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Comment by siren2026 | Hacker News Reader

siren2026

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

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The most recent was ~15 years ago, but in my experience some shit never changes. Surfers are still the same belligerent assholes on their favorite local breaks they where 30 years ago so I doubt much has changed in these places either.

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)

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