19 ms·

Climbing Guide as a Shared Infrastructure

40 points by zbycz 1mo ago

siren2026 1mo ago
What a cool idea. Until now all of that information has been kept being gatekeeped applications (mountainproject, theCrag, 8a.nu, ...) But as usual the real issue will be to get people to use it. The network effect is everything
- forgetfreeman 1mo ago
  On the subject of gatekeeping in the climbing community there's also the minor issue of getting threatened with violence by locals when trying to document routes.
  - jwjohnson314 1mo ago
    Really? In 30 years of climbing I’ve never run into territorial locals. Surfing, on the other hand, can be pretty hostile.
    - mauvehaus 1mo ago
      There's a crag in MA where the access is specifically conditioned on the crag not having a guidebook or the routes being recorded in an online database. I don't know of any violence occurring over any of this, but I know there have been access issues and closures in the past.
    - forgetfreeman 1mo ago
      Grandmother Mountain boulders in western NC, me and a buddy had to cut a climbing trip short after getting into some shit with a four pack of the locals over me taking photos of some of the problems there. Nobody got hurt but it was every bit as hostile as any encounter with the surfing locals I'd ever had in the Outer Banks. Vedauwoo Wy, a local friend made me leave my camera at his place and basically warned me not to talk to or even make eye contact with any of the locals at some of the back country crags we were going to. No encounter there but the stories I've heard told (and believe) are something else. Same for Wild Iris near Lander.
      - jwjohnson314 1mo ago
        Out of curiosity, how long ago were those incidents? Seems crazy for such well-known areas with guidebooks and extensive documentation on mountain project.
        forgetfreeman 28d ago
        The most recent was ~15 years ago, but in my experience some shit never changes. Surfers are still the same belligerent assholes on their favorite local breaks they where 30 years ago so I doubt much has changed in these places either.
- eamag 1mo ago
  If you could add all known routes to the map in the beginning, people would've used it. But OSM doesn't allow automatic contributions...
- toasty228 1mo ago
  At least the physical gatekeeping will protect us from most of the parasites that invaded hiking paths and treat nature as a checkbox on their chatgpt generated travel list (or worse, a trash)
spuz 1mo ago
This article seems to be an AI warping of this original article which contains a lot more useful details and screenshots of what the application looks like: https://community.openclimbing.org/d/24-v200-a-big-step-forward https://community.openclimbing.org/d/24-v200-a-big-step-forw...
- nathancahill 1mo ago
  Vote to update the link to this.
- zbycz 1mo ago
  Hi, i am one of the authors. Here is our submission of the official release post on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255586 Reposting what @jvaclavik wrote: > Hey HN,jvaclavik here from OpenClimbing team! > We are thrilled to release version 2.0 of our fully opensource/opendata climbing guide. > Based on OpenStreetMap for map-data and Wikimedia Commons for images, we created a (hopefully) user-friendly app which completely uses these open databases, thus contributing data back to commons. > We designed a simple and powerful notation for drawing climbing routes directly over the Wikimedia pictures: - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:wikimedia_commons:path https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:wikimedia_commons:pa... > Check out the release article for a ton of new features, or go directly to the web at https://openclimbing.org https://openclimbing.org > We would love to hear feedback from fellow hackers and open-data enthusisats.
specproc 1mo ago
Discovered bouldering in my forties, after neglecting my body for years. Fantastic sport, I'm stronger, fitter, and more flexible than I've ever been. It's fun, social, relatively cheap, and way less of a grind than the gym.
- kakacik 1mo ago
  Bouldering/climbing are exquisite sports, I love them most from all my non-winter activities (and then there are indoor walls/bouldering places), but it doesn't completely replace gym. Or it does but only in sense 'I am doing physical activity'. If I rely only on climbing (did that experiment few times), many of my muscles visibly get smaller, and so does strength/stamina accordingly. Climbing doesn't develop whole body evenly, heck fanatics who do only this have often hunched (albeit very muscular) backs with corresponding long term issues, and popeye sailor like hands with overdeveloped forearms, compared to often lacking biceps/triceps area. In gym its easy to focus on specific places you want to develop, plus compound exercises like squats or deadlifts involve muscles and stabilizers that no climbing session can. I completement each with the other, and add tons of other sports like hiking, swimming, ski / ski touring in winter. Best for body and mind, true passions rather than just activities or hobbies. Also, generally recommending multiple sports since one may end up with injury or degradation that makes one sport impossible, its important to keep up with another. With climbing, ie finger joints in later age can get ie osteoarthritis and thats it basically. Old folks you see climbing around are often lucky genetic winners without even realizing that.
  - brailsafe 1mo ago
    I do get the impression from people who don't have multiple physical/outdoor pursuits that they perceive the landscape of being fit to be either going to the gym and being regimented, or not going to the gym, and everything else is just leisure, and these people tend to not even walk much (It's just an impression, not a broad generalization; I'm not looking down on these people). For people (or at least me) who do have multiple things going on, outdoor interests, climbing etc, the gym is like... my rest day almost. It's the place I go to supplement everything else, to socialize if I'm lucky, and hit a few muscles that only get uneven infrequent abuse while doing all of my other stuff. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise how volatile my career's been been, because the impression I get is that those who have the aforementioned perception pretty much go to work, imagine going to the gym one day, hate the notion of it, and then simply don't, but also don't do anything else physically healthy instead. If you set out to be physically engaged nearly every day, and you make a point of living near the gym, then it becomes the easy option.
Poacher5 1mo ago
It's an interesting idea but these things have never taken off in the past. I'm speaking from a UK-centric position here, but there's a pretty strong ethos that guidebook creators should get paid for the work that they do and there's also a responsibility attached to a professional guidebook that doesn't exist on a crowdsourced platform. UKC can only take you so far, and 25 quid for a copy of whatever SMC book you need is hardly onerous. Any donut can add "Shit Chosspile E8 6C **" to the UKC database but if it's in the SMC book it's probably worth having a look at.
- zipy124 1mo ago
  You mean to say you don't want to climb such classics as "Twatfield Thunderminge" (https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crags/brimham_rocks-538/twatfield_thunderminge-503520 https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crags/brimham_rocks-538/t...). /s
nathancahill 1mo ago
I maintain a country's climbing guidebook. It's a royal pain to keep all the different platforms (theCrag, Mountain Project, 8a.nu, 27 Crags, etc) all in sync. Each one has a different format, each info is slightly different, each one has it's own way of drawing the routes on photos. I welcome any effort to have an open standard.

40 points by zbycz 1mo ago

siren2026 1mo ago

What a cool idea. Until now all of that information has been kept being gatekeeped applications (mountainproject, theCrag, 8a.nu, ...) But as usual the real issue will be to get people to use it. The network effect is everything

forgetfreeman 1mo ago
On the subject of gatekeeping in the climbing community there's also the minor issue of getting threatened with violence by locals when trying to document routes.
- jwjohnson314 1mo ago
  Really? In 30 years of climbing I’ve never run into territorial locals. Surfing, on the other hand, can be pretty hostile.
  - mauvehaus 1mo ago
    There's a crag in MA where the access is specifically conditioned on the crag not having a guidebook or the routes being recorded in an online database. I don't know of any violence occurring over any of this, but I know there have been access issues and closures in the past.
  - forgetfreeman 1mo ago
    Grandmother Mountain boulders in western NC, me and a buddy had to cut a climbing trip short after getting into some shit with a four pack of the locals over me taking photos of some of the problems there. Nobody got hurt but it was every bit as hostile as any encounter with the surfing locals I'd ever had in the Outer Banks. Vedauwoo Wy, a local friend made me leave my camera at his place and basically warned me not to talk to or even make eye contact with any of the locals at some of the back country crags we were going to. No encounter there but the stories I've heard told (and believe) are something else. Same for Wild Iris near Lander.
    - jwjohnson314 1mo ago
      Out of curiosity, how long ago were those incidents? Seems crazy for such well-known areas with guidebooks and extensive documentation on mountain project.
      - forgetfreeman 28d ago
        The most recent was ~15 years ago, but in my experience some shit never changes. Surfers are still the same belligerent assholes on their favorite local breaks they where 30 years ago so I doubt much has changed in these places either.
eamag 1mo ago
If you could add all known routes to the map in the beginning, people would've used it. But OSM doesn't allow automatic contributions...
toasty228 1mo ago
At least the physical gatekeeping will protect us from most of the parasites that invaded hiking paths and treat nature as a checkbox on their chatgpt generated travel list (or worse, a trash)

spuz 1mo ago

This article seems to be an AI warping of this original article which contains a lot more useful details and screenshots of what the application looks like: https://community.openclimbing.org/d/24-v200-a-big-step-forward https://community.openclimbing.org/d/24-v200-a-big-step-forw...

nathancahill 1mo ago
Vote to update the link to this.
zbycz 1mo ago
Hi, i am one of the authors. Here is our submission of the official release post on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255586 Reposting what @jvaclavik wrote: > Hey HN,jvaclavik here from OpenClimbing team! > We are thrilled to release version 2.0 of our fully opensource/opendata climbing guide. > Based on OpenStreetMap for map-data and Wikimedia Commons for images, we created a (hopefully) user-friendly app which completely uses these open databases, thus contributing data back to commons. > We designed a simple and powerful notation for drawing climbing routes directly over the Wikimedia pictures: - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:wikimedia_commons:path https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:wikimedia_commons:pa... > Check out the release article for a ton of new features, or go directly to the web at https://openclimbing.org https://openclimbing.org > We would love to hear feedback from fellow hackers and open-data enthusisats.

specproc 1mo ago

Discovered bouldering in my forties, after neglecting my body for years. Fantastic sport, I'm stronger, fitter, and more flexible than I've ever been. It's fun, social, relatively cheap, and way less of a grind than the gym.

kakacik 1mo ago
Bouldering/climbing are exquisite sports, I love them most from all my non-winter activities (and then there are indoor walls/bouldering places), but it doesn't completely replace gym. Or it does but only in sense 'I am doing physical activity'. If I rely only on climbing (did that experiment few times), many of my muscles visibly get smaller, and so does strength/stamina accordingly. Climbing doesn't develop whole body evenly, heck fanatics who do only this have often hunched (albeit very muscular) backs with corresponding long term issues, and popeye sailor like hands with overdeveloped forearms, compared to often lacking biceps/triceps area. In gym its easy to focus on specific places you want to develop, plus compound exercises like squats or deadlifts involve muscles and stabilizers that no climbing session can. I completement each with the other, and add tons of other sports like hiking, swimming, ski / ski touring in winter. Best for body and mind, true passions rather than just activities or hobbies. Also, generally recommending multiple sports since one may end up with injury or degradation that makes one sport impossible, its important to keep up with another. With climbing, ie finger joints in later age can get ie osteoarthritis and thats it basically. Old folks you see climbing around are often lucky genetic winners without even realizing that.
- brailsafe 1mo ago
  I do get the impression from people who don't have multiple physical/outdoor pursuits that they perceive the landscape of being fit to be either going to the gym and being regimented, or not going to the gym, and everything else is just leisure, and these people tend to not even walk much (It's just an impression, not a broad generalization; I'm not looking down on these people). For people (or at least me) who do have multiple things going on, outdoor interests, climbing etc, the gym is like... my rest day almost. It's the place I go to supplement everything else, to socialize if I'm lucky, and hit a few muscles that only get uneven infrequent abuse while doing all of my other stuff. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise how volatile my career's been been, because the impression I get is that those who have the aforementioned perception pretty much go to work, imagine going to the gym one day, hate the notion of it, and then simply don't, but also don't do anything else physically healthy instead. If you set out to be physically engaged nearly every day, and you make a point of living near the gym, then it becomes the easy option.

Poacher5 1mo ago

It's an interesting idea but these things have never taken off in the past. I'm speaking from a UK-centric position here, but there's a pretty strong ethos that guidebook creators should get paid for the work that they do and there's also a responsibility attached to a professional guidebook that doesn't exist on a crowdsourced platform. UKC can only take you so far, and 25 quid for a copy of whatever SMC book you need is hardly onerous. Any donut can add "Shit Chosspile E8 6C **" to the UKC database but if it's in the SMC book it's probably worth having a look at.

zipy124 1mo ago
You mean to say you don't want to climb such classics as "Twatfield Thunderminge" (https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crags/brimham_rocks-538/twatfield_thunderminge-503520 https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crags/brimham_rocks-538/t...). /s

nathancahill 1mo ago

I maintain a country's climbing guidebook. It's a royal pain to keep all the different platforms (theCrag, Mountain Project, 8a.nu, 27 Crags, etc) all in sync. Each one has a different format, each info is slightly different, each one has it's own way of drawing the routes on photos. I welcome any effort to have an open standard.