Mountain Project – Rock Climbing Guides: Routes, Photos and Forum
mountainproject.com
mountainproject.com
https://www.climbing.com/news/mountain-project-openbeta-and-...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/free-climbing-rock-cli...
>The original use of the term Beta in climbing is generally attributed to the late climber Jack Mileski. "Beta" was short for Betamax, a reference to an old videotape format largely replaced by the VHS format.[3] According to some sources Mileski would record himself on tape while completing routes and then share these tapes with friends. According to other sources, it was actually a play on words, as Mileski would often ask, "you want the beta, Max?"
Quick explanation for those not familiar: at an extremely simplified high level, MTG tournaments are a rock-paper-scissors game (with many more options). To some extent, part of the ability to play a tournament well is external to your ability to play MTG, and consists of your ability to predict the distribution of rocks/papers/scissors/etc in the field of players, and picking the appropriate countermeasure.
Hello everyone, I’m Viet Nguyen, OpenBeta’s founder and project lead.
I got hooked on climbing 11 years ago, and around the same time, I began a new dev job in the enterprise open source industry. Inspired by OpenStreetMap, I created OpenBeta as a platform for climbers to share climbing information under a fair and open license (climbing data: CC0, source code: MIT & GPLv3).
*One clarification:*
As an all-volunteer and nonprofit tech project, OpenBeta mission is about empowering the community with the data about rock climbing routes in human friendly and machine-readable format. It’s never about building digital guides and competing with guidebook authors. Everyone is welcome to incorporate our datasets & tools in their commercial projects.
Besides climbing, many of us are hackers and data nerds. All we wanted is to be able to access and tinker with the community-generated climbing data to make maps of climbing walls, study Python Pandas and recommendation engines, etc. Open access to climbing data doesn’t have to be about the physical aspects of climbing.
If I may leave 1 link, I’d like call your attention to our First Ascenionists data cleanup project.
https://github.com/OpenBeta/fa-cleanup
I’m looking for a project lead to help us out with the initiative.
Best,
Viet Nguyen
Current a lot of people in the climbing community are unhappy that the user submitted data is not available to use in other applications. As a result there is large effort in my local community to keep climbing areas from being added to the site.
As mentioned above Open Beta is a better and more honest alternative since it’s operating under a CC license. Mountain Project along with what has become Outside Magazine are two the most controversial outdoor apps in use. They are largely thought to increase crowding and other conflicts that come with managing limited resources. Mountain Project in particular is a good example of how to screw over a niche community for personal profit. At least someone in silicone valley got rich, right?
https://www.outsideonline.com/business-journal/brands/outsid...
I will say that the idea that route info should be freely available is not rooted in history of the climbing community. For many decades the primary way to get info (aside from asking around) was to buy guidebooks that other climbers researched and published. Making money off route info has a long tradition.
And the core tradition of climbing competence is to just show up and climb what you see. This is why flash and onsight climbs are highly regarded even on sport routes with permanent draws. Free access to route beta is not essential for climbing.
I certainly don’t object to Open Beta but I think some of the complaints about MP are a bit overwrought.
Viet Nguyen, OpenBeta's founder here.
As mentioned in my post above, besides climbing, many of us are hackers and data nerds. All we wanted is to be able to access and tinker with the community-generated climbing data to make maps of climbing walls, study Python Pandas and recommendation engines, etc.
Open access to climbing data doesn’t have to be about the physical aspects of climbing, for the same reason open source enthusiasts wanting to have access to the source code. It doesn't mean we're not supporting commercial derivative of a project.
There was rac.climbing on usenet in the long long ago and some of the users have moved from site to site and are till around.
rockclimbing.com was pretty popular at one point but got bought by a publishing company who initially wanted to invest in its growth but quickly put it on life support.
Mountain project started as colorado specific but quickly expanded...with a suspicious amount of overlap with the rockclimbing.com route data base. They expanded into skiing and mountainbiking etc. A few years ago they sold to rei who ran them as a public service for a while. During the 2020 economic worries REI sold them to onx maps, a montana based company that got its start doing land ownership maps for hunters before expanding into more sports.
Some of their competitors on the mountain bike side sold to outside magazine at the same time along with gaia gps. Outside was clearly gearing up for an IPO but now has laid a bunch of people off.
There have been a bunch of other regional or international sites (8a.nu, cascadeclimbers.com, ukclimbing, turns-all-year, telemark talk). A lot of these regional discussion forums have been replaced by facebook groups now which aren't nearly as good for like finding all the old trip reports for a particular route you want to do.
One interesting aside was the supertopo forums which started as a Yosemite specific forum associated with a guidebook company it attracted a ton of older climbers and turned into an add money maker for its creator. They eventually pivoted it to gear reviews/affiliate links and became outdoorgearlab before dropping the forum due to threats of copywrite lawsuit as people kept posting scans of old photos, magazine articles etc in an effort to preserve climbing history.
This explains why, after a decade since using or thinking about the site, I have been seeing it pop up regularly over the last few months. New owners = new marketing campaign.
At this point the comments on routes are the only thing I find value in. When you figure out what you want to climb, browsing through two decades of comments can be useful for figuring out things like how to approach it, what to pay attention to, etc.
I now use a combination of the RockFax app and printed guidebooks. The latter are generally a better experience but comments on the app sometimes come with up-to-date info that helps (a foothold that cracked and raised the grade, a rusty bolt, whatever).
They're fascinating, for a good utilitarian example check out The Dixie Caggers Atlas by Chris Watford. For pure art Southern Nevada Bouldering is just beautiful. I'm sure others may have some good recommendations.
MP is nice, but lacking. Hard to complain when it's free and it's user provided data.
One thing maybe more relevant for HN there is a new company doing 3d scans of sport crags.
It looks really really cool. But I only boulder - would still be amazing to have.
Way more helpful than user submitted photos and directions which are only half correct, and missing 70%
MP also suffers from the most active climbers mot wanting to share their favorite place.
This sport becoming too popular is a legitimate problem in many spaces - indoor and out.
Guidebooks are still mostly a 1 person, small publisher thing. Which I love.
Jamie Emerson is one of the fathers of CO climbing and is releasing 2 new books. MT Evans is out. I can't wait for RMNP.
This is a hard space to scale as a free service. because like a lot of online things only like the top .1% are providing the bulk of the knowledge and content.
History and stewardship are big problems too.
Blasting music in the Park for instance. And then arguing flame wars on Insta between a teen and Jamie :)
Access is constantly threatened and it takes outreach and relationships with land managers to keep open. Saving Little Cotton Wood is a big one that looks like they're going to literally be steam rolled and blasted apart.
Though some of these 'old guys' used to stash pads themselves lol. Can complain about ethics but climbing has had a rebellious, anti-establishment streak. Losing the nicheness and seriousness of climbing is hard for me (gyms are filled with once in a while happy hour climbers and man-splanning dates)
It would be awesome if RockGarden got some corporate backing or funding to expand. Only a few companies (red bull comes to mind. Yeti too.) that are willing to spend without an obvious direct ROI.
Make DIY scanning rigs & send to paid locals across the world.
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Background: I'm a fairly serious climber, mostly gym rat trying to get outside as I can't keep up with the kids anymore!
Also because the route info is user-generated, I have found little niche areas no one would have ever bothered including in a printed guidebook, like a few boulders under a highway, or a couple sport climbs on an island.