mountain database of elevation and distance from saddle (as a proxy for gradient) I'm interested in doing data visualization projects about mountains.  

We have data from http://www.peaklist.org/ultras.html complied by Aaron Maizlish (Who we tried to contact but not sure of his contact details these days?)

The data he was curating contains name, elevation, co-ordinates and Key Saddle.  The key bit of data we're after is the distance from elevation to either key saddle  or sea level to get a very rough outline of shape.

I'm not sure if such data exists or we would have to derive it from some topography database?  Would anyone have any ideas on how we might go about getting said data or access to free topographic data that we may be able to somehow match in?

I've attached the below artwork that inspired this project - while we wouldn't necessarily look to get all the shape types here, it would be nice to have some different natural shapes.

The idea being somewhere in between pure Art &amp; pure geography 

Thanks, Damian.
After investigating a number of the options and data outlined I thought the STRM was the best bet.  I was unable to find a place where I could download the data in a file that I could read into some software I'm familiar with the DEM file was in a binary format which I struggled with to ready into R so I started to work with the JPGs to read these in as raster image in R.  I faced a couple of roadblocks around how to query a bringing that back to latitudes.

Eventually I came across the R Package: rgbif: Interface to the Global 'Biodiversity' Information Facility API
With this package you can query a specific lat &amp; long and return the elevation in meters! also as a bonus you can get some biodiversity information.    It connects to the geonames database other software that has clients to connect to the data can be found here

#Here is some R code for the POC:
#install.packages("rgbif")
library(rgbif)


#You need to sign up to your own Geonames account you get 1000 queries per hour for free max 30k per day
user &lt;- Sys.getenv("GEONAMES_USER")

#I take 15 points of latitude either side of the peak at 0.005 intervals
Latitude &lt;-c(-17.3991666666667,-17.4041666666667,-17.4091666666667,-17.4141666666667,-17.4191666666667,-17.4241666666667,-17.4291666666667,-17.4341666666667,-17.4391666666667,-17.4441666666667,-17.4491666666667,-17.4541666666667,-17.4591666666667,-17.4641666666667,-17.4691666666667,-17.3941666666667,-17.3891666666667,-17.3841666666667,-17.3791666666667,-17.3741666666667,-17.3691666666667,-17.3641666666667,-17.3591666666667,-17.3541666666667,-17.3491666666667,-17.3441666666667,-17.3391666666667,-17.3341666666667,-17.3291666666667)
Longitude &lt;-c(145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333,145.818333333333)

#Use the elevation function to return the elevations
Bartle &lt;- elevation(latitude=Latitude, longitude=Longitude, username = user)

#Order my co-ordinates for the plot
Bartle &lt;- Bartle[order(Bartle$latitude),]
plot(x=Bartle$latitude, y=Bartle$elevation_geonames, main = "BARTLE FRERE, SOUTH PEAK")
lines(x=Bartle$latitude, y=Bartle$elevation_geonames) 
polygon(cbind(c(min(Bartle$latitude), Bartle$latitude, max(Bartle$latitude)), c(min(Bartle$elevation_geonames), Bartle$elevation_geonames, min(Bartle$elevation_geonames))), col="#00CC66") 




So I hope to work on this over the next couple of weeks and hope to update further - but here is the start just localised to Australia 



Thanks Again Camilo!