Route explorer for RR

Because a single rating for a multi-pitch route can often be misleading as to how hard/easy the route actually is I wanted to experiment with a different way to look at things.

What I came up with was a pitch-by-pitch visualization that looks at the length of each pitch vs. its rating. It's not perfect but I think it's an interesting way to look at things.

The list of routes included in the data are pulled from the top 50 routes for Red Rock on MP. Because the pitch-by-pitch rating/length data is inconsistent on MP I (tediously) pulled that data from the Handren book. I could add more routes to the data or swap it out for a completely different area but it's boring to hand enter data.

If you mouse over the individual pitches the rest of the pitches in that particular route will be highlighted so you can see the whole route. Clicking on the route will open a new window with the associated MP page.

This won't work well on touchscreen devices because of the mouseovers so it's best viewed on a computer. Also, I can't guarantee this works in Internet Explorer but then again if you use IE you are probably used to the rest of the internet not working.

Enjoy

Red Rock route explorer

Disclaimer: I'm using IE

It is an interesting way to quickly review a lot of routes for length and sustained-ness. Potentially very useful when planning a multi-day climbing trip to a particular area.

In the past, I've used a table with two columns for routes of interest: easy / hard on one access and short / long on the other. It effectively divided routes of interest into four categories: easy-short, easy-long, hard-short, hard-long. It made it convenient to sit around camp the night before and quickly narrow down the climb of interest for tomorrow depending on interests and energy level. But it took a fair amount of effort to manually generate the table, and once generated, no one else could easily modify it.

I would much rather use something like this tool. Or (perhaps) use this tool to produce a table like that ... if the clutter factor was reduced and the ease of use was better - likely, you have some of these on your to-do list.

a) somehow add filtering of routes similar to MP.com's "Best routes for YOU in this area": length (Grade?), max difficulty, quality rating, style (bouldering, sport, trad), area, and maybe protection (G, PG, etc..);

b) allow highlighting the trace of a particular route so it is can be clearly distinguised from others - it could be by mouse click or maybe just by hovering the mouse over part of the a route's trace route - maybe the route changes color or style of line. And when there are many routes, a summary list of - say - names/pitches/difficulty off to the side could be used to select routes for highlighting - or perhaps the filtering of 'a' would be enough.

c) allow a subset of routes to be selected and saved off in some way - for use at the destination, for sharing with climb partners, etc..

I don't think local climbers would use this much. But those with means to travel to destinations with many climbs - it would reduce some of the overhead on deciding routes of interest.

It'd be convenient if something like this were integrated with a "living guide" such as MP.com.

Cool idea. Interested to see how much it might catch the attention of the masses.

If you don't have the skills, this could really use someone with software development skills to flesh out all the possible uses out with a small number of experienced climbers before doing much other work.

I like it, Tyson.
A very interesting experiment in data visualization.
This really adjusted some of my misunderstandings about local routes.

Also, I wish the libraries I work with where as whimsically named. soup = BeautifulSoup(). I am so jealous.