On the Nose

Rock climbing is a non-trivial part of my identity and this community has been my rock, pun not intended (sorta), for the last decade and a half. I could write forever about climbing as a sport, as a community, and as a growing industry - but for now, I'll just say that since its inception the rock climbing community has been a family and every big family has a crazy uncle. For me, I feel like that person is Hans Florine.

You can read all about Hans Florine on his wiki page, but here's what you need to know. A 'project' in climbing is usually a specific climb that the climber couldn't do right off the bat, and so they devote time and energy to learning how to finish it. This often involves climbing it over and over again until they can climb it from top to bottom without resting on the rope (having the belayer, their partner on the ground, support their weight via the rope) and without falling. Most rock climbers might focus on a project for a while, like....a decade at most, until they finish it or give up, and then they move on to a new project. As I said, most if not all traditional rock climbing projects are climbs that the climbers originally couldn't finish.

Hans first climbed the Nose, a specific climb up El Capitan in Yosemite, in 1989. It is 2900ft (880m) tall and it took him and his partner, Mike Lopez, 46 hours to finish it. That is a significant improvement over the first time it was climbed in 1957, which took 45 days. Since the first ascent in 1957, it has been the mission of many climbers to improve upon that time, whittling it from 45 days to a single day (the Nose In A Day [NIAD] record). The NIAD record has had many holders. The person who has held it the most, though? Hans.

Hans' project hasn't been a climb that he had to work to be able to finish. He finished it the first time he climbed it, remember? Oh no, his project has been to climb the Nose over and over again, climbing it faster and faster, for the last three decades. Like I said - the crazy uncle.

I read Hans' book, On the Nose, over christmas (2020) and as I was reading, I had the thought that it would be a lot of fun to try to visualize all of his climbs. This was my first coding dataviz project after completing the CS 171 course and it was my first timing working on a dataviz project from start to finish, gathering the data to finished product, entirely on my own. All of the projects in the course were either done as groups, or for homeworks and labs, the data and the skeleton of the final product were given to us. This time, I had no playbook.

Luckily for me, when I got to the back of the book, the appendix listed all of Hans' climbs, his partners, the duration, and whether it had held a record. Perfect. I spent a few hours going through it and inputting the data into a spreadsheet and voila - my dataset was finished. In terms of cleaning, I converted times from days to hours when necessary (e.g. '3 days' to 72 hours) but that was about it. Wish all data collection was that easy.

I decided pretty early on to use a bubble visualization. One of the final projects in CS 171 2019 had incorporated a bubble chart and I knew I wanted to try to make one and figure out how it worked. I started with Jim Vallandingham's tutorial and went from there.

The intended audience for this visualization was the climbing community. I felt there was a lot of background needed to appreciate the story and I wanted to make a one-and-done page, no scrolling necessary. Were there other ways I could have added in the background text, such as a modal on load, make it more accessible to a broader audience? Yes. But did the idea occur to me to do that back then? Apparently not.

My main questions at the time were, how many of Hans' climbs were record setting? Was there a correlation between the record-setting climbs and the number of partners?

I started coding and was able to separate out bubbles based on certain characteristics, like whether it was a record or not. I wanted to set up a little stepper so that people would first see how many climbs were records, and then they could keep track of the record climbs through the other variables, such as duration and partner. However, for 'years' I wanted to try something fancy: a cubic bezier curve timeline. I thought it would be fun to 'wind' through the years and have the bubbles placed just so. Placing the bubbles precisely ended up being a lot of fraction calculations and tinkering to adjust for bubble size, but in order to make sense of it all, there actually needed to be a timeline. Something to connect the bubbles and provide order.

Suffice it to say, this did not go well.

I gave up on this idea after my head started to form a bump from all the times I banged it on the desk and went with a traditional timeline. I changed the styling to be a bit more minimalistic, created a legend, and decided to add some text after all. I wanted to add a picture of the Nose, but a straight-up .jpg wasn't jiving with the aesthetic I was going for, so I traced a picture and created a .svg version. Originally it was just the mountain, but after doing a trial run with a friend, they said it was unclear what it was on first glance, so I added some trees to provide context to the context.

I would definitely make it mobile-friendly, which it currently isn't, I would update the graphics to be a bit cleaner, and I would try to make it more accessible to a wider audience by providing a modal on load with some more background information. I'm sad my complicated timeline idea didn't work out, but overall I'm really happy with this. I achieved my goal of making a bubble chart and figuring out how force visualizations work - so hell yeah. I also really enjoyed making a visualization that intertwined with one of my other passions in life, and I plan on doing more rock climbing visualizations in the future.