EXTERNAL RESOURCES

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I’ve turned up a wide variety of tools, blogs, and other useful bits n’ bobs for scrambling online. Rather than keep them to myself, I think it’s best to share them around - so I’ve compiled them here for your viewing pleasure.

BETA & TRIP REPORTS

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There are loads of folks out in the Rockies doing crazy things that I could only dream of. Then there are people that do my kind of thing - scrambling. Many of us have websites, and many of us post about our trips on said websites to help each other out.

Bivouac is a substantial Canadian Rockies database run and maintained by Robin Tivy out of BC. It houses a frankly ludicrous amount of beta and is home to trip reports from the legendary Rick Collier, among many other notable explorers from around here.

The site is not free and costs $25/yr for the ability to access and upload trip reports (the most valuable info on the site by far). That being said, I pay it happily - webdev takes time, databases aren’t cheap to run, and Robin has more than earned it. It’s certainly better value than an AllTrails or Gaia subscription! Yes, I know the bar is on the floor here

Explor8ion is run by Vern DeWit out of Calgary, and hosts his trip reports of hiking, scrambling, climbing, and canoeing throughout Canada. You may notice this site has some striking similarities to Vern’s; this is no accident as his site is what got me into scrambling! Explor8ion’s formatting of trip reports is top-notch, while the content is likewise of extremely high quality.

Spectacular Mountains is another high-quality site maintained by geologist Cornelius Rott. Cornelius is an extremely skilled scrambler and climber, and an excellent writer on top of all that! His trip reports are top-notch, and his site is one of the first places I look when hunting for beta on obscure summits.

On-Top is run by Matthew Hobbs, and is a site of similar quality to Explor8ion and Spectacular Mountains. It features a wealth of trip reports with detailed route descriptions and glorious photos to top all that off. It’s another one of my top sources for beta.

Bob Spirko has done a pretty impressive amount of hiking and scrambling in the Rockies, and documented most of it on his website. Of particular interest is the trips map, which makes it trivially easy to see whether the site has beta on a given peak you’re after.

Andrew Nugara is the author of the famed More Scrambles book discussed later in this article. He’s also uploaded a substantial amount of trip reports on his website, which is well worth a visit.

The site provides an alphabetic log of his scrambles to date, making searching for specific summit names a breeze.

Sonny Bou is yet another scrambler that has been around the Rockies a few times and then some. His trip report style very much aligns with “a picture speaks a thousand words” - if you need a photo of a specific face of a remote peak, it’s probably on his site. Most of his reports have more photos than paragraphs!

Ephraim Roberts doesn’t have a website, but is nonetheless extremely notable. If you haven’t already seen a summit register in a pink ammo can somewhere around the Rockies, don’t worry - you will soon, and it’s his. Like myself, he seems to hold David Thompson Country in high regard, and most frontcountry summits around there have one of his registers. His Peakery log is well worth keeping an eye on…

Steven Song is among the youngest Canadians to have climbed all the 11,000’ers in the Rockies. A glance at his website indicates that he tends to chase numbers more than I believe is strictly healthy, but the beta is good, and good beta is good beta. It’s well worth a visit.

USEFUL TOOLS

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The internet is chock-full of useful gizmos, gadgets, and applications that claim to be able to help us hike better, faster, et cetera these days. I’ve found that only a few of them are worth having - but those few are very worth it.

The ESA’s Copericus Browser provides access to Sentinel mission data - namely, frequent satellite imaging passes of the globe. This is extremely useful for monitoring snow cover, and provides historical data back to 2016, letting you make an educated guess as to when a given objective will be snow-free - with science!

SpotWX provides detailed forecast data from a wide variety of weather models. Of particular interest are the RDPS and HRDPS models from Environment Canada, which are right about 90% of the time within a 24-hour window. Forecasting in the Rockies is extremely challenging because of how screwy the weather often is, and this is about as close as you’ll get to a concrete answer on whether it’ll rain.

Viking GPS is a powerful tool that I use for most of my route planning and GPX editing. It provides a wide variety of map tiles and data including satellite, high-res topo, and can even source DEM data from NASA if you feel so inclined. If you see a map on this site, it was probably generated in Viking.

Most mobile mapping software these days wants a subscription for fancy features like high-res topo maps, satellite imagery, et cetera. OSMAnd is normally one such app - however, it is also open-source and F-Droid provides an up-to-date Android binary with the pro features enabled by default. Subscriptions normally leave a bad taste in my mouth, and that taste only worsens when it comes to FOSS software - so I’ll gladly help people get around that.

BOOKS WORTH READING

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The reality is that a wealth of scrambling beta is available online these days, and you don’t really need books much. Heck, most objectives that I take interest in have only a few recorded ascents, and aren’t in any books. That being said, it’s worth having a few of the classics around, as most people (myself included!) will assume you’ve read Kane and Nugara’s books and leave out otherwise-useful beta in our reports.

Scrambles in the Canadian Rockies

This book by Alan Kane is a classic, and arguably a huge influence on the scrambling community at large. The information is well worth having; that being said, these days his book serves as a list of places not to go for myself. Most accessible Kane scrambles have seen heavy traffic and erosion in recent years, and are far less pleasant on the joints than more remote and infrequently-travelled regions.

More Scrambles in the Canadian Rockies

Andrew Nugara wrote a follow-up to Kane’s scrambling guide several years after its release. It is not nearly as well-known, and many of the scrambles described therein are well worth your time, and see very little traffic.

David Thompson Country: A Scrambling Guide

This is a more recent release from Brett Pawlyk. While I only acquired this recently and have yet to follow its beta, it is detailed, accurate (as far as scrambles I’ve already completed in the area), and definitely a book you should have if you scramble in the HWY 11 corridor.