Which California city has the best Mountain views?

Well, it’s certainly not San Jose or San Francisco – those have only C- and D-tier Mountain Views, several rungs below the S- and A-tier mountainscapes of Pasadena and Palm Springs or Weed up near the Oregon border. At least so says this new visualization of “California Cities by Impressiveness of Mountain Backdrop,” which applies hard science to a pastime Californians know and love – gazing lovingly into the distance at mountaintops. (You’ll find the tiered city ranking and a letter grade explainer at the bottom.)

The visualization is the work of Bay Area native Kai Xu, a student-researcher at Yale University, who’s studying new ways to measure mountains on Earth, other planets and asteroids. He’s also the creator of PeakJut.com, a website that quantitatively ranks mountains by their awesomeness. Let’s just say, the guy likes mountains.

“I’m very lucky to have grown up in California, a state with beautiful natural scenery,” Xu says. “I’m an avid hiker, but an armchair mountaineer. My favorite mountain in the Bay Area is Mount Day (in Santa Clara County). Its local rise is more similar to that of mountains in Big Sur and Tahoe than it is to other mountains in the Bay. Yet few people know about it.”

To make his ranking, Xu developed a new concept called “rut.” There’s a lot of math involved, but basically rut describes how sharply and impressively a city’s surroundings rise above the city itself.

“Impressiveness is determined by both how high the surrounding mountains rise above a location, and the angle at which the surrounding mountains rise,” he says. (It’s spelled out  in detail in his research paper, “Datumless Topography: A Universally Consistent Way to Quantify Relief.”)

Xu’s calculations put most of the Bay Area’s mountain views in the “meh” range. It’s not until you get out to the sparsely populated areas of Yosemite Valley and Big Sur that you find truly impressive mountainscapes. By contrast, urban areas around Los Angeles – and really just SoCal in general – are soaking in Valhalla-class scenery.

“Rut values in SoCal can get very high because the mountains in the Transverse Ranges rise rapidly to heights of over 10,000 feet from low-lying areas close to sea level, where many major cities are conveniently located,” he says. “Within California, even though rises of a similar magnitude can be found in and around the Sierra and Mount Shasta, SoCal is unique in its combination of major cities with dramatic mountain backdrops.”

Now that Xu has released this information into the world, what should people do with it? On Reddit where he posted his visualization, one person has a savvy idea: “Useful for pricing residential real estate. A good view is a plus.”

Using his rut calculations, Xu has also put together a tiered ranking of cities. It’s just for fun, and the cutoffs are rather arbitrary, he says, so “please don’t feel too sad if your city didn’t get into the tier you hoped for.” Here it is:

California cities ranked by impressiveness of their mountain views (by Kai Xu)

S tier – rut above 500 meters – world-class mountain scenery; would visit for mountain views alone:

•  Palm Springs (749 m), Yosemite Valley (712 m), Weed (636 m), Lone Pine (520 m)

A tier – rut between 200 and 500 meters – impressive, but probably wouldn’t visit for mountain views alone:

•  Rancho Cucamonga (404 m), Big Sur (336 m), San Bernardino (234 m), Pasadena (213 m), Yreka (211 m)

B tier – rut between 100 and 200 meters – nearby mountains or distant big mountains:

•  South Lake Tahoe (172 m), Mammoth Lakes (169 m), Redding (128 m), Los Angeles (117 m), Bakersfield (105 m), Fresno (101 m)

C tier – rut between 25 and 100 meters – nearby big hills/small mountains or distant mountains or very distant big mountains:

•  Long Beach (86 m), San Jose (66 m), Eureka (60 m), San Diego (48 m), Sacramento (30 m)

D tier – rut between 10 and 25 meters – nearby hills or distant big hills/small mountains or very distant mountains:

•  Paso Robles (22 m), San Francisco (22 m), Stockton (22 m), Daly City (21 m), Davis (15 m)

F tier – rut between 0 and 10 meters – flat tier; doesn’t exist in California, as hills or mountains are visible anywhere in the state:

•  New York City, Kansas City, Miami and most of the eastern half of the U.S.