For most of my life I’ve lived on the East coast and done most of my climbing around The Gunks, Rumney, Birdsboro, etc. While 70m ropes are not unheard of in those areas they’re by no means necessary. Contrast that with places like Indian Creek where some feel an 80m rope is just the cost of entry. When I recently needed to plan a move out to Washington state I was left wondering what the standard was for route heights and rope lengths on the other side of the country. If I came over with my 60m rope, how many routes would I be precluded from trying?
Based on various friends’ anecdotes and random internet posts I ended up deciding on a 70m rope and I’m glad I did, but I couldn’t help but wonder if there weren’t a more structured way of informing the decision. In what probably amounts to serious overkill I ended up mapping out the regions of the country in which I’d most prefer to have various lengths of rope.
I find that there are usually two situations in which I’d want a longer rope: linking pitches on a multi-pitch route, or getting down off a longer single-pitch route. For me personally, I find myself running into the latter scenario more often than the former, and so I decided to use that as the basis for my investigation. Additionally, I’m no James Simmons, if I can’t climb one or two routes at my grade in an area, that’s fine. I just don’t want to be left choosing the scraps because the majority of routes are too long for my rope. For me, if 90% of the routes in a area are accessible to me, I don’t feel limited by my gear, and so that’s the threshold I used to determine what a reasonable rope length for an area would be, the length that would allow me to rappel or lower off of 90% of its single-pitch routes.
With these conditions in mind, I looked up all the routes I could find which were plausibly “single-pitch”, i.e. not explicitly multi-pitch, less than 60m total height, not a boulder, etc. With these routes I made a grid over all the continental US and found the heights of each single-pitch route within ~120 miles (a 2 hour drive, optimistically) of a given area.
Right off the bat the map confirms the idea that in general East coast climbers, especially those in the mid-Atlantic, don’t need particularly long ropes. If you happen to visit New England or the Carolinas a lot you might benefit from a 70m rope, but by and large a 60m rope will get you up and (more importantly) down from most routes on the East coast. In contrast, almost everywhere West of the Great Plains can really benefit from a 70m rope if not an 80m. For my purposes, however, it is interesting to note that while the Pacific North West can definitely make good use of a 70m rope, there’s no particular need for an 80m as you might otherwise want in many other areas of the West and Mountain West.
In addition to general guidelines about overall route lengths in areas, I was curious about the differences based on individual climbing venue. I created the same map but instead of averaging out entire regions, I just noted the average/90% route heights of a handful of the most popular areas in America. Again, each area is colored by the length of the route which is taller than 90% of all other routes in that area. On the map below you can hover your mouse over each bubble, or tap using a tablet to see a few details about each area.
One thing I find slightly misleading about the aggregates above, however, is that not all routes are created equal, especially when it comes to length. There are many climbing areas that have a pattern of creating difficult routes by adding numerous extensions to otherwise easier routes. This creates a correlation between height and difficulty. Take Little Si in Washington for example, the area itself has a 90th percentile route length of 37m which is quite long but if you look at its top five longest routes, they include two 5.14’s, two 5.13 and only one 5.12, each between 43m and 52m. While Little Si might have some very long routes, they’re not particularly relevant to me. To shed a bit of light on the breakdown of routes at different areas, especially with respect to grade, below I’ve given an overview of route lengths at each of the areas shown in the map. There is a list of the five tallest routes at each area, as well as histogram breakout of the route lengths at each number grade.