In January ‘26, a few of us OpenBeta contributors (and our dogs!) made it out to Red Rock Canyon to climb, meet in person and talk about our 2026 goals for OpenBeta. Clinton, Emily and Viet made it down to Red Rocks for a gloriously sunny weekend, coming from Salt Lake, Seattle and Portland to get to know each other.

On Saturday, Clinton and Viet climbed together at Cactus Massacre Wall inside the Red Rocks Conservation Area. On Sunday, Emily joined up at Kraft to boulder near the iconic Cube Boulder. We got to know each other, introduced the dogs, and climbed the easier climbs behind the Cube instead of braving the taller, proud Cube boulder. We also explored some less traveled boulders in the nearby area and had a good time on the Tomahawk Boulder.

OpenBeta’s recent improvements were a topic of discussion, since a lot of progress has been made or is in the works on the climb catalog:

• OpenBeta’s mobile app for Android phones brought in both users and site contributors

• Clinton and Nathan presented OpenBeta at the State of the Map conference in Boston

• Steph Abegg granted permission to OpenBeta to use her high-quality topos on the site. Her website is practically bursting with beta for hundreds of climbs around western North America. Thank you Steph Abegg!

• OpenBeta partnered with Pebble Climbing to boost their independently developed app

• An OpenBeta app for iOS is in the works, in addition to improvements to the existing Android app - stay tuned!

Our crew enjoyed meeting up in Red Rocks again and are looking forward to getting together again soon!

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Thanks for reading! Want to help out with mobile app development or otherwise contribute to OpenBeta? Contact us at hello@openbeta.io or join our Discord to get started.

Photo Gallery

• If you’re in Boston this weekend, come say hello to OpenBeta volunteers Clinton Lunn, Nathan Musoke, and Minh Nguyen at State of the Map US conference.
  Come support their talk on Friday, June 20 at 4:30pm.

• Our Android mobile app is live!
  Search OpenBeta on the Google Play Store and take it for a spin.

• 🚨 iOS help needed!
  We’re desperately looking for an iOS developer to help us set up a build pipeline for the iPhone version. Kotlin experience is a plus but not required. Please reply to this email if you can lend a hand.

• Spotlight: climb search in Pebble app
  Our climb search API service now powers the search tool in the Pebble Climbing app.

• Throwback: OpenBeta Red Rock Weekend 2024
  Relive the stoke 👉 Read the trip report.

OpenBeta is a nonprofit project built and run by climbers like you. Support our mission by making a financial contribution today. Donate now →

* Donations are tax-deductible where applicable by law.

This past October, OpenBeta volunteers gathered for our second OpenBeta & Friends weekend in the iconic Red Rock Canyon, just outside Las Vegas. With its world-class climbing and stunning desert landscapes, Red Rock was the perfect backdrop for a weekend of adventure, laughter, and community building.

No formal agenda — just camping and climbing with the people we usually only know from GitHub issues and Discord threads. At the belay and on the long approaches to the walls, the conversation kept coming back to OpenBeta—new features we’d love to build and how to keep growing the community around the project.

One hot topic: OSMAnd, an open source mobile app built on OpenStreetMap data, is incredibly handy for recording GPS tracks, which helps us map approaches to climbing walls and improve access data for everyone.

Thanks to everyone who came out — we can't wait for the next one!

Our multipitch ticklist

• Twitx Cradle and Stone

• The Walker Spur

• Solar Slab

• Black Magic

• Cragging sessions at Yin & Yang, Classic Rock, Cactus Massacre, Straight Shooter and more.

Photo Gallery

Where do you live and climb?

I live in Mesa, Arizona. Arizona has tons of great climbing, but Jack's Canyon is probably my favorite spot. It has loads of great sport climbing on super solid limestone, but is remote enough that there aren't large crowds. Another place I love is Cochise Stronghold, known for it's sparsely-bolted slab multi-pitch climbs. If you are down for the approach and the runout it offers some great adventure climbing!

Besides climbing, what are you passionate about?

In addition to being a climber, I'm also a parent of 3 kids! As you can imagine, this can be time consuming, but whenever possible my wife and I try to get outside with our kids and climb together. I'm super excited for them to grow up climbing with us and I hope they enjoy the sport as much as we do!

I enjoy any outdoor activities like hiking or camping, but coffee brewing and photography are also side hobbies of mine!

What do you do for work, why did you choose that path?

I'm a software engineer working at Block and I've been doing software engineering professionally for around 8 years. I got into programming when I was about 12 years old because I was really into Minecraft at the time and wanted to make mods for it.

How did you learn about OpenBeta?

I initially wanted to create a better mobile app for Mountain Project, but I discovered that their API is not publicly available. While researching alternatives, I came across an article detailing the challenges OpenBeta is facing regarding Mountain Project’s copyright claims. This sparked my interest in OpenBeta's mission!

I build software for a living so the mobile client for Mountain Project has always been frustrating to me. It is not a user friendly experience at all and the offline support is not great. I initially wanted to build something better for climbers to use. Being a software engineer I also recognize the importance of open source software and data so that also drew me to OpenBeta.

What is your role at OpenBeta?

I am developing the OpenBeta mobile app. I want to support editing of areas and climbs on mobile devices to make it easier for climbers to contribute and to truly build a comprehensive catalog of climbing data!

How did you get into climbing?

I lived in Incline Village on Lake Tahoe for a year. I lived a few minutes away from a climbing gym and decided one day to give it a try. I was instantly hooked and it wasn't long until I wanted to climb outdoors.

What is your favorite type of climbing?

I enjoy all types of climbing, but easy trad multi-pitch is my favorite. It's always fun to challenge yourself on hard single pitch, but something about spending a few hours on an easy wall is just very relaxing to me.

Sending Ewephoria in Cochise Stronghold was pretty memorable to me. I was new to multi-pitch climbing and slab is a weakness of mine so I felt very accomplished after sending what was a scary route to me at the time!

What do you love about the climbing community? What about the climbing community bothers you?

I love how friendly most climbers are and how everyone is willing to help out and teach each other! One thing that can be frustrating is the grade gatekeeping and arguing that you see in the comments on some climbs. Who cares if this is crag is easier than your local crag? Just climb and have fun!

What is one lesson you’ve learned from your journey so far?

Before I got into climbing, I always thought climbing was an extreme sport with a high barrier to entry. I realized that climbing is much more accessible than I thought! There are climbs for all skill and strength levels.

Thanks for reading! Want to help out with mobile app development or otherwise contribute to OpenBeta? Contact us at mobile@mail.openbeta.io or join our Discord to get started.

To the climbing community:

The OpenBeta team and I recently received valuable feedback from community members who are upset that their contributions to the MountainProject website have appeared on the OpenBeta website without permission and attribution.  We take community feedback seriously and use this as an opportunity to update and improve our approach.

As a climber from Portland, Oregon, I originally started OpenBeta as an educational project, using rock climbing data as a foundation for coding tutorials on web development and data science. 

In 2021, after onXmaps acquired MountainProject, their lawyers sent OpenBeta a cease-and-desist letter, claiming ownership of the user-generated content in the data files shared by OpenBeta, which temporarily shut the project down. Thanks to the support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), we were able to clarify that OpenBeta’s use of route information found on MountainProject is fair use due to the nature of the project being transformative, noncommercial, and primarily factual.

Most importantly, this experience sparked a much-needed discussion about the ownership and accessibility of climbing information in the digital space. I and several passionate volunteers started building a new version of OpenBeta with the vision that climbers should have stewardship over climbing data, with the freedom to share and reuse information openly.

However, in pursuing this mission, we also made mistakes — we failed to properly contact authors on MountainProject to communicate our intentions and obtain permission. We sincerely apologize to all of you whose written work has appeared on our website without permission or attribution.

We’re planning the following adjustments based on the feedback:

1. Remove descriptions that are not created by OpenBeta users.

2. Create a process for users to import their contributions from other websites.

We believe in the power of open information, but we also understand that transparency must be accompanied by accountability. We are dedicated to learning from this and ensuring that OpenBeta continues to be a project driven by and for the community.

As a grassroots organization driven by a shared passion for climbing, we invite all climbers to join us in shaping the future of open access to climbing data. The OpenBeta team and I hope to continue hearing from you as we implement these changes. Please reach out to me directly anytime at viet@openbeta.io.

Viet Nguyen
OpenBeta Project Lead

—
EFF Letter: https://www.eff.org/document/eff-letter-mountain-project-re-openbeta-redacted

March 15, 2024 is the cutoff date:

• This is the last day we can receive funds/financial contributions.

• Recurring donations will be paused on this day.

We are evaluating alternatives and will keep you updated in the upcoming days.

Work in progress

Our volunteers are actively working on two major features:

1. Bulk Climb Import: This feature enables users to bulk upload climbs into our database.

2. Topo Drawing: We’re building a free and open source topo editing tool.

What’s new on OpenBeta.io

Introducing a new and improved crag map available at openbeta.io/maps. Traditionally, hosting a large-scale map server has been prohibitively expensive. Thanks to recent innovations in the digital mapping space, we can now host our own map tiles at a significantly lower cost compared to commercial providers.

Volunteer Spotlight

A big thank you to Iacami Gevaerd from Brazil for his invaluable behind-the-scenes infrastructure improvement work (we'll get into the technical details in a separate future blog post). In short, our monthly bill for media hosting has now decreased to an average of $16, compared to the previous $50/month.

Have an idea or a suggestion to share? Join our Discord chat server.

Don’t miss our live tutorial session on OpenBeta Discord voice chat this coming Thursday 6/22 at 8AM Pacific time.

Topic: How to map climbing routes and crags on OpenStreetMap
Time: Thursday 6/22/2023 at 8am PST / 17:00 CET
Host: Nathan Musoke, OpenStreetMap & OpenBeta contributor

How to join: https://discord.gg/ptpnWWNkJx (Sign up for an account then go to General under Voice Channels)

Did you know?

OpenStreetMap, the world’s largest free and open-license geographic database, has been an inspiration for OpenBeta. You can find OpenStreetMap user-contributed geographic data in popular running and hiking apps and vehicle navigation systems.

Local Climbing Organizations (LCOs) play an indispensable role in maintaining, conserving, and promoting climbing areas. They work tirelessly to ensure that climbers have access to safe bolts and that climbers are acting sustainably in the areas they love to climb in. LCOs often collaborate with land managers, landowners, and other stakeholders to address a range of issues, including access, conservation, and education. Some of the key functions and benefits of LCOs include:

1. Access management: LCOs work to establish and maintain relationships with landowners, land managers, and other stakeholders to secure and maintain access to climbing areas. They may negotiate agreements, establish access trails, or create parking to minimize conflicts and ensure continued access for climbers.

2. Route maintenance and development: LCOs are responsible for maintaining the quality and safety of climbing routes. This can involve bolting, re-bolting, and anchor replacement, as well as cleaning and stabilizing loose rock.

3. Conservation and stewardship: Every climbing area has its own unique set of conservation concerns. LCOs ensure that climbers are aware of relevant issues and work to mitigate the impact of climbing on the environment.

4. Community building and education: LCOs often host events, workshops, and climbing festivals to bring the local climbing community together.

The work that LCOs do is critical for the longevity of outdoor climbing in any given area, so it makes sense that we try and work with LCOs and support their efforts on the ground in any way we can.

What are we planning?

To start with, we'd like to bring LCOs onto OpenBeta.io and increase their visibility to climbers browsing an area. LCOs will be able to link to their website and social media accounts, and climbers will be able to see which LCOs are active in a given area. We plan to allow LCOs to maintain their own entries so that they can keep information up to date. You can see our work so far on a page like this, where Boulder Climbing Community shows up as an LCO that is active in the area. A user can click straight through to the LCO's website from here.

In the future, LCOs will be able to list specific calls to action that will be reachable more quickly and uniformly on the OpenBeta platform.

This lays a good foundation to build on, and will hopefully allow us to build tools specifically for LCOs that will help them do their work more efficiently. The project is still evolving as we talk with more LCOs and find out what they want to see come out of this collaboration, and if you (yes, you) have any good ideas that you reckon should go in the pipeline, you can visit our GitHub or join us on Discord

Are you an LCO?

If you represent an LCO, we’d love to hear from you! Click below to fill out a quick form

Sign up as an LCO

LCO Stewardship initiative

We’re currently working on a Local Climbing Organization Stewardship initiative, listing LCOs on openbeta.io under the respective climbing areas. We hope to make it easy for climbers to learn more about their local climbing organizations and also to encourage everyone to get involved and support local crag care activities.

Kudos to Boulder Climbing Community, Portland Area Climbers Coalition, and Central Arizona Bolt Replacement Program for supporting this initiative.

We will be adding more organizations in the upcoming months. If you know a great local organization, please let us know (replying to this email) or provide the LCO information on this Google form.

In the news

• Listen to our interview on the Runout podcast. Viet sat down with Andrew Bisharat & Chris Kalous to discuss what the OpenBeta project is all about. It’s an honor to be in the open segment for their interview with the legendary Lynn Hill.

• Andrew Bisharat wrote on the Evening Send blog: Making route beta open source is an effort worth waging.

Community projects

Open climbing data & open source tools help accelerate innovation. What OpenBeta community members are building:

• A new Android & iOS climbing app built on OpenBeta data needs your naming suggestion.

• Jordan Laramie, a community member, created an open source Discord chat bot built on OpenBeta free climb search API service. Join the OpenBeta Discord server to test out the bot. See how to add the bot to your own server.

Keep the stoke alive

OpenBeta is an all-volunteer nonprofit run by climbers like you. Similar to a mini tech-startup, we rely on essential collaboration tools and cloud infrastructure to do our daily work and to keep the lights on. Currently, monthly donations are not enough to cover our expenses ($120 - 150/month). Ways you can help:

• Make a donation today.

• If you’re a business serving the climbing community, become a sponsor and put your brand in front of our growing community.

OpenBeta is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Your contribution is tax-deductible in the US, to the extent allowed by the law.

Guest post by Klaus and Michael from the community

Greetings climbers,

We are excited to announce a project from within our community, an iOS/Android app that will change the way climbers explore and contribute to crags. The app will not only make exploring crags easier, but it will also help climbers respect nature by providing information on sensitive habitats and promoting the use of public transport.

It will leverage the OpenBeta dataset and all contributions made in the app will flow back into the platform. Our focus is it to make contributing and discovery of climbing areas around the world as easy and fun as possible.

Become part of the journey and vote now:

Happy Climbing,

Klaus and Michael

You can add new climbs and modify existing data on our website openbeta.io.

When contributing to OpenBeta you help us build a community knowledge of climbing routes that are freely and openly available to all.

Many thanks to our volunteers and financial donors who help keep the project going.

How to start contributing

We created a special Test Area to help you familiarize with the editing tool. Feel free to add new crags and climbs under this areas.

Simply click on for the "Edit mode” switch to start editing. You’ll be asked to log in or create a new account if you’re new to the site.

Markdown Format

You can use markdown to make longer text fields such as climb and area description easier to read. Some good uses of markdown: marking text Bold for emphasis, making bullet lists, or linking to another website.

PRO TIPS:
- Press Enter key twice to create paragraph break.
- Switch Edit mode to off to preview your markdown.

Climb CSV Editor

When gathering feedback from climbers we learned that the ability to create and edit climbs in bulk is very important. With that in mind we built a special text editor that enables power users to create multiple climbs at once by entering one climb per line.

You can also rearrange the climb list (for left-to-right sorting order) by a copy-and-paste of the line to the desired position.

What is CSV?

CSV or comma-separate values (see wikipedia) is a simple way to edit a line of text as if it’s a spreadsheet. We use the vertical bar character | to separate one field from another.

As you can see in the screenshot at the moment we only support climb name in the CSV editor. Soon you’ll be able edit the climb grade (see Issue 663). For example:

Warm up problem #1 | V0

What’s Next?

The plan for 2023 is to build bridges with route developers/maintainers and local climbing organizations. We’ll be reaching out to folks to seek guidance on how to use our editing tool to best serve the climbing community.

Questions or comments? Feel free to drop us an email at info@openbeta.io or join us on Discord.

It’s okay to Spray!

You don’t have to be a coder to participate. Four steps you can help us smash bugs and improve the climbing route catalog (openbeta.io):

1. Sign in and upload at least 3 climbing photos.

2. Make sure to tag a climb.

3. MountainProject users: import your ticks! Learn more.

4. Submit an edit. Yes, you can change anything: add new areas, rename existing areas, write a description.

Report problems or suggest improvements on our GitHub issues.

We will restore the site to its original state at the end of the testing period (Dec 1 2022). We will do our best to preserve new additions and changes to climbing areas. Your account and photos will remain as is.

Go to openbeta.io

FAQs

1. Can I add new areas?

   Yes, please.

2. What if I delete something by accident?

   No problema. We will restore the site back to its original state at the end of the testing period (Dec 1).

3. Can I add new climbs and boulder problems? I don’t see a button for that.

   We’re working on it.

4. What will happen to my updates after the hackathon?

   We will do our best to preserve your contributions. Your accounts & photos will remain as is.

Still got a question? Email us at hello at openbeta.io or chat with our volunteers on Discord.

Climbers often keep To-do lists of climbs as a way to track progress and motivate ourselves. I want to share with you my list for OpenBeta (ranging from medium difficulty to V-hard kind of problem 😀) that I hope to achieve by the end of this year and early 2023.

The data set from MountainProject contributors has given us a great jump start. Thank you! As the climb catalog user base grows, I’d like to enlist your help to improve the data in the following key areas:

• Identify and tag major climbing areas a “destination”.

• Assign a 2 to 5-letter short code, similar to Airport code, to those destinations.

• Identify missing and inconsistent FA data.

• Add new countries and new crags.

In each section I’m going to describe the existing problems then my proposed solutions. Please share your feedback in the comments box below.

Area classification

Difficulty: V-Medium

We want to answer the question, “Where are all the major climbing areas in the US?”

Data Silos Problem

Currently, thousands of climbing areas in the climb database are organized under states and some arbitrary geographical regions similar to a File-and-folder structure. For example, Nevada is divided into three regions, Eastern, Western and Southern. In everyday conversation, however, those regions are not known or used by climbers. Instead, we’d refer to an area by its popular name: “I’m going to Red Rocks” or “Mount Charleston is great in the summer”.

A sample hierarchy

Nevada
  |— Southern Nevada
       |—— Red Rocks *
             |—— Calico Basin
                     |—— Cut Your Teeth Crag
                     |—— Riding Hood Wall
                         ...
       |
       |—— Mount Charleston *
             |—— Kyle Canyon
                   |—— The Hood 

A similar classification exists in other states: Smith Rock is under Southern Oregon, Indian Creek is under Southeast Utah.

US State, an unnecessary boundary

A state or a province is a political and administrative boundary that can easily be determined by a GIS lookup function given the climbing destination’s approximate latitude and longitude. For areas near state borders such as Lake Tahoe or Portland, Ore., state boundaries can hinder data aggregation. (see map below)

In OpenBeta, we’re gradually deemphasizing state boundaries and geographical regions, highlighting destinations as the data becomes available.

Solution: A Manual Tagging Approach

In the climb catalog version 0.4, we’re introducing an edit feature that allows users to tag well-known climbing areas such as Smith Rock, Red Rock, Indian Creek, Long’s Peak, Red River Gorge, The Gunks as “destination”.

Since this is the first community data cleanup project, we don’t want to place too many restrictions on what one may consider an area a “destination”.

Benefits

Having a list of major climbing destinations enables us to make better maps, improve climb searches, and a host of other GIS activities related to climbing such as weather apps.

First-Ascenionist Data Cleanup

Difficulty: V-Hard

Early generations of first ascensionists played a vital role in the history and development of climbing. Unfortunately, records of their works, if available, exist as a short byline string (list of the individuals’ names and the year) in the current dataset in no particular format.

Improving the quality of this metadata will not only enable efficient curation, but also pave the way for the creation of a route developer directory.

A sample of existing FA data field in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada

• Levitation 29
  Jorge and Joanne Urioste/FFA: John Long, Lynn Hill & Joanne Urioste

• Crimson Chrysalis
  Uriostes, 10/79

• Spare Rib
  George and Joanne Urioste, 1980

• Voyager
  P. Van Betten, J. Smith 1986

• Adventure Punks
  Paul Van Betten, Richard Harrison, and Sal Mamusia, 1983

As you can see names of same individuals are recorded differently:

• Jorge vs George

• Uriostes vs Jorge and Joanne Urioste

• P. Van Betten vs Paul Van Betten

• J. Smith vs Jay Smith

Dates are either missing or in various formats, 10/79 vs 1980.

Solution: Machine Learning and Manual Corrections

Fortunately, we don’t have to start from scratch. Two contributors have already come up with preliminary parsing scripts. One of scripts uses spaCy, a machine learning library for detecting human names. I think the sensible approach would be processing the FA data with code as much as we can and flag the rest for manual corrections.

I’m looking a Project lead to help tackle this initiative. Please email viet at openbeta.io if you’re interested.

OpenBeta project is going strong thanks to a small group of impassioned volunteers. As an active software development project, like a mini tech startup, we also rely on essential collaboration tools to do our daily work, and online infrastructure vendors to host our applications such as the Climb database and the Search API.

Monthly Bills Breakdown

Monthly Donations

OpenBeta is setup to accept monthly or one-time donation from the OpenCollective Foundation. By the way, we’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit so your donations are tax-deductible where allowed by law.

For the month of June 2022, we received $36 in total, $11 from three monthly supporters and $25 from 2 one-time donations. The rest is subsidized by me (Viet Nguyen).

As you can see, OpenBeta monthly budget is currently in the red. We will soon start a membership drive. If you have experience in fundraising and would like to help out, please email viet at openbeta.io.

You can also show support by wearing our T-shirt at the crag (designed by Chloé Beaulieu, a climber and volunteer from Canada). For pre-ordering information, email your name, size, and mailing address to hello@openbeta.io.

Updated on June 30 to include one new contribution.

Without further ado, here’s a screenshot of my profile:

Visit my profile on OpenTacos.

Tag a Climb 🔖 🔖

Similar to tagging on social media, once you upload a photo, you can click anywhere on the photo to tag a climb. The tag creates a link between your photo and the climb. When people visit an area page or a climb page, they will see your photos.

Pro Tip: To search for the correct climb, I’d use the following syntax: <climb name> <climb type> <climbing area>.

For example, in order to search for Wherever I May Roam at Smith Rock, Oregon, I’d type: “wherever I may sport smith”. The search engine will suggest a list of closely matched climbs for you to pick.

Oops, I tagged a wrong climb

Simply click on the X icon to remove the tag.

Did you know you can add a similar climb search to your apps? Learn more about our free search API.

Area Explorer

We’re also working on redesigning the Area explorer page to make it easier and more intuitive to use. While this topic deserves a separate post, I wanted to briefly mention it here for you to see how we show aggregate tagged photos.

Visit Red Rock Canyon on OpenTacos

License

You may be wondering whether photos are also available for re-use under CC0, the same license we use for climbing data. The short answer is No. By default, all uploaded photos are copyrighted by the photographers (please only upload your own photos!). You must have permission from the photographer before using their photos.

We’re currently evaluating a licensing option and are looking for ways to encourage users to contribute photos of boulders and walls under CC0 for the purpose of making topos. Please take a moment and share your feedback on RFC 307.

This article describes a couple of cool things you can do (and I did) with natural language processing (NLP) techniques and a database of route descriptions. First, I give some minimal background on the NLP techniques used to produce the results herein. Next, I show how a route description can be used to produce a numerical route profile. For example: how pumpy a route is likely to be (on a scale of 0 to 1) based on the words used in the description. Third, I demonstrate a route search method in which you can enter a short hypothetical route description and get back a list of real routes with similar descriptions (it works pretty well some of the time). Finally, I present some guidelines on how I think routes should be described in an online guidebook. Note that a key assumption underlying this article is that route descriptions in online guidebooks are mostly good (i.e. actually descriptive). This assumption could be bunk, so keep that in mind. All the code used to generate the results described below can be found here.

Some background on natural language processing

NLP is a subfield of AI that deals with getting computers to “understand” human language. Here is a good overview that is (coincidentally) the first result when I google “natural language processing”. I use two common NLP techniques below: Word2vec and Doc2vec. A Word2vec model converts words to vectors. You can think of these vectors as coordinates in N-dimensional space (usually N > 50). The vector conversion is accomplished using a specific neural network architecture trained on a large collection of text (a corpus). The vector representation of words in a corpus with similar meanings will be close, literally: the distance between the vectors will be relatively small. Further, any functions that can be applied to vectors (addition, averaging, rotation, etc.) can then be applied to words, often with semantically meaningful results. A Doc2vec model works similarly to a Word2vec model, but converts “documents” (sentences or paragraphs) to vectors, rather than words.

Building climbing-specific Word2vec and Doc2vec models

There are many high-quality, pre-trained English Word2vec and Doc2vec models built with massive corpora available for free on the internet (start here). The problem with applying these directly to text about rock climbs is that climbers continually spout streams of nonsense (chossy, beta, pumpy, runout, and on and on) when talking (and writing) about climbs. Such nonsense would make little sense (ha) to a model trained using “typical” English. Luckily, we have a quality corpus to train climbing-specific models available on the OpenBeta GitHub. This database includes route and boulder descriptions scraped from Mountain Project, covering most of the U.S. These descriptions can be used to produce models that “understand” climbing jargon (which I did). My climbing-specific Word2vec and Doc2vec models can be found here, along with the training scripts and data.

Here are some instructive word similarities (cosine similarity, for those who are interested) we can get from the Word2vec model, the similarity score for each word (0 = no similarity, 1 = highest possible similarity) is shown in parenthesis:

Three words most similar to “chossy” in the training corpus:

1. junky (0.90),

2. crumbly (0.88),

3. flaky (0.87)

Three words most similar to “beta”:

1. method (0.75)

2. body positioning (0.68)

3. figure out (0.64)

Three words most similar to “crack” + “technique”:

1. fist jams (0.76)

2. off width (0.74)

3. jamming (0.73)

Note that I trained the Word2vec model on single words, bigrams, and trigrams. Bigrams/trigrams are common two/three-word phrases that are treated as a single word in the model, hence why we see some phrases in the above results.

Route profiles from text descriptions using Word2vec

I wanted to develop some interesting ways to visualize routes based on their descriptions using my Word2vec model, and the first thing I thought of was to profile routes by hold types. The idea is this: for each hold type (jug, crimp, etc.) calculate the distance of each word vector in a route description to the word vector for that hold type, then aggregate these distances to get an overall similarity score. I thought this would work much better than direct pattern matching since Wordvec models easily handle synonyms, tense changes, etc (e.g. “bucket” is near to “jug”). However, this didn’t work too well as different hold types are usually used in the same context in route descriptions. To clarify, you frequently see “grab the crimp” or “grab the jug” (and many other similar variations of this phrase), so the Word2vec model primarily learns that a word is a hold type, not the differences between hold types. For example, here are the five most similar words to “jug” in the training corpus:

1. hold (0.84)

2. hueco (0.82)

3. undercling (0.82)

4. sloper (0.81)

5. finger bucket (0.81)

you can see that “sloper” is high on the list, despite not being considered a jug-type hold. Likewise, “pinch” and “crimp” have a similarity score of 0.88 (quite high). However, general route descriptors such as technical, powerful, fun, chossy, etc. are not often used in the same context. And, after some testing, I was able to get some interesting route profiles using words such as these as categories. Here is an example comparing the profiles calculated using a set of nine general route descriptors for two very different routes:

The online description for Double Stout is:

Technical and insecure steep slab and face climbing. Start with the first few clips over a small roof of Black and Tan, and continue straight up the golden brown face. The sustained crux lasts for several more clips (preferably pre-hung). Stopping short at the anchor of Casual Gods below the roof offers an excellent 5.13- tick in itself.

The online description for Sonic Youth is:

This is one of Clear Creek's best climbs. The route ascends the steep ceiling and finishes with an awesome, overhung dihedral. The route used to be rated 12d, so maybe the correct rating is 12d/13a. Either way this route will challenge you. The initial moves are powerful, but solid, while the final crux requires endurance and good body tension. There are some classic moves on the route that will leave you smiling. A couple moderate rests can be found to help with the redpoint effort. It is highly recommended.

You can see how the numerical profiles fit the corresponding description for these routes. Double Stout is primarily technical and sustained, whereas Sonic Youth has multiple powerful/tensiony cruxes separated by rests. For the specifics of how the descriptor scores used to generate Figure 1 were calculated please see this Jupyter notebook.

Description based route searches using Doc2vec

Suppose you want to find some routes for potential projects, or build a vacation to-do list, but you really only want routes with dynos, because you are cool. You could search through Mountain Project page by page looking for the word dyno, but this is time-consuming, annoying, and (so they tell me) will suppress your melatonin production, making your chances of sticking a dyno pretty low due to sleep deprivation. To further complicate things, a dyno could be described as a jump, huck, toss, throw, or dynamic move (to name but a few). However, there is a simple solution, using a Doc2vec model (to reiterate, Doc2vec is essentially analogous to Word2vec but converts sentences or paragraphs to vectors, rather than individual words):

1. Convert a database of route descriptions to vectors.

2. Write a description of your ideal route.

3. Convert your written description to a vector.

4. Find the description vectors in the database closest to that of your ideal route (yielding descriptions with similar meanings).

This is all relatively straightforward with the Python package Gensim, plus I already did 1, 3, and 4, so you just have to write the route description. Here are some example searches, the results are the routes corresponding to the top three closest descriptions to the query phrase.

Query: “Clean vertical face with small crimps“

Results:

1. Monkey Wrench (5.10c) | “Steep edges up a clean face.  As good as any route on the 45 Wall.”

2. Sparrow Slab (V2) | “A very clean face is nearly featureless, aside from just enough small and sharp edges.”

3. Drink Up Buttercup (5.11b) | “Steep climbing on larger holds leads to a clean vertical face.“

Query: “Enduro climbing on jugs“

Results:

1. Phantom Pain (5.11c) | “Make long pulls on pretty good holds, working up a pump towards the top of the route where you surpass a bulge.”

2. Release the Lions (5.11c) | “Fun 5.11 enduro-climbing on positive holds.“

3. Atomic Rage (5.12d) | “Climb most of Atomic Gecko then traverse left into the business of Rage. Good Enduro climbing marred by the chipped pockets on Rage.”

Query: “Sustained pocket pulling, classic“

Results:

1. Cowgirl Paradise (5.11c) | “Good Pocket pulling.  Steep & sustained.”

2. Ignorant Bliss (5.11b) | “Sustained pocket pulling. Excellent as part of the warmup for the other routes at the cliff.“

3. Blue Suede Shoes (5.11d) | “Short but sustained pocket pulling along a face/arête with spectacular views of the valley below. Quality.”

Query: “Big dyno for cool people“

Results (only the first was good):

1. Hut Hut Hike (V6-7) | “Cool climb with a cool dyno.“

The results are pretty reasonable for the above hypothetical query descriptions. However, there is an expanse of caveats stretching far into the distance for this method… First, there will be many false negatives (climbs that don’t show up in results even though they physically match the query) since people don’t always describe climbs well. Second, very detailed query descriptions are likely to return poor results. My experiments with the model indicate that a single sentence highlighting one or two features of the desired climb is best. Third, I think (although I am not sure) that climbs with especially long descriptions will not be in the top search results very often. This is because long descriptions are likely to have information that would not typically show up in a query (information on bolt placement, route history, etc.), this is essentially the inverse of the second caveat outlined above. Likely, there are plenty of other issues that could be discussed, but I think those are the most important three that I have identified.

The search results shown above can be reproduced using this Python script. I recommend first creating and activating a conda environment using this environment.yml, then everything should run smoothly. After setting up your environment you can get search results via the command line:

$ python route_description_search.py -d <query string> -n <# of results>

Make sure that the model file (doc2vec.model) and search data (search_data.pkl.zip) are in the same directory.

Some suggestions on how to describe rock climbs

In this section, I list some guidelines that I think should be followed when posting route descriptions online. These guidelines are not for route location or protection descriptions, which should be as detailed and accurate as possible, and in a separate section to the route description. Rather, the idea is to provide an accurate overview of the route style, quality, and rock without giving detailed beta or extraneous information.

1. Be accurate: Self-explanatory.

2. Give minimal beta: I think that hold types and moves can be described generally, but move-by-move beta should be avoided. Not everyone appreciates seeing beta before climbing a route. In the future, I think it best for online guidebooks to have separate (hidden) sections for the detailed beta.

3. Keep it short: Two to three sentences seem reasonable. Route history could go in a separate section if the route has an especially interesting history. Descriptions of bolt/gear placements, clipping stances, etc. should go in a separate “protection” section.

4. Be descriptive: Don’t just write “beta pending” or “cool route“, that isn’t helpful for anyone. I think things like major rock features (dihedral, roof, etc.), hold types, rock quality (clean, chossy, etc.), and movement style (powerful, techy, etc.) are great things to include.

During the development of openbeta.io the climbing route catalog, we’ve also built a full-text search engine that enables users to find climbing routes by name, FA or description. We decided to open up access to this API to help accelerate the development of other climbing-related projects in the open source space.

The program is in early access phase. We will publish more documentation on our official docs site.

Climb search API in action

1. Search by route name

2. Search by FA and description

FAQ

1. How do I qualify?

In order to qualify for free access, your project must be released under an OSI-approved license.

2. What can I do with the API?

The API is suitable for building an autocomplete search feature in your app. Visit openbeta.io to see the search box in action.

The search result contains latitude and longitude for each matching climb which enables you to build location-aware climbing apps such as climbing weather apps, curated climb maps, and personal ticklist tracker.

3. What is your API tech stack?

Building a full-text search engine with millisecond response time is hard. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we’ve built our API on top of Typesense.

4. I have a question. How to get help?

Email hello@openbeta.io or come chat with us on Discord.

🎁 Sponsorship Opportunity

OpenBeta is an all-volunteer nonprofit dedicated to ensuring free and open access to data about rock climbing routes for open source programming, education, and data science endeavors. We’re looking for sponsors to help us keep this free Climb API service running in the long term. If your business is serving the outdoors community and would like to support our cause, please contact us: hello@openbeta.io.

In the most recent release of OpenTacos, we have introduced a new search tool to help you discover crags near a city or a well-known landmark. You can also filter crags by grade range and climbing styles (more on this below). As you can see, we also tally up the number of crags by distance from your search location.

If you’re familiar with the geography of the Portland area, you probably have a good picture of what is available, Rocky Butte, Carver, Madrone, Broughton Bluff and Ozone, all within 30 miles from downtown. But there’s more climbing in the Mount Hood area and Beacon rock, if you’re willing to venture a bit further out, in the 30 - 60 mile range. While it might be a no-brainer for someone with local knowledge of the area, the tool is useful for those who are new to climbing or visiting the city.

How is Portland, Oregon stacking up against Boulder, Colorado?

🔥 Filter Crags

After seeing a list of crags near your search location, you can use the Filter bar to narrow the search result to suite your grade range and climbing style(s): traditional, sport or bouldering.

You can also click on individual crag markers on the interactive map to learn more about a particular crag. We’ve introduced a grade band concept to simplify the UI.

Trad and Sport

• Beginner: up to 5.8

• Intermediate: 5.9 - 5.10

• Advanced: 5.11 - 5.12

• Expert: 5.13 and up

Bouldering

• Beginner: V0

• Intermediate: V1 - V3

• Advanced: V4 - V7

• Expert: V8 and up

In this example, I'm a sport climber, looking for climbs in the 5.7 - 5.9 range. As you can see, Jungle Cliff has no easy climbs, four in the Intermediate range (5.9 - 5.10), plus many more harder climbs which I don't care for.

🔥 Where is my donut?

The Radius filter also allows you to specify a minimum search radius, effectively excluding the inner circle which makes the radius filter look like a donut.

🔥 Download search data

Last but not least, you can download the search result in GeoJSON format.

Summary

A huge thank you to OpenBeta volunteers who made Milestone 2 release possible: Chloé Beaulieu, Michael Dimmitt, Kendra Gibbons, Clinton Lunn, Antoine Marnat, Kevin Nadro, Gal Weinstock.

Launch OpenTacos

If you love climbing as much as we do, and want to help shape the future of climbing in the open source space, you can help us figure out the next steps.

What do you want to see next in OpenTacos? Please leave your feedback on this GitHub issue.

We welcome all kinds of contributions: sharing new route information, identifying inaccuracies, writing the code, reporting bugs, designing the website, creating documentation or contribute a few bucks towards the cause. Get started by contacting hello@openbeta.io or chat with our volunteers on Discord today.

[1] Open source: source code is freely available with a license that permits modification and re-sharing.

[2] Content license: license that defines what users may and may not do with the crowd-sourced content.

[3] CC0

[4] CC NC-SA

[5] OpenBeta on GitHub

[4] Work-in-progress (Estimated completion: summer 2022)

[5] Users can suggest edits but changes must be approved by admins.

Why should I consider OpenBeta over the alternatives?

First of all, I have to say, there would not be climbing betas online today without projects like TheCrag and MountainProject.  I feel grateful for everything they already contributed, and would like to acknowledge the amazing work they have done for the community. 

If you’re looking for a matured platform with a large user base and good coverage of crags in the USA and around the world, then theCrag and MountainProject might be suitable for you.  MountainProject has complete coverage of the USA and some international destinations. TheCrag, on the other hand, amasses an impressive database of over one million climbs on five continents.

But, if community empowerment and fairness are important to you OpenBeta might be the right platform for you. I started OpenBeta because I was frustrated with the state of existing crowd-sourcing platforms that own and benefit from the free and generous contributions from climbers.

If you think climbing route betas, crag GPS coordinates, climb names, grades and FA names, etc., are building blocks of public knowledge that shouldn’t be owned by private companies, and if you want to change the status quo, I hope you will consider OpenBeta.

What does OpenBeta do better?

OpenBeta is the new kid on the block. While it may appear we’re catching up with other platforms, the main difference between us and others is that OpenBeta is 100% open source.

At our core we put climbers’ interests first and foremost. Inspired by OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia, we publish the crowd-sourced data files of climbing routes under the Creative Commons Public Domain (CC0) license. This license ensures that the knowledge of this great outdoor experience belongs to the community and continues to be accessible without legal restrictions.

We follow the footsteps of WordPress and Linux by using a strong copyleft license (AGPL) to ensure your code contributions remain openly available to everyone.

We’re also actively working on a wiki app with an improved search engine that allows you to find climbs by first ascensionist names.  

If you uncover a bug or have ideas for a killer feature, please create an issue report.  Of course, we welcome all bug fixes and GitHub pull requests.

What is an open license?

Broadly speaking, an open license is one which grants permission to access, re-use and redistribute a work with few or no restrictions. [Source: The Open Knowledge Foundation]

Why does having an open license matter when I can already read everything for free on the internet?

While other climbing websites don't charge a fee to read the crowd-sourced betas, they do place restrictions on the way you can utilize  beta from contributors. Their Terms and Conditions forbid contributors and users from using the betas outside of their platform, even if the information itself may not be copyrightable. Examples of such innovative uses are making a climbing weather app or using the climbing data to train a prediction model in your Data Science class.

By adopting well-known and open licenses such as those published by the Creative Commons, we strive to make it easier for community members to improve and build on each other’s work.

One Last Thing You Should Know

OpenBeta is an all-volunteered 501c3 nonprofit collective. We come together to build open source tools to enable new and innovative uses of data about rock climbing routes. We believe open access to climbing data in the digital age is as important as open access to public lands.

Hopefully this guide was useful in providing an overview of OpenBeta as compared with MountainProject and theCrag.

If you love climbing as much as we do, and want to pass on climbing route betas to the community, please consider joining our effort. You can help us figure out the next steps.

We welcome all kinds of contributions: sharing new route information, identifying inaccuracies, writing the code, reporting bugs, designing the website, creating documentation or any other activities that help develop this project further. Get started by contacting hello@openbeta.io or by chatting with our volunteers on Discord.

Warning: this blog post contains a lot of technical jargons.

1. SandBag

GitHub: https://github.com/OpenBeta/sandbag
License: MIT

SandBag is a JavaScript/TypeScript library for climbing grade comparison and conversion. Available as an NPM module.

Have you ever worked on a climbing app project and needed to validate YDS grades or sort/filter a list of climbs by difficulty? And what the heck is 5.10c/d? Is it easier or harder than 5.10+? The library helps you get through these boring tasks and more.

Supported grade systems

✔️ YDS, V-scale, and French.
We need your help adding support for other systems such as British and Australian Ewbank. Contributions are most welcome!

Examples

Install the library:

# Using npm
npm install @openbeta/sandbag

# or yarn
yarn add @openbeta/sandbag

Compare two YDS grades:

import { YosemiteDecimal } from '@openbeta/sandbag'

const easier = YosemiteDecimal.getScoreForSort('5.6') 
const harder = YosemiteDecimal.getScoreForSort('5.10')

console.log('Is 5.6 easier than 5.10?', easier < harder) 

// Output: Is 5.6 easier than 5.10? true

2. Climbing GraphQL API

GitHub: https://github.com/OpenBeta/openbeta-graphql
Code License: AGPL v3
Content License: CreativeCommons Public Domain (CC0)
Endpoint: https://api.openbeta.io

As announced in the December newsletter, we are developing a new and more powerful API based on GraphQL. The API enables programmatic access to the climbing data —get crags and climbs for a certain area, filter climbs by disciplines and difficulty.

Why GraphQL? As a long time user of REST, I was initially skeptical of the value of GraphQL until I started analyzing the climbing data.

• A tree structure is a natural way to organize climbing information.

• By design, GraphQL queries have the same shape as the data they return.

• GraphQL allows us to specify in the queries exactly what we need.

For example, we can model USA climbing areas as follows:

# An area contains one or more sub-areas
# Leaf areas contain one or more climbs
USA
  ├─ California
  │    ...
  ├─ Colorado
       ├─ Boulder
            ├─ Flatirons
                 ├─ First Flatiron
                      ├─ Direct East Face (5.6)
                      ├─ Yellow Brick Road (5.7)
                         ...  

            ├─ Eldorado Canyon State Park  
               ...

Let’s say you are interested in area statistics for Boulder and immediate sub-areas. Your query will look like this:

query AreasInBoulder {
  areas(filter: { 
          area_name: {
             match: "Boulder", exactMatch: true
          }
        }) {
    area_name
    totalClimbs
    children {
      area_name
      totalClimbs
    }
  }
}

# Result
{
  "data": {
    "areas": [
      {
        "area_name": "Boulder",
        "totalClimbs": 5140
        "children": [
          {
            "area_name": "Flatirons",
            "totalClimbs": 1300
          },
          {
            "area_name": "Eldorado Canyon State Park"
            "totalClimbs": 1219
          },
          ...
         ]
       }]
   }
}

Interactive playground

Developer ergonomics is an important consideration when adopting a new framework. We run our API service with introspection enabled, which allows you to explore and test the API with an online playground.

3. OpenTacos

GitHub: https://github.com/OpenBeta/open-tacos
Code License: AGPL v3
Content License: CreativeCommons Public Domain (CC0)
Live site: https://tacos.openbeta.io

OpenTacos is a free and editable catalog of climbing routes inspired by Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. We build this tool to help climbers research climbing areas, and ultimately, help us identify inaccuracies and improve the underlying datasets.

Completed:
✔️ Find climbs by name, description, or FA.

Work in progress:
- Find climbs near a city or a well-known landmark.
- Filter climbs by disciplines or difficulty.
- Filter areas by climbing seasons.

We want your feedback

The core volunteer team wants to hear from the climbing community to guide our directions. Visit the GitHub Kanban board to learn more about planned features and milestones. Note: You need a GitHub account to comment on issues.

You can also chat with us on Discord.