alt.hn

8/16/2026 at 10:10:56 AM

Climbing Guide as a Shared Infrastructure

 https://irz.fr/en/articles/openclimbing-open-guide-en/

by zbycz

8/18/2026 at 8:34:23 AM

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-forw...

by spuz

8/19/2026 at 10:35:38 AM

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

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:pa...

> Check out the release article for a ton of new features, or go directly to the web at https://openclimbing.org

> We would love to hear feedback from fellow hackers and open-data enthusisats.

by zbycz

8/18/2026 at 1:07:16 PM

Vote to update the link to this.

by nathancahill

8/18/2026 at 10:02:51 AM

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.

by Poacher5

8/18/2026 at 8:38:32 AM

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.

by specproc

8/18/2026 at 9:25:49 AM

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.

by kakacik

8/18/2026 at 10:00:45 AM

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.

by brailsafe

8/18/2026 at 6:37:28 PM

I agree with this. People that go to the gym see any other sports as inefficient and entertainment to a comical level. They drive to/from the gym. It's almost comical

But yet, when I go out hiking or to the mountains with them they can barely keep up. They still think they are the fittest though.

The gym/lifting is mainly a vanity place, where it is all about feeling disciplined and looking good. But your body is way more functional doing real things.

by siren2026

8/18/2026 at 12:12:00 PM

Over twenty years of non-stop rock climbing, and I have so much arthritis in my upper body that it pains me to do simple tasks. I’m in my forties.

Sometimes a little neglect ain’t so bad.

by fingerlocks

8/18/2026 at 6:34:36 PM

Do you link the arthritis to climbing as a cause? Do you think it made it worse or on the contrary helped with not getting worse?

by siren2026

8/18/2026 at 6:50:48 PM

the arthritis is in the joints that suffered climbing trauma, it’s 100% related and not at all uncommon. My orthopedic surgeon is also a climber

by fingerlocks

8/18/2026 at 1:20:49 PM

Ouf, username checks out. Thanks for the warning, wishing you health.

by specproc

8/18/2026 at 4:42:18 PM

I’m also early 40s but have been climbing since 17. No major injuries and it’s been a fantastic way to stay in good shape, although I’ve never pushed it to my limit. If you’re obsessive by personality type it’s very easy to overdo it. If not, it can be a great way to maintain fitness, sanity, friends, etc.

by etrautmann

8/18/2026 at 1:06:07 PM

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.

by nathancahill

8/18/2026 at 8:22:16 AM

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

by siren2026

8/18/2026 at 8:31:49 AM

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...

by eamag

8/18/2026 at 8:57:44 AM

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.

by forgetfreeman

8/18/2026 at 10:53:46 AM

Really? In 30 years of climbing I’ve never run into territorial locals. Surfing, on the other hand, can be pretty hostile.

by jwjohnson314

8/18/2026 at 3:54:25 PM

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.

by forgetfreeman

8/18/2026 at 4:12:56 PM

Out of curiosity, how long ago were those incidents? Seems crazy for such well-known areas with guidebooks and extensive documentation on mountain project.

by jwjohnson314

8/18/2026 at 12:16:42 PM

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.

by mauvehaus

8/18/2026 at 9:56:01 AM

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)

by toasty228