Cliff Finding Tool

I have a way to identify cliffs in any given area. 

I have had an idea bouncing around for a while, and, after creating a proof of concept, I got stuck on the coding.

Background:

There is free lidar point cloud data for most areas in the US from a government survey which is free to download. This point cloud data includes the ground, trees, and anything else which was there at the time the data was collected. If I were able to write a filter to filter out the trees, you could use tools that already exist to create a mesh and have a model of the ground in an area. With that model, you could have a program find any areas which are near vertical and more than, say 30 feet, and you could have a map populate where each potential cliff is in an area. That would give you a list to go and explore and potentially find new climbing areas.

The reason I’m reaching out here, is that after trying to write a program to clean up the data and remove the trees, I could not get it working.

Let me know what you think.

I've been using lidar for the past few years to find new walls.

There's been a discussion about it here:

https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/125287096/find-walls-and-boulders-using-lidar-data

In practice, you still need to hike out to walls to see if there's any problematic ledges in between overhangs, as well as investigate rock quality.  I've found quite a few dirt cliffs using lidar data.

This works very well. I’ve done what you described using DEM data from KyFromAbove and QGIS. I’m sure it depends on the state which ran the program, but for KY, the LIDAR data is captured with the leaves off, so that entire step wasn’t necessary for my case.

bmdhacks is correct, there’s still plenty of manual exploration needed to judge the quality of the walls. A tuned map can give you a great shortlist to work with, but there’s no way to shortcut the hiking required to verify locations. Great looking walls on the map can turn out to be chossy, washed out, tiered ledge systems and vice-versa

If caltopo.com is using the lidar dems in your search region (it is for nearly all of CO for example) then enable "slope angle shading" and the black bands are cliffs (>60deg). You can use custom dem shading to create steeper terrain filters. Profile tool can give you a quick and fairly accurate estimate of height. If you must have it in 3D or want to analyze non-rasterized LPC, then this is at least a fast and simple way to identify points of interest. I've found a good number of hitherto unknown/undocumented ice climbs this way.

Do you all think there are many cliffs in the US which are accessible (both in terms of public access and not requiring an onerous approach), undiscovered, and good for climbing? I would imagine that with the explosion of the sport in the last few decades that would be a rare unicorn. I doubt there are any here on the East Coast but I don't know about out west. 

I'm from Washington State so "onerous approach" has a bit of a different definition out here, but a lot of PNW climbing development is limited by how much work it is to build trails and scrub moss.  Squamish has nearly infinite rock, it's just an insane amount of work to put up good routes.  My take talking to people in Vegas is that they also have an inifinte amount of rock to develop, but why bother.

https://gripped.com/events/route-developers-are-celebrated-in-squamish/

cubist A wrote:

Do you all think there are many cliffs in the US which are accessible (both in terms of public access and not requiring an onerous approach), undiscovered, and good for climbing? I would imagine that with the explosion of the sport in the last few decades that would be a rare unicorn. I doubt there are any here on the East Coast but I don't know about out west. 

Many.

cubist A wrote:

Do you all think there are many cliffs in the US which are accessible (both in terms of public access and not requiring an onerous approach), undiscovered, and good for climbing? I would imagine that with the explosion of the sport in the last few decades that would be a rare unicorn. I doubt there are any here on the East Coast but I don't know about out west. 

Many, even in the East. Sure none of them are likely to be world class, or even close, but still offering plenty of opportunities for worthwhile 'vertical exploration'.