Mountains
Vengetindate and Romsdalshorn. Source: Canon Ixus 850IS, (c) Ari Paulin , licensed under (c) 2008 Ari Paulin. Shot on 2008-02-10 in Åndalsnes, Møre og Romsdal, Norway (Google maps).
Mountains of the world
Good climbing is where you find it. Great number of good mountain climbing is to be found all over the world.
Obvious place to look for mountain climbs are the highest ranges Himalaya, Karakorum, Pamir, Tien Shan and Andes. Climbing in these areas typically require plenty of planning and time. Quite often there's also some bureocracy involved. Climbing in the lower ranges is often (but not necessarily) less complex in this respect. Also remoteness of range impacts the climbing considerably. Remote areas require generally more planning and longer approaches. Often these areas have few or no fixed huts. In return, they usually are not too crowded. In contrast, easily accessible areas, such as European Alps, make climbing logistically easier, but may sometimes be overcrowded in the high season.
Don't let the numbers fool you. Some lower ranges sport very big scale climbs because the valleys are also very low. For example, Southern Alps of New Zealand has a host of climbs that are as big in scale than many climbs on much higher mountains.
Books
- : Seven Summits. Warner Books, 1988. Isbn: 0446385166.
- : Seven Summits - Auf den höchsten Gipfeln der sieben Kontinente. As Verlag, Zürich, 2001. Isbn: 3905111578.
- : World Mountaineering - The World's Greatest Mountains by the Worlds Greatest Mountaineers. Miller's Publications, 2006. Isbn: 1845331427.
- : Top Climbs of the World (Top Series). New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd, 1999. Isbn: 1859740855.
- : Hiker's and Climber's Guide to the World's Mountains and Volcanos (4th Edition), 4 edition. Kelsey Publishing, 2001. Isbn: 9780944510186.
Links
- Alpinist. Alpinist Magazine is committed to celebrating world alpinism and adventure climbing.
- American Alpine Journal. Published since 1929, The American Alpine Journal is the premiere annual record of significant mountaineering and long rock climbing ascents worldwide. At American Alpine Club.
- Grading. Climbing world is full of different systems, with which it is possible to evaluate the difficulty and seriousness of a given route. This document aims to ease figuring out how hard is a given grade in a given system.
- Highest mountains. List of highest mountains with some additional information. Also includes some other remarkable hills.
- Le Topo-Guide interactif pour l'alpinisme. Route descriptions.
- MountWiki. Mount Wiki is a collaborative project on hiking & mountaineering. We at Mount Wiki aim to make this site the ultimate mountain guide, which guides you through your preparation process when you are preparing a mountaineering trip. The long term goal is that a visitor comes to the sites and leaves the site with all the info he needed and can start his trip immediately. To serve this goal, Mount Wiki contains information on mountains, passes, huts, villages, climbing technique and a lot more. .
- Mountain Info. Mountain Info is an international mountaineering information service which has been in existence for over 25 years. When Mountain Magazine ceased publication, High took over this important reporting duty. At Climb Magazine.
- Mountain Project. Beyond the Guidebook - The Premier Resource for the Climbing and Mountaineering Community. Load of info about US climbing areas (some info about few other areas well).
- Peakbagger.com. Info about several peaks and Journal Excerpts. Definitely worth checking.
- Peakware. Information about the mountains around the world.
- SummitPost. SummitPost.com is a "self-adaptive" mountaineering information website. Its content is supplied and moderated by the mountaineering community. In time, the best information will filter to the top, and the crap will go away. Initially, this site will provide information on and photos of some of the more popular peaks around the world. Eventually, the site hopes to become an all-encompassing online source of mountaineering information.
- Travelling and tourism links. General travelling and tourism related links are to be found on my regular homesite.
- Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based mostly on anonymous contributions.
- worldtopo.com. The website collects basic information about climbing areas worldwide. On the moment you can find basic information of more than 1500 areas.
Places to climb
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Info
One of the roadblocks in migration from static mountain pages into data driven pages has been my inability to decide on data model that is flexible enough for mountain pages yet does not make it necessary to add plenty of information just to keep the data model intact.
My original idea was to use physical mountain groups as grouping criteria, but the more I thought of it, the less sense does it seem to make. This structure when used alone makes it very difficult to place cities, valleys etc. that lie between mountain groups correctly. This problem is especially present when dealing with more detailed descriptions. Perhaps more importantly, regions are usually explored from a certain base (city or village), from where access to mountains is usually done through valleys (and huts, camps or bivouacs in them). Once you are in the valley, the climbs on the other side of the mountain (and thus inaccessible) are of very little relevance. Thus linking peaks directly to the valleys in a meaningful manner is pretty much impossible, whereas linking mountain features to valleys is very much possible and meaningful. Because of this, my current plan is to go into direction where I have separate area pages and mountain pages.
On the plus side, this will keep the actual page size rather reasonable and page structure complexity should remain manageable. Furthermore, this should make it far easier to use mountain and route data elsewhere (such as grading page). On the other hand, this will require some recursive processing to be able to create those links automatically (I have made a successful proof of concept of that sort though), so I should have some idea how to achieve this.
I figure xlink and xpointer might be the ideal solution for my need to include parts of the other document in the document, typically ingress paragraph and paragraphs of individual area or mountain page on the parent page. At the moment this is done by manually copying the information but obviously this is very primitive solution.
Area pages
- Main area info
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- Location information consisting of location in relation to countries, major cities, seas, lakes and rivers and neighboring mountain ranges.
- Mountain groups and most notable peaks including list of peaks (linked, of course)
- Logistical information including access, convenient centers, accommodation and oernmissions.
- Climbing information consisting of weather and seasons, types of climbing, grading and classic climbs.
- Valley info
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- Access
- General description
- Available features and climbs (linked)
Mountain pages
- mountain level data, such as:
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- name
- height
- summits
- location
- climbing history
- information such as description, possibly some information about the features and most popular climbs
- mountain references (such as topos, articles, web links etc.)
- features, such as faces
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- name or some form of identification (eg. north face, east side etc)
- feature level info such as access, starting points (huts, bivouacs etc)
- climbing info such as most popular routes, classics, conditions etc
- references (mainly topos)
- Routes
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- Route name
- usually this refers to geographical name of the route. If is is not sufficient to identify the route, name of the route is added, for example North Face "Welzenbach". However, when the route has well established name like Hörnligrat on Matterhorn, it may be used. Then the geographical name is added in parenthesis. Some cases the opposite direction might occur. If a route does not finnish on a main summit, the summit is listed.
- First ascent info
- date and first ascent party.
- Brief info
- Basic info of a climb consisting of:
- Brief character of a route.
- Bried description of a route, at least a starting point.
- Difficulty, both overall and appropriate technical difficulties if known.
- Effort, altitude gain (usually only the route, especially on more technical routes) and time. Possibly separate info for approach and descent.
- Possibly info about conditions.
- Detailed route description
- Detailed route description for:
- approach
- ascent
- descent
- References
- References in guidebooks and/or online route descriptions. However, only actual route descriptions are listed here, ascent stories etc are listed under route links.
- Grading
- Climbing world is full of different systems, with which it is possible to evaluate the difficulty and seriousness of a given route. This document aims to ease figuring out how hard is a given grade in a given system.
- Effort
- Length (both in terms of distance and time). Altitude gain (usually only the route, especially on more technical routes) and time. Possibly separate info for approach and descent.
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Copyright ©
Ari Paulin (email), 2010 |
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