Picking Backup Climbs with 20 Years of Weather Data
You plan a route on Mount Shuksan for weeks, and three days out the forecast falls apart. Now what? People who have climbed here for twenty years answer this from memory. Storm coming off the ocean? Go east of the crest. Marine layer? Head south. They have a mental database built from hundreds of weekends, some of them ruined. I don’t have that database. I’ve been climbing in the Cascades for a few years, and when my primary objective gets stormed out, I have no honest basis for picking a backup. I could copy what more experienced friends do, but I wanted to actually understand it. I wanted an answer I could check against 20 years of records, not secondhand rules of thumb. The result is the PNW Climb Planner, an interactive map that ranks backup objectives for any of 500 Washington peaks, conditioned on the season and the incoming weather pattern. This post is about how I got there.