Better Climbs are for Better Climbers

In our last blog post, we scraped some of Central Utah’s best rock climbing routes. (See previous blog post here).
Now, lets take a look at the data and see if we can find any interesting trends. I’ll start off with a few basic histograms to get a feel for the data.

One of the first things I wanted to look at was the distribution of the user’s ratings. As a reminder, I pulled the top 200 most popular routes in the area. I’m honestly a little bit surprised to see some routes with such low ratings. (Ratings can range from 0 to 4 stars)

The good news though, is these ratings are pretty normally distributed. These are self given ratings, and it’s good that we aren’t seeing any large skews here.

The next thing I wanted to check was the amount of routes in each climbing grade (Rating). If you look at the original data, or know how routes are graded, you will know that once routes reach 5.10 they are then further subdivided into 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, and 5.10d. This same pattern is used for all routes 5.10 and higher. In order to reduce the size of the x-axis, I combined all 5.10 routes into a 5.10 category, and did the same for the higher grades as well.

You will noticed the large jump in number of routes once we reach 5.10. This is likely because of the combining that I just mentioned. This also may have to do with the jump in difficulty. “A 5.0 to 5.7 is considered easy, 5.8 to 5.10 is considered intermediate, 5.11 to 5.12 is hard, and 5.13 to 5.15 is reserved for a very elite few.” (Short commentary on climbing grades).

In the next image we will see the distribution of the count of climbs given their length. We see immediately that most climbs are under 120ft or so. Rope lengths are most common at 60m, 70m, and sometimes 80m. A 70 meter rope is ~230ft. To do a single pitch climb sucessfully, you would need the rope to be able to span up to the top of the route, and then back down to the bottom, giving you about 115ft as the maximum height you could attempt with a 70m rope (although I would not recommend more than 110ft with a 70m rope).

In our data there are only 8 routes that are multipitch, explaining the routes that are beyond the length a rope can span in a single pitch.

Next I was interested in how the user Star ratings play into all of this. Which types of routes are more liked by the community? In this first graph we can see a trend between the length of the route and the Stars it received.

Notice the slightly positive trend between length and Stars. Generally, longer routes are liked a bit more by the community than shorter routes. Also of interest, if the route is over 150ft, it received over 2.5 stars.

Finally, let’s take a look at how the users given stars compare to the rating (grade) of the route. Here we will also color the routes by length.

We notice, similar to the last graph, that there is a slight positive trend. As the Rating (grade) increases along the x-axis, ratings seem to also increase slightly, especially as we step into the 5.11s and 5.12s. Note that there are no 5.12 routes below about 2.25 stars.

There were two very important trends we discovered. Of the most popular 200 rope routes in Central Utah: 1. Longer routes tend to have higher stars. 2. Harder routes tends to have higher stars. There could be a few reasons for this. The reason we only see 5.12 routes with higher stars may be because if you are skilled enough to be climbing at that grade, you may not spend time on lower quality routes, even if they may be more convenient in other ways (like ease of access, as an example). Regardless, it does seem like the better routes may require better climbers.

Link to Github Repository