In fall 1999 the webmaster (Adam Helman) and Edward Earl climbed Mount Ritter, the Madera County highpoint, in California's Sierra Nevada. Adam was unaware that Mount Ritter was a county highpoint, having simply come along for the adventure and rewards of yet another climbing challenge.

In contrast, Edward had long known about county highpointing. Edward encouraged Adam to join the county highpoints discussion group, which was then moderated by Andy Martin.

Adam presented an addendum to Edward's Mount Ritter report, and in so doing was noticed by people as a potential leader in developing a central repository for trip reports. Furthermore, Roy Wallen was appointed trip report editor.

At that time the only web presence for the county highpointers were a few HTML pages on Edward Earl's personal web pages - specifically, the current front runners lists (FRL) and a writeup about prominence.

Andy Martin independently created a sample web page to display the most salient features of county highpointing at the time.

An even older web page, from 1996, was produced by Andy Martin. Both documents are now of historical value.

Unaware of Andy's concept promoting an independent web presence for county highpointers, the webmaster used free disk space on his geocities personal web pages to create the desired trip report archive. The archive grew through the winter to include several hundred reports logically arranged by state.

By April 2000 the webmaster decided it was time to look forward and consider the growth of county highpointing in the long term. As a result, he decided that an independent website dedicated to county highpointing would be desirable. So was born cohp.org - the site you now visit. It took some convincing to sell other highpointers on the merits of a website dedicated to county highpointing.

During spring 2000, cohp.org operated in parallel with the older set of personal web pages at geocities. The complete switch to cohp.org was made in June, with additional reports and further development being devoted exclusively to it.

The hyperlink below leads to a Winzip file that contains the entirety of the county highpointers web pages as of June 2000, residing, as noted above, as a subdirectory on the webmaster's personal pages at geocities.com .

A total of 639 trip reports are present, reflecting the starting phase of what is now the website now visited - www.cohp.org . No completion maps, first ascent lists, biographies, or front runner lists (FRL) were available.

After receiving permission from Edward Earl to use his content, the existing FRL and prominence page were lifted without change and placed into cohp.org - so accounting for the different "look and feel" of only these web pages within cohp.org .

To recreate the county highpointers web pages as of June 2000, click on the hyperlink below and save to your hard drive the indicated Winzip file into a top-level directory, i.e. C:\ for most PC users.

If you do not have Winzip installed, e-mail the webmaster explaining the problem. In turn the webmaster will offer assistance.

Double-click the filename in Windows Explorer and, now within the Winzip application, extract all files to the specified, default, top-level directory. A subdirectory \archive2000 will be created, under which all 757 files will populate a newly created, state-by-state directory tree.

To view the "website" just open the home page, C:\archive2000\highpts_home.html using either Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer web browser.