Single pitch route height and rope length map across the US

I recently moved to WA from NY and I wanted to look into the difference in route heights out West. I ended up turning it into a bigger analysis than I'd expected though, so I thought I'd publish it in case it helps anybody else figure out what length rope they might want in a new area.

https://dgopstein.github.io/articles/route-length/

This is really amazing data. Thanks for posting!

nerd! (But this is really sweet!  Thanks)

That is cool.  Always wondered why for a long time I felt that a 60m was fine for climbing.

Heh - and at a glance I know where I do not want to live.  :)

What would the data look like without trad routes? Rebuffet's Arete is not a route you're going to climb via a toprope belayed from below. I'm pretty sure "Finders Keepers," a single-pitch 5.6 trad route in Tuolomne that apparently has a walk-off, can be climbed without a 120m rope. 

Dave Cramerwrote:

What would the data look like without trad routes? Rebuffet's Arete is not a route you're going to climb via a toprope belayed from below. I'm pretty sure "Finders Keepers," a single-pitch 5.6 trad route in Tuolomne that apparently has a walk-off, can be climbed without a 120m rope. 

This is a great point. Not as a criticism but as a feature request maybe? Style definitely plays into this. 

Dave Cramerwrote:

What would the data look like without trad routes?  

Less interesting

Dave Cramerwrote:

What would the data look like without trad routes? Rebuffet's Arete is not a route you're going to climb via a toprope belayed from below. I'm pretty sure "Finders Keepers," a single-pitch 5.6 trad route in Tuolomne that apparently has a walk-off, can be climbed without a 120m rope. 

Yeah, this is something I struggled with a lot. On the one hand, you're right, there's a lot of noise in the data because I can't really tell which routes you'd expect to rappel/get lowered off of vs not. But on the other hand I didn't want to exclude all the good single pitch trad climbing at e.g. NRG, Indian Creek, and even places with mixed single/multi-pitch like the Gunks and Yosemite. Regardless, here's a quick mock-up of the non-trad map (bottom) contrasted with the original unfiltered map (top):

As you'd expect, the route heights dropped almost everywhere.

Edit: Apparently combination trad/sport routes can also be very tall, and the map of sport route heights is different than the map of non-trad route heights. I originally posted the former, but then switched it to the latter.

Dan G....this is very interesting work and a huge effort. Thank you for giving back to the climbing community 

Thanks for all the positive reaction everyone! I was half expecting a lot of YGD...

Anyway, now that I'm mostly done with this thing I'd consider working other analyses/visualizations. If you have any other similar-type questions feel free to put them out there. I don't have a ton of free time, but then again that's supposed to be one of the great things about Washington... you can't spend all your time climbing when it rains 90% of the time.

I had never thought of that (e.g. geography of route length). Super interesting.

Great work! It would also be very interesting to see the US as compared to other countries. Specifically those in Europe where I've always had the impression the routes were usually longer and more frequently required 70-80m ropes.

Franck Veewrote:

I had never thought of that (e.g. geography of route length). Super interesting.

It stands out a little more when you hear your local climbing partners saying things like "60m ropes are the new 50s", and then later that night you're reading on the internet some dude in Colorado saying "80s are the new 70s".

Dakota from North Dakotawrote:

Great work! It would also be very interesting to see the US as compared to other countries. Specifically those in Europe where I've always had the impression the routes were usually longer and more frequently required 70-80m ropes.

I'd be interested in this as well, though I'm not sure how readily available the data is?

This is exceptionally well done and useful. Thanks.

How automated is this? It would be so cool to be able to plug in an area from mountain project and get the graphs about route lengths, especially if it would work on larger and smaller areas. E.g. plug in "Los Angeles Basin" vs "Malibu Creek State Park" vs "The Power Wall." Then decide which length rope you want for your day out.

But mostly, this is awesome and really interesting to look at. Thanks!

Awesome stuff. Very interesting to read and see this kind of analysis.

Evan Gateswrote:

How automated is this? It would be so cool to be able to plug in an area from mountain project and get the graphs about route lengths, especially if it would work on larger and smaller areas. E.g. plug in "Los Angeles Basin" vs "Malibu Creek State Park" vs "The Power Wall." Then decide which length rope you want for your day out.

But mostly, this is awesome and really interesting to look at. Thanks!

I love that idea, but unfortunately I don't know how doable it is. While the generation of the maps/graphs is essentially completely automated there are other factors that would make this difficult:

• For one thing, while it would be excellent to use mountain project's data for this type of work, they've been very explicit that they do not want to enable this type of use of their data, see e.g.: https://www.mountainproject.com/data .

• On a more technical level, right now this site is hosted on github pages which doesn't support any backend dynamism, so I'm basically limited to using whatever data I can pre-load into javascript/json files. It's easy enough to pick 50 popular areas, write that data to json and display them, but the data size of doing that for every local area at every level of granularity would be prohibitive. I could pretty easily fix this by just ponying up for a real hosting service then writing server-side app to back this page, but I'm not quite at the stage in my life yet where I'm willing to pay the $20/month to host a blog I post to once a year.

Incidentally, both of these issues would be pretty easy to solve by hosting this type of breakdown on MP's servers themselves. I'm not sure how open to external contribution they are, but I'd be more than happy to put in free work if they were interested in receiving it.

Anyway, all that aside, here’s a mockup of what your example crags _would_ look like:

Is all this really necessary.

Kevinmurraywrote:

Is all this really necessary.

Of course not.

Kevinmurraywrote:

Is all this really necessary.

Is climbing at all necessary?

Well done!  This is really cool work.