Setting vs Sending: The Cliffs at LIC

Cliffs at LIC Climbs Analysis

I’ve been rock climbing consistently for about 10 years and have been going to The Cliffs at LIC for a majority of that time. In rock climbing there are “Grades” of a route which measure it’s difficulty - each one incrementally more difficult than the last. I was curious about the distribution of grades for my local gym, and how that compares to the abilities of the climbers that go to the gym.

Using object oriented programming in Python, with packages including pandas and Beautiful Soup, I scraped climbing data from Vertical Life - the mobile application that The Cliffs uses to track their climbing data. This data includes all the climbs currently available at the gym, along with their associated difficult. Additionally, we can look at user history for guests at The Cliffs to see what grades they typically climb, and what are the hardest grades they are able to climb. Link to the full source code: https://github.com/shaunmac611/cliffs_lic_data

Using this data, we can compare a count of climbs available for each grade and how many guests typically climb at that grade. To measure a guests capability I took the 10 highest grades they have completed and averaged them, as an upper bound I also took their single hardest grade completed. By comparing the difficulty available to the capabilities of the users we may be able to optimize how the gym is set. To put another way: we can see if there is an abundance of climbs that are too difficult for the members, if there are an abundance of climbs that are too easy/boring, or if there if there is a happy medium.

**Available Climbs**: Cumulative percent of climbs available at The Cliffs by difficulty (grade). The route setters reset the entire gym every few months, this data pulled climbs from March to October 2021
**Highest Grade Achieved**: Cumulative percent of guests who have ever achieved a difficulty. Typically, climbers will “project” a particularly difficult climb for their ability. This acts as an upper bound of a climbers ability (or in this case, a community’s ability) but is not the best way to measure what people are typically climbing. Ideally this line would be lower than the Available Climbs.
**Average of Top 10 Grades**: Cumulative percent of guests who are able to consistently climb a difficulty. Ideally the routes available would be close to this line to keep climbers at all levels appropriately engaged.

Based on the above the route setters have done a fantastic job of aligning the difficulties they offer with their guests abilities. They are likely using the data available and listening to community feedback to ensure a great experience for guests of all abilities.

Route Data in the Cliffs at LIC

Additionally, I created a snapshot of the gym using the available climbing data. This was more interesting for me personally as I like to see what percentage of climbs I personally am able to complete within the gym. See snapshot below.