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Cliff Notes

Appetite for Destruction

Could New App for iPhone Spell Doom for Guidebooks … and 8a.nu?

The days of recording new-route information in Fred Beckey’s little black book are long gone. This May, Wolverine Publishing is releasing the third edition of Red River Gorge Rock Climbs, both as a 400-page book and an app for the iPhone and iTouch. The app isn’t just an e-book or a digitized version, like a pdf, of the print product; rather, it is a fully interactive program that could change a lot about how we relate to our routes, crags … and maybe even each other.
“This is the biggest thing to happen to the climbing world since sticky rubber and Friends,” says Dave Pegg, owner of Wolverine Publishing.  
Hyperbole aside, the app is a quantum leap forward in terms of literally getting route information into the hands of climbers. When you open the app, a context-sensitive bar on the top of the screen acts as a table of contents, and helps you navigate the Introduction, History, or Climate sections, or just browse the climbs. The bottom tool bar toggles the five modes in which the app functions: Explore, Search, Ticklist, Log and Navigate. Explore, the most general mode, organizes routes by Region > Wall > Climbs. Navigating this database is as intuitive and easy as scrolling through music on an iPod (Artist > Album > Song).
Where the app really shines, however, is in the other four modes. In Search mode, you can find routes in a number of ways, most simply by typing in the name. Say someone tells you Breakfast Burrito is the sickest 5.10 in the world, and you have to do it. Plug in “breakfast,” and you’re there.
You can also search for routes by applying filters. If you know you’re going to be in a certain region, and that you only want to climb 4- or 5-star trad routes in the 5.10a to 5.11a range, apply those filters and you’ll see all the routes that match your criteria.
For some Very Serious Climbers, one of the most satisfying aspects of a guidebook is the ability to check a box next to routes you’ve onsighted or redpointed. The app stores your tick list of routes, marking them as onsights, flashes or redpoints. You can also check a route as “worked on,” which means you’ve tried the route, but haven’t sent. In addition to your tick list, your logbook chronologically tracks what climbs you’ve done or worked on.
The logbook is pretty smart. For example, let’s say you onsighted Breakfast Burrito two years ago,
but then, you revisit the climb. Unfortunately, you fall (hey, it happens) and then redpoint the pitch next try. You can record the new redpoint in the logbook without erasing that original onsight. The logbook records your ascents by date, essentially creating a training journal that allows you to evaluate your current level of climbing.
The Navigate mode takes you to a map of the region. It shows trails and roads, and helps you navigate your way around this vast backwoods region.
The Red River Gorge was the perfect area to showcase this emergent technology as there are so many regions, crags, walls, routes—both trad and sport. This quantity of data just lends itself to the app, in many ways outshining its thick, paper counterpart.
Guidebooks are not only getting fatter, they become outdated more quickly than ever. For example, just five years ago, Wolverine released the first edition of Red River Gorge Rock Climbs, which had 1,350 routes. Now we’re on the third edition, which offers over 1,800 routes (reflecting an average of 100 new routes every year). The new New River Gorge guidebook, also being published this spring by Wolverine, lists 2,400 routes and, at 550 pages, weighs over two pounds—about the equivalent of 15 Black Diamond Oz quickdraws. Lugging these biblical tomes around to crags makes less sense if you can keep all that information on your phone, and access it, even while hiking, more quickly than turning a book’s pages.
The sky is the limit for this initial technology—developed by three software designers who are also climbers. It’s fun to imagine all the directions this app could go. Currently, none of the routes listed in the guidebook have individual GPS coordinates—just the crags. But imagine a guidebook (especially at a place like Hueco) that could triangulate your position and tell you exactly at which route/boulder you are?
The app also begs to have a website on the back end that could host and collect user-generated data, and in turn, share that new information with app users. The community could theoretically make guidebooks more complete, useful and current by contributing vital information, a la Wikipedia. Precise GPS coordinates of individual routes, missing bolts, broken holds, current conditions, or specific tags that work with the filter function such as whether routes are “crimpy,” “enduro,” “powerful,” “height-dependent,” etc., are all possible ideas.
If this website were developed, it could become a place where redpoints, onsights and flashes are posted in real time, individual logbooks are shared, and photos uploaded—all of which could give 8a.nu a run for its money.
It would be great to see users have the ability to tag their own photos, even videos, to a route, or pull  out your iPhone while dogging up Dracula ’04, and watch a video with beta. At the moment, these ideas are still down the pipe.
Wolverine is considering how this app is going to affect its print guidebook. The app’s price is $29.95, and will include free updates every six months for two years. The book costs $36, but if you buy the app, available on iTunes, you may be able to get a discount on the book. (The iTunes price has to remain firm, which is why it’s easier for Wolverine to offer a discounted book.)
"It's the content and information that people are paying for,” says Pegg, “not the format.”
Pegg sees an opportunity here to publish more guides to smaller areas. A guide to Mill Creek, for example, might not sell enough copies to justify printing an entire book; but it could easily become an app.
In one way does the app fall short of the book: circumventing that timeless, simple pleasure of sitting down with a guidebook and flipping through the pages, organically arriving at a route that looks inspiring and fires you up for the next day.
An abridged version of the app to the Red’s two most popular crags, the Drive By and Roadside, is available for all to check out, for free, on iTunes in May.

Please visit: www.wolverinepublishing.com/app