UKC Logbook Graphs: Trad Routes

UKC is a great resource for climbers to log their climbs and allow them to keep a record of all of their ascents. It can even produce graphs from some basic statistics taken from your personal logbook. However, you are slightly limited with the specifics of the data, since UKC groups it all together and doesn’t give you the option to filter out what you are interested in; such as, I originally wanted to know yearly averages of my Trad leads. Therefore, I created some (actually a fair amount of) code to allow yearly analysis of my UKC logbook and made it into an App to make it easy to use. Note, the App can only analysis routes that are graded by the British Trad system.

Click this link to to go straight to the App: https://zcsharp.shinyapps.io/climbing_logbook/

Tutorial
First things first, you need to download your UKC logbook. Log onto UKC and then click the link here, this should automatically download your logbook onto your computer.

Now you are ready to use the App, just click the link above or here. You will be greeted with the side panel displayed in Figure 1, where you can upload the logbook that you have just downloaded by clicking the ‘Browse…’ button. Once you have done that, the graphs will be displayed. Firstly, the analysis is conducted on routes with the British Trad grading system only and is limited to that. However, the side panel (Figure 1) will allow you to filter routes based on the ‘Style’ column in the UKC logbook. This is made up of two parts, which I have referred to as the ‘type’ and ‘ascent style’ of the first and second parts of the text in the Style column, respectively. With this in mind, you can filter out whatever combinations you want, depending on what peaks your interest or what is relevant to you. The filter criteria is applied to ALL of the graphs displayed. Additionally, the side panel in Figure 1 has a slider that can be used to include/exclude a range of years in the ‘Max/Median’ and ‘Routes per Year’ graphs. It is worth noting that UKC only records the last two digits of the year of a route logged; therefore, years are between 0 and 99 and refer to the year within a century. If you have routes logged over multiple centuries it will not order them chronologically, instead they would be ordered numerically, but I doubt this will cause any issues unless you have routes logged 100 years apart.

There are 5 graphs generated overall and I hope it is fairly self explanatory on what they mean and how to manipulate them. If not, I can always expand this section. Additionally, if you drag and drop a graph onto your computer’s file explorer, it will be automatically saved as an image file (PNG).

Technical Info for Nerds
R (4.0.5) was used to analyse a UKC logbook and generate the graphs, while the ‘Shiny’ package (1.6.0) was used to generate the web app that allows the easy to use interface and real time manipulation of the data. The hosting site, shinyapps.io, is used to host the app.