Peak Bagging, Lists and the Gamification of Hiking

A list will get you out of the house on a wet Tuesday. It will also send you up a hill in cloud you should not be on.

Updated 1 August 2026 · Written by Will Tory · Field-tested by the iHikeFar test team

Hiking has always had lists. Munros in Scotland, the 4,000-footers in New England, the Wainwrights in the Lake District, the fourteeners in Colorado, the hundred famous mountains in Japan. What has changed is that the list now lives on your phone, tracks your progress automatically, ranks you against other people and sends notifications. Hiking has been gamified, thoroughly and mostly without anyone deciding it should be.

This column is not an argument against lists. It is an argument for noticing what they do to your decisions.

What lists genuinely give you

Structure is the honest benefit. A list turns a vague intention to walk more into a concrete plan, and concrete plans survive bad weather and low motivation far better. Lists also take you places you would never otherwise choose. Almost everyone working through a regional list has discovered an unremarkable hill on a grey day that turned out to be one of their favourite walks — a route no algorithm and no photograph would ever have recommended.

There is a skills argument too. Completing a full round of anything means walking in every season, in poor visibility, on pathless ground and in conditions you would otherwise avoid. That is genuine competence, accumulated as a side effect of chasing an arbitrary target. Many highly capable hill walkers acquired their judgement precisely this way.

What lists quietly take away

The first cost is attention. A walk aimed at a target tends to be experienced as progress rather than as a place, and the difference is subtle until you notice you cannot remember the middle section of a hill you climbed last month. The second cost is repetition — lists discourage returning to a place you loved, because a repeat visit does not count.

The third cost is the serious one: lists distort risk. A hiker who needs one more summit to complete a round has a reason to continue in weather they would otherwise turn back from. Rescue teams see this pattern regularly, particularly late in the season and late in a round. The list creates a sunk cost, and sunk costs make poor decisions feel rational.

How to use a list without letting it use you

Set the same rules you would set for any hike, and write them down before the round becomes personal: turnaround times, weather thresholds, an explicit willingness to abandon a summit and come back. Deliberately schedule walks that are not on any list. Return to favourite places on purpose. And when you notice you are choosing a route because of what it completes rather than because you want to walk it, treat that as information rather than motivation.

Streaks, apps and the notification problem

Streak mechanics are the most aggressive form of this. A streak makes stopping feel like failure, which is exactly what a person recovering from an injury or facing a genuinely bad forecast should not feel. If an app is pushing you outdoors on a day when your body or the weather says otherwise, the app has stopped serving you. Turn off the notifications and keep the map.

The case for aimless walking

There is a category of walk that has no target: no summit, no distance, no list, no tracking. You go out, you turn around when you feel like it, and nothing is recorded. Most hikers do this rarely, and most report that these are the walks they remember with the most affection. It is worth protecting a share of your hiking for this, in the same way it is worth protecting a share of your reading for books nobody assigned.

None of this means abandoning ambition. Big objectives are a genuine pleasure, and the satisfaction of completing something difficult is real and earned. The argument is only for balance — for keeping the list as a tool rather than a scoreboard, and for remembering that the reason any of us started walking uphill was not to finish anything.

The tell, if you want one, is what you do when you reach a summit in cloud with no view. If the answer is that it still counted and you go home satisfied, the list is running the show. If the answer is that you sit down anyway because it is quiet up there, you are probably fine.

A note on the summit register

Summit registers and cairns have existed for centuries, which is a useful reminder that none of this is new. People have always wanted a record of having been somewhere. The difference now is that the record is public, comparative and continuous. That is a meaningful change in kind, not just in convenience, and it deserves more thought than it usually gets.