How to track the NH 48 and other peak-bagging lists with Strava

Which one

For the NH 48, the Adirondack 46 or the Colorado 14ers, List Hiker is built for exactly this: connect Strava (read-only), and it matches every hike to the peaks on 16 mostly Northeastern lists, checks each list’s rules (winter boundaries, one-peak-per-hike lists) and, by its own description, fills out the application on many lists when you finish. It’s free on the web and iPhone, and Android users can use the website. For peaks and cols anywhere in the world, the Munros included, Summit Bag works straight from Strava and can add the peaks you bagged to your activity descriptions. If you’d rather log climbs in a community with trip reports, Peakery has NH 48 and ADK 46 challenges, and Peakbagger tracks progress against hundreds of lists, both from GPX files rather than a Strava connection.

None of the apps changes this: none of the clubs covered here asks for a GPS track. The AMC Four Thousand Footer Club wants the date of each peak, an essay and a check, sent by mail. The Adirondack 46ers want an online form and $20. Nothing on either club’s application pages mentions apps, GPS files or Strava. An app is a way to get your dates and rules right before you apply, not proof.

The apps side by side

List Hiker

List Hiker’s Strava page opens with “Your Strava hikes, counted on every list.” You approve read-only access, it loads your whole Strava history (usually within minutes, per the site), and each new hike lands on your lists moments after you save it. Rename or delete an activity on Strava and it follows. Garmin, COROS and Suunto hikes come through if those devices already sync to Strava. If you’d rather not connect, you can load Strava’s account export instead, but new hikes then won’t arrive on their own.

Matching works from the GPS track: each hike is compared against every summit and trail segment List Hiker knows, matches are confidence-rated, and one hike can count toward several lists at once. The part that matters for a club application is the rules check. Its FAQ lists astronomical seasons for New England lists and calendar seasons for others, one peak per hike on the Trailwrights 72, full segments on the Terrifying 25, grandfathered peaks, and a plausibility check that won’t count a summit if the speed or elevation gain says you rode up. If your GPS died before the top, you can add the peak by hand.

The 16 lists include the NH 48, 52 With a View, the NH 100 Highest, the Terrifying 25, the Adirondack 46, the Catskill 3500, the New England 67 and 100, the Northeast 115, the Colorado 14ers and Centennials and the Georgia 4000-Footers. Variations include Winter, Four-Season, Single-Season, the Grid, Every Calendar Day and 48-over-70. For the 14ers it tracks a Ranked 53 and a Standard 58; the Colorado Mountain Club counts 54 and accepts longer lists as long as its 54 are in them, so check yours against the club’s.

When you finish, List Hiker says it can build “a validated, filled-out completion application form” to print, sign and mail with the fees. It says this works on “many lists” without naming which, and that it isn’t associated with or endorsed by the Appalachian Mountain Club or other list sponsors. The iPhone app (iOS 18 or later) adds Apple Health sync, a Peak Locator for finding the true summit on trail-less peaks, and offline use.

Summit Bag

“It’s a bit like Strava segments, but for peaks and cols,” is how Summit Bag describes itself. It compares your Strava activities against more than 500,000 features and records which ones you passed, and you can track groups “like the Scottish Munros” or build your own. A group you build stays private for now, so an NH 48 group of your own is an option; whether a ready-made one exists isn’t on any public page.

A bag counts when your activity’s route line passes within 70 metres of the feature (wider for a few popular peaks with disputed summits). In the UK and Ireland the peaks come from the Database of British and Irish Hills; elsewhere, from named peaks with a height in OpenStreetMap, synced roughly quarterly. Its FAQ flags a couple of catches. Activities with the map fully hidden in Strava’s privacy settings don’t show up. And your back catalogue is checked against Strava’s low-resolution summary line, which can miss bags on long activities. “Reprocess Activity”, or renaming the activity in Strava, fetches a more detailed one.

Of the five in the table, it’s one of two that write back to Strava (Athmetrics, below, is the other), and only once you enable Update Strava Activity Descriptions in its settings; that applies to new or edited activities. There’s a free tier and a Premium one (manual bags for climbs that never reached Strava are Premium); the public pages don’t list the price. One developer, Phil Bellamy, runs it.

Athmetrics

Athmetrics is mostly a Strava training dashboard and race finder, but its hiking-list guide puts the NH 48 first: “Choose NH 48, Terrifying 25, 52 WAV, and more.” It syncs your latest Strava activities and credits summits from the GPS track within a 200 metre radius, wider than Summit Bag’s 70. Older hikes can come in by CSV upload or manual entry. It adds a footer to your Strava descriptions; pick summit list progress in your profile and that footer shows the peaks you have left, instead of monthly stats. It renames activities only if you turn on auto-naming. It’s on the web only. The free plan keeps your last 30 days in sync, and Premium, whose price isn’t on any public page, adds full-history imports (a full year, per its dashboard).

Peakery

Peakery calls itself “your basecamp for the world’s mountains”: 645,000 peaks on its maps, by its App Store count, more than 500,000 logged climbs with photos and trip reports, and more than 750 curated Peak Challenges. The New Hampshire 4000 Footers Challenge has all 48 peaks, and there are Adirondack 46er, Scottish Munros and Colorado 14ers challenges too. There’s no Strava connection on its pages; you log a climb with a GPX file (Strava will export one from any of your activities on the website, under the ellipsis menu, Export GPX), by hand, or with Peakery’s own GPS tracker. Free, on the web, iPhone and Android.

Peakbagger

The Peakbagger app (iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 or later) searches the Peakbagger.com and ListsOfJohn databases, keeps track of your climbs offline and, per its App Store listing, measures your progress “against hundreds of peak lists”, with custom lists and leaderboards. Tracks come in as GPX, KML, KMZ, TCX or FIT files, and the app can pass your ascents on to ListsOfJohn and the UK’s Hill Bagging site. Strava isn’t mentioned. It’s free. If you’ve kept your record on Peakbagger for years, List Hiker can import Peakbagger’s ascent export.

Other summit apps on Strava

These connect to Strava and track summits, but none of their store pages names the NH 48 or the 46: Summits (Strava and Garmin Connect, 450,000+ peaks, custom challenges, free on iPhone, Android and the web; its website’s challenges include the Welsh 3000s and the USA 14,000-foot peaks), Peakproject (Strava, Garmin, Intervals.icu or file uploads, collections like the Alpine 4,000m peaks; free, with a $29.99 a year Supporter tier) and Peakify (Strava, Apple Health and Garmin, summit challenges for Welsh and Lake District lists among others, and it can add stats to your Strava descriptions; Pro is $9.99 a year).

How the NH 48 application works

The list is officially the White Mountain Four Thousand Footers, often called the New Hampshire 4000 Footers: 48 peaks, all on official trails except Owl’s Head, whose herd path is in the AMC White Mountain Guide. To count, a peak has to rise 200 feet above any ridge joining it to a higher neighbor, which is why Clay and Guyot aren’t on it.

The rules are short. You climb on your own feet to and from each summit, in one continuous trip (overnights are fine), as many peaks per trip as you like. No auto road on Washington, and no Cog Railway or tramway shortcuts. There’s no time limit, but you need the list that’s current when you apply.

Applying is still mostly a paper job. A complete application is the application page, an essay and the fee. The club’s online WM4 form only builds a PDF: you fill in each peak’s date and companions, pick your final summit, then “MUST click the Download PDF button”, print both pages and mail them with the essay and fee to the AMC Four Thousand Footer Committee, P.O. Box 444, Exeter, NH 03833-0444. The form asks you to explain a final summit that isn’t your latest date, and peaks usually hiked together that carry different dates. The fee is $15 for the White Mountain list (for most other lists the club’s pages say $10, “increasing to $15.00 as of May 1, 2026”, a date that has passed, so confirm the amount before you mail it).

The essay isn’t formal. The FAQ says to write it as if telling a fellow hiker, usually about your last peak, and that the club has never refused anyone for leaving it out. If you finished in summer or fall, send it by January 31 to be processed in time for the Awards Night, usually in April. You can email the form and essay, but the fee still goes by mail. The FAQ talked about online payment after the 2026 Awards Night; the online form still says to mail it.

The club doesn’t insist on its own form, which is what makes an app-built one usable. Its tips sheet accepts your own spreadsheet if the whole thing fits on one portrait page with your name and address at the bottom. It also asks you to label the final peak, add a comment confirming any unusual same-day combination (its example: “part of one-day Pemi-loop”), and give exact dates where you have them.

Winter and Owl’s Head

This is where a date-matching app is most likely to get it wrong. For the AMC’s winter lists the whole trip must start after the minute of the winter solstice and end before the minute of the spring equinox, so a hike on December 21 may or may not count. Write WINTER at the top of a regular application and note start or finish times on those edge days. The Adirondack 46ers count winter by the calendar instead, December 21 to March 21 inclusive.

On Owl’s Head, a higher summit about 0.2 miles north of the traditional one came to the AMC’s attention in 2005 (it may be a rediscovery of a summit first found in the 1960s). The AMC has recognized either since 2018 and says it will start requiring the new one, with a grace period. An app that checks a single summit point against a small radius (Summit Bag’s is 70 metres) may credit one and not the other, and neither List Hiker’s nor Athmetrics’ pages say which summit point they use for Owl’s Head, so look at that peak yourself.

The other lists

• Adirondack 46. Registration is online only; the 46ers no longer accept paperwork by mail or email. Each finisher fills in the official form on the club’s site and pays a $20 fee, and gets a climbing number by email (with a “W” for winter). Each year’s class closes at midnight on December 31. Four of the 46 are listed under 4,000 feet, and MacNaughton, which the latest USGS survey puts at 4,000, isn’t required.
• Colorado 14ers. The Colorado Mountain Club’s Summit Completer form asks for your first and last peaks with dates, your address, a few favorites and a short story. No fee is mentioned.
• Munros. All 282 of them. The Scottish Mountaineering Club takes compleations online (post is still accepted). Submitting means your name, year, photo and caption are published on its site.

Common questions

Sources

• AMC Four Thousand Footer Club: the lists and fees, how to apply, WM4 online application form, FAQs, White Mountain 4000 list, tips for avoiding processing delays (PDF)
• Adirondack 46ers: how to join, how to join FAQs, the peaks
• Colorado Mountain Club: Summit Completers and the completer form
• Scottish Mountaineering Club: compleator submission and Munro FAQs
• List Hiker: home, for Strava hikers, how it works, lists, FAQ, App Store
• Summit Bag: about and FAQ
• Athmetrics: hiking list guide, updates, Strava tools
• Peakery: home, New Hampshire 4000 Footers Challenge, Adirondack 46er challenge, Scottish Munros, Colorado 14ers, App Store
• App Store: Peakbagger, Summits (and its web app, summitstracker.com), Peakproject, Peakify
• Strava Help: exporting your data and map layers

Related reading

The List Hiker and Summit Bag listings have the details on data access and pricing, and the full directory has the other hiking and climbing apps that work with Strava.