In the Beginning

I love rock climbing. I’ve only been involved in the sport for a little over a year, but it has become a huge part of my life. One of the great things about living in Utah is the abundance of outdoor routes in the mountains that are so close by. I discovered quickly that an excellent resource for information on outdoor routes across the globe is the Mountain Project. This massive repository contains 278,123 routes and counting, with Utah claiming 16,899 of them.

Looking at all of this data would be fascinating. Daunting too. Rather than observe routes across the world I decided to take a focused look at some routes that I would actually consider climbing. I pulled the 200 most popular routes from Central Utah (more information here), but then I had wondered. Why are these routes the most popular? I saw routes are varying lengths, difficulties, and even stars (quality rating given by those who climbed the route). So what makes these the most popular routes?

Plot

So what’s the story

As you can tell from the graphic above there is no extremely obvious and strong trend. Notice routes are spread pretty evenly across the x-axis (stars). There is a decent variety of route length (y-axis) - a few very long routes out there though - and for the “Ratings” (difficulty, shown as dot size), there is also quite a spread, although we do see a bit of a trend towards routes that are 5.10 or above. What does this mean? All kinds of routes are popular. Long, short, hard, easy. Even highly enjoyed, and those not so much (Stars). All kinds of routes are included in the most popular. What does this mean? There are underlying factors not observed here that I think could help to explain popularity in outdoor rock climbing routes. One strong example is ease of access. Would you rather hop out of your car, walk 20 feet and start climbing an “average” route, or hike 2 miles down a trail (hauling gear) for a “better” one? Which route do you imagine is more popular? Although from the data we do see a light trend towards harder and longer routes, I believe there are some unexplored factors that could help us further explain popularity in these routes.

More details, along the code used to scrape the data and create the graphics are found at my Github Repository.