This winter I undertook a project to determine which portions of the country are the best for climbers. After contacting Climbing Magazine, editor Matt Samet agreed to write a piece about my research. Look for my maps and an interview in the Off the Wall column of the August edition. I scanned, georeferenced, and digitized maps from Rock N' Road, a climbing atlas authored by Tim Toula. Then I analyzed the data in a GIS to produce a map of livability based upon the number of crags in the vicinity. Hopefully, the maps will provide people with a graphical representation of climbing potential in certain areas of the lower-forty eight states. At this time I feel that Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and maybe Hawaii haven't been as thoroughly explored as the forty-eight contiguous states, and that it wouldn't be fair to compare them. Sort of like apples and oranges. Below is a poster that I put together and presented at the Nevada GIS Conference in South Lake Tahoe.
4 comments:
Hi Tom,
Cool post. I ran across your maps while reading Climbing this week. Have you considered putting together a prediction/catchment crag map with known points (as you have from your georef'ed points) against GRID's of elevation, slope, and geology? To my knowledge I don't think anyone has done that yet.
I haven't yet taken up that task. The next thing that I'll do will be to take into account area closures and then create a grid that shows the difference between climbing potential without closures and with closures.
Can you tie your data into Google Maps for driving-time data to get a more "temporal" view? Los Angeles is probably overweighted (short distances, long driving times)?
Had been blabbering to my wife about wanting to do something similar earlier this week. It was a hoot to flip open the magazine this morning! Cool maps!
Getting realistic drive times would require a higher resolution data set. If I had GPS coordinates for all of the climbing areas it would definately be possible. There are also those climbing areas that you can't get to by road, so distance to those areas would need to be measured in driving time and hiking time. A simple fix might be just to add a congestion factor that decreases the climbing potential at an area.
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