You are planning a route through hills you have never ridden. The elevation profile shows a serious climb at 40 km, and the map around it is a mass of contours with nothing to tell you what any of it is called. Is that the pass your club talks about, or an anonymous drag you could route around?
There is a new button on the map toolbar that answers this: turn on peaks, and named summits appear as triangles with their names beneath them.
It follows the map. Pan across a range while you plan and the layer fetches whatever is now on screen; zoom out past a point and it politely gives up rather than trying to draw a thousand hills. The three highest summits in view are picked out in red, so you can see at a glance what dominates the country your route crosses.
It is a layer, not a search
This matters more than it sounds. PitStopper's POI searches put things into your POI list: they get counted, exported to your GPX, saved into your project. Peaks deliberately do none of that.
The reason is simple. This layer changes every time you move the map. If panning across Cumbria quietly stuffed four hundred summits into your POI list, your carefully curated set of water stops and cafes would be buried, and your next export would be full of hills you never asked for. So the peaks layer keeps its own markers and its own cache, and never touches your POIs.
If you do want summits in your list - to export them, to have them announced on the phone - there is a Summit POI category in the normal search. Same data, different job.
Click a peak
Each triangle is clickable, and the popup shows what OpenStreetMap knows: its height, and where the data exists, a link to read about it.
Heights honour your unit setting, so if you work in feet you get feet.
What OpenStreetMap actually knows about hills
Here is the part that surprised us. Before deciding what to put in that popup, we counted. Every natural=peak in a box around the Lake District - 683 summits - and tallied which tags they actually carry:
| Tag | Coverage |
|---|---|
ele (height) |
95% |
name |
95% |
wikidata |
37% |
wikipedia |
35% |
| SOTA radio reference | 6% |
prominence |
0.4% |
That last row rearranged our plans. Prominence - how far a summit rises above the ridge connecting it to anything higher - is the measure hill-baggers care about, because it is what separates a real mountain from a bump. It is the right way to rank summits. It is also, in practice, almost entirely absent: three peaks out of 683.
So the layer ranks by height, which is on 95% of them, and treats prominence as a tie-break for the lucky few. Scafell Pike happens to be one of the three, which is why its popup shows both.
Meanwhile Wikipedia links turned out to be on more than a third of summits - two orders of magnitude more common than prominence, and far more useful to a curious cyclist. That is now in the popup.
The general lesson, and it applies well beyond hills: rank by the good signal where it exists, and check how often it actually exists before building on it. A tag that is theoretically perfect and practically absent is not a feature, it is a comment.
Crowded ranges
A mountain range presents an awkward problem: there are more summits than there is room for names. Around Great End, at the zoom where you can see the whole massif, the first version rendered "Grea…/Great End/Long Pike" stacked into an unreadable smear.
The layer now works out, every time it draws, which names actually fit. Where two names would collide the lower summit keeps its triangle but loses its label - it is still there, still clickable, and the popup still names it. Zoom in and the names come back as the space opens up.
You can watch this happen with Symonds Knott, a subsidiary top a hundred metres from Sca Fell. Zoomed out it is hidden entirely behind its bigger neighbour. One zoom level in it appears as a bare triangle. One more and it gets its name.
Where to find it
The peaks button sits on the map toolbar on the right, next to the other layer controls. It is off by default and remembers nothing - turn it on while you are working out where a route should go, turn it off when you want a clean map again.
Peak data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors, the same volunteers who map every water tap and bike shop PitStopper shows you. If a hill near you is unnamed or missing its height, that is something you can fix for everyone.
