its summit, and that no sign or caption in the frame gives the name away. The photographer and license are credited after each guess, with a link to the original. Peak locations and elevations come from Wikidata, and the map uses Esri terrain, relief, imagery and place-name tiles. The Maroon Bells photo in link previews is by John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA (CC BY 2.0).
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Your scores
There's no account. Your results, streak and stats are saved in your browser, and the archive lets you play any earlier day you missed.
Who made it
Pin the Peak was built by Will Loughlin as part of 30 websites in 30 days.