ClimbingWeather.com Keeps You Dry

You’re on your latest road trip to a bunch of climbing areas. You wake up at the Arches National Park campground and peek out your tent and its snowing. Oh right, you think, it’s still March. I should have thought about the weather here.

So what do you do? The best thing now is to jump on-line to ClimbingWeather and check the forecast for other climbing areas. If you’re in Moab you can quickly find the forecast at Red Rocks, Cochise Stronghold, Joshua Tree, Bishop, Rifle, and a lot of other areas within a day’s drive.

ClimbingWeather is the brainchild of Jon St. John, a climber in Fayetteville, West Virginia, by the New River Gorge. The idea started when he lived in Washington DC and went to dispersed areas like the Gunks, Seneca Rocks, and Red River Gorge. The weather was always different at each area so Jon constantly checked the upcoming weekend forecast for days before deciding where to head.

“Weather sites can be pretty obnoxious,” he says. “Look at Weather.com with their tons of ads and lots of clicks required to get to the forecast. My original idea was to have a site where you could enter your location and get the forecast for all of the climbing areas, starting from the closest to your location.” He also found that the National Weather Service forecast database can be queried by latitude and longitude, making it a snap to find forecasts for climbing areas rather than nearby towns. After moving to Fayetteville, St. John got the site up and running. “I have a full-time day job, so I'm not looking to profit off of it. I just wanted to make something really useful and easy for climbers to use.”

Weather is a big deal to climbers, especially if you’re road-tripping or making long weekend trips to favorite areas. It makes or breaks our weekend plans. Now though you can bookmark ClimbingWeather, using it as another tool to make those critical “Where should we go tomorrow?” decisions.

Photo above: Ian and Martha huddle beneath an overhang in a driving rainstorm at Elevenmile Canyon.
Photograph © Stewart M. Green