Wiktionary
n. 1 (context dated English) A coin worth thirteenpence. 2 (context US climbing English) A mountain rising to more than 13,000 feet above mean sea level.
Wikipedia
In mountaineering in the United States, a thirteener is a mountain that exceeds above mean sea level, similar to the more familiar " fourteeners," which exceed . In most instances, "thirteeners" refers only to those peaks between 13,000 and 13,999 feet in elevation.
The importance of thirteeners is greatest in Colorado, which has the majority of such peaks in North America with over 600 of them. Despite the large number of peaks, a few peak baggers have successfully managed to climb all of Colorado's thirteeners. Thirteeners are also significant in states whose highpoints fall between 13,000 and 13,999 feet. Regarding whether or not peaks in excess of 13,999 feet should be considered as "thirteeners", this article will count them as such for statistical purposes, but concentrate its focus on those peaks less than 14,000 feet since the higher peaks are already covered in the fourteeners list.
Not all summits over 13,000 feet qualify as thirteeners, but only those summits that mountaineers consider to be independent. Objective standards for independence include topographic prominence and isolation (distance from a higher summit), or a combination. However thirteener lists do not always consistently use such objective rules. A rule commonly used by mountaineers in the contiguous United States is that a peak must have at least of prominence to qualify. According to the Mountaineering Club of Alaska, it is standard in Alaska to use a prominence rule rather than a 300 foot rule. These are the standards applied for the lists below.
Usage examples of "thirteener".
She had played the piano with facility, and as the Galls had been Baptists before Mr Gall and his wife took up with the Thirteeners, Ellen had found herself organist and leader of the choir at the smallest and least important of Salterton's Baptist churches.
He disliked the untidy beliefs of the Thirteeners, as they were often called.
Thirty-odd years later, in two or three hundred cities in the USA and Canada, a few thousand Thirteeners continued his mission.
It had started badly, for the earliest guests to arrive were twelve young Thirteeners, the others in the sept of thirteen with which Monica, at puberty, had been received into the Beamis flock.
But vitality did not seem to be a characteristic of young Thirteeners, and they were quiet, almost furtive, in their approach to merry-making.
But the young Thirteeners were leavened after ten minutes by the arrival of Chuck Proby, who had a very worldly air, and then by Mrs Gall's favourites, Alex Graham and Kevin Boyle.
They were not Thirteeners, but they were pleasantly solemn about religion, and occasionally ventured philosophical reflections to the effect that there were a lot of things in the Universe that we didn't understand yet, and that it stood to reason that there was Something at the back of the wonderful world which we saw all around us.
He was a man of professional tact, and he knew that the Thirteeners belonged in that category of religion which they themselves called "the moderate-stricts".
Even the young Thirteeners loosened up, and sniggered and neighed their delight.
When the Quartet had finished, a few callow Thirteeners thought to applaud, but Gus stilled this unseemliness with a quick gesture.
The young Thirteeners, considering their general lack of vitality, ate astonishingly.
She would never forget her family, of course, and she would certainly never be a loose-liver, as some internationally-known divas had so reprehensibly been, but she would no longer be bound by the chains of the Thirteeners or the social habits of Salterton.
The Thirteeners, and everybody else with whom she had ever been intimately acquainted, thought very poorly of nakedness.
But, miraculously, at this moment when she should have stood in awe of her mother, and Pastor Beamis and the whole moral code of the Thirteeners, she felt, on the contrary, free of them, above and beyond them as though reunited with something which they sought to deny her.
She had outgrown the Thirteeners and in one or two daring moments had thought of herself as finished with religion.