Imagine opening a map and finding almost everything you need for climbing in one place: areas, crags and routes, grades in your preferred system, topo photos, rock type, sun and shade – together with your own ascents and projects.

That is what we are building with OpenClimbing.

OpenClimbing is an open-source climbing guide built on top of OpenStreetMap and other open data. Instead of creating another closed climbing database, we want the data to stay open, reusable and editable by the whole community.

Today, OpenClimbing already contains almost 40,000 climbing routes, with more than 6,000 routes drawn directly on photos, across over 1,000 climbing areas in 31 countries – and the numbers keep growing as people add and improve data in OpenStreetMap.

Anyone can improve a crag, add a missing route or create a topo – and those improvements become part of an open dataset that can also be used by other applications.

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The goal of https://openclimbing.org is to offer a non-commercial alternative to traditional climbing apps. Instead of filling private databases, we decided to design a structure for mapping climbing routes directly into OpenStreetMap.

This way, all data in the app is fully open and can be freely used or edited by anyone.

Image: Crag with marked climbing routes in Hlubočepy, Czechia

Key Features of openclimbing.org

• Both the database and the code are completely open, so anyone can contribute with content or code. Thanks to the open data approach, anyone can create new ways to use or visualize the data.

• Each climbing route has defined GPS coordinates, making it easier to find in the terrain. This is big advantage but also a limitation – you cannot add routes without it.

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