Can Climbing Guidebooks Survive the Digital Age—and Do They Need To?

The clash between guidebook authors and climbing apps raises a bigger question: what do we lose—and what do we gain—when beloved print traditions go digital?

Share

Save

A boulderer in the desert

Picture, if you will, a lone boulderer with a pad strapped to their back, hiking across public lands, in some familiar place in Southwestern America. Scattered sagebrush, pieces of obsidian, and manzanita dot the desert as their approach shoes kick up dust on the trail beneath them. The pad makes scraping sounds as they turn to fit their body between a scrub oak and a boulder. Rounding the boulder, they look up and find their line. A condor grunts overhead as the boulderer tosses their pad on the ground and pulls out their phone.

They sit on their pad and watch beta videos while assessing their own body metrics and wondering if they have the ape index to reach the crux the way a user on their screen did. They set their phone up against a creosote bush to film themselves at the perfect angle, then they swap shoes, chalk up, and give it a burn. They top out and pump their first for the camera. When they get down, they log their send and upload their video onto the app. A gray fox watches a roadrunner as they scroll around for more problems on the boulder.

This portrait of the present plays out every day across hundreds of climbing areas. Jump back 20 years, and a paper guidebook and flip phone would be out. Jump forward 20 years, and, well, if researcher and Google’s AI Visionary Ray Kurzweil is correct, the Singularity will have taken place, and our lone boulderer will be some half-human, half-AI machine potentially crawling backward up V25s. The only recognizable element will be the boulder. Maybe the creosote bush will still be there.

In twenty years, there undoubtedly will be a whole host of new conversations concerning ethics and AI in climbing (Can it be used in comps? If using AI to develop a new area, does it get a FA credit?) and other aspects of human life. But, for now, we’re in the digital age. As apps progress, the paper guidebook endures. But, can it hold on—and should it? A recent, very public battle between a guidebook author and popular climbing app spotlights where physical guidebooks might someday get lost, and who is determined to keep them alive.

Our Picks

Guidebooks Are Still a Problem

These New Maps Reveal New York City's Underground Bouldering Spots

Common courtesy

In 2008, middle-school science teacher David Lloyd was living in Lander, Wyoming, when his friend Steve Bechtel, who had previously written a bouldering guidebook on the Wind River Range, suggested that Lloyd write an updated version. “He said I was so much more into bouldering than he was,” Lloyd tells me. With Bechtel’s permission, Lloyd went to work. He recruited graphic designer Ben Sears to do the layout, and they shelled out $8,000 for a run of glossy pages. “It was really pretty, and people liked it,” he says. “But it took four years to make our money back.”

Lloyd was on the board of the Central Wyoming Climbers’ Alliance (CWCA), and he sought their advice on whether he should follow his Wind River Guide up with another guide to The Rock Shop, a Lander-area bouldering destination. The other board members expressed concern that Lloyd would be moving to Grand Junction the next year and wouldn’t be around to help with any access and sanitation issues that might pop up from bringing in a new crowd. “So, I put the Rock Shop guide on hold and moved to Grand Junction the next year,” he says.

Years later, as climbers often do, Lloyd sold his house and most of his belongings in Grand Junction and decided to hit the road in his Toyota Tacoma. “I wanted to live the dirtbag lifestyle,” Lloyd says. “For who knows how long—10, 20 years, even. But I ended up driving straight to Lander.” Lloyd lived in his truck and climbed at The Rock Shop for a few months before the guidebook bug bit him again. “I’d been gone a long time, and nobody had made a new guide. So, I thought, ‘Alright, I’m jumping back in.’”

Lloyd convened again with the CWCA, and this time, they begrudgingly agreed that somebody was going to have to make a new guide soon, and that someone may as well be Lloyd. Executive Director Justin Iskra gave Lloyd a tour around The Rock Shop and showed him all the new routes that Iskra had developed. “I got the CWCA approval, I announced it on Instagram, and I talked to everyone at the coffee shop on Lincoln,” says Lloyd. “So, I knew I was good to go.”

Lloyd feels that there are a few bare minimum requirements for starting work on a new guidebook. “If it’s out of print, someone can update a guide, or, if someone has doubled the number of problems, then it’s time for a new guide,” Lloyd explains. “But the new author should always reach out to the old author. It’s common courtesy in our world.”

In the past, Lloyd has been supportive when authors have reached out about updating his guides. Jake Dickerson and Steve Bechtel reached out to him recently, and they all agreed that it was time to update one of Lloyd’s old guides. Lloyd says he completely supported their project. “They’re locals, and Steve Bechtel makes great guides.”

But in 2023, Lloyd got a phone call to discuss a different type of guidebook. “KAYA called me, and they wanted to use my guidebooks for The Rock Shop and Unaweep Canyon,” Lloyd tells me. “That’s when it all started.”

The Feist Case

KAYA describes itself online as “an all-in-one climbing platform” that helps you find climbs and beta, with over 300 partner climbing gyms and digital guidebooks for nearly 115 North American destinations. It was created in 2019 by four founders, including TED Fellow and current CEO David Gurman.

“We were on a climbing trip in Fontainebleau when I shattered my ankle,” Gurman tells me over the phone. “I was sitting around a hotel room wondering what to do with my life, when co-founder Austin Lee asked me if I wanted in.” Gurman did, and KAYA began. KAYA was mainly known for tracking beta for indoor climbing problems, until in 2022, Gurman and co-founder Marc Bourguignon were walking through the woods in Squamish when they got lost. “We were trying to find this boulder problem, and we were like, ‘Dude, there’s got to be a better way.’ Just that little moment really inspired building out the outdoor guidebook side of it.”

Now, KAYA considers itself a digital guidebook publishing company. “We don’t aggregate guides,” Gurman says. “We don’t make them. We’re a publishing platform for guidebook authors to create digital guides.” The advantages of a digital guide are plentiful: climbers can save weight and space in their packs, contribute their own photos and beta to the community, and enjoy updates without having to wait several years to buy a new version. KAYA’s $9.99 per month Pro tier and payment model separates the app from what most climbers see as its main competitor: Mountain Project. The free website, now run by mapping app onX Backcountry, puts the onus on users to upload all data. They don’t pay guidebook authors to upload their guidebooks.

“I would say that the hardest part of all of this is actually getting the GPS data of all the climbing locations,” Gurman says. “OnX is betting that people will give it for free via Mountain Project. KAYA collects community-submitted GPS data as well, but is mainly guidebook authored.” He reports that guidebook authors are responsible for 85% of KAYA’s total climb taxonomy; the other 15% is from regular users.

In 2023, a mutual friend connected David Lloyd with KAYA to discuss digitizing his Unaweep guides. “I wasn’t somebody who wasn’t into tech, or digital guidebooks at all,” Lloyd tells me. “In our first meetings, they made it sound so good. They wanted all 2,250 boulder problems for Unaweep, which are my volumes one and two.” But then Lloyd got the contract. “I’m willing to pay myself next to nothing to make a guidebook, but for them to offer next to nothing for the work just felt like an insult.”

Lloyd reports that he was offered several payment options, which ultimately amounted to about $1 per boulder problem:

“Option 1: 40% revenue share, no cash upfront, for providing complete data on 2,250 problems and moderating content monthly.

Option 2: 30% revenue share, $500 cash upfront for providing data on 2,250 problems and moderating content monthly.

… continuing in this pattern until Option 5, which offered $2,250 cash and 0% revenue share.”

KAYA confirms the details to me, adding that they’ve since increased their revenue share with authors. Option 1 is now 50%.“This aligns better with our ‘author-first’ mentality,” Gurman tells me.

Lloyd called the folks at KAYA and let them know that he didn’t think it was the right time for Unaweep to go onto KAYA. “Rather than write back and ask what my concerns were, they just said they were going to reach out to other people and have them put it on. I said, ‘Yeah, go ahead. No one’s gonna do it at that price. It’s nine miles of canyon, and the opposite side is a 40-minute hike.’ And here we are, it’s 2025, and users have put like 150 problems up on KAYA, but no one has signed the contract and done the 2,250 problems.”

Two years after the Unaweep encounter, when the KAYA team decided that it was time to put The Rock Shop up, instead of calling Lloyd again, they called a different Utah guidebook author named Matt Desantis. Lloyd didn’t know DeSantis, so he felt like KAYA should have reached out to him about their plans to create the digital guidebook. Those are Lloyd’s rules, after all. “Matt did reach out to me about doing the guide,” Lloyd says. “But immediately after hearing from him, I went and looked, and the guide was already up. So, he reached out to me after already doing it. I told him someone from KAYA should have reached out to the CWCA, since they weren’t even that happy about me doing my first guide.”

Lloyd and his daughter took a close look at the KAYA Rock Shop guide and couldn’t help but notice that it had all the first ascents on it. “How did they get that information? Only through my book could they get that info,” Lloyd says. “Nobody but me had put it all together.”

Lloyd was frustrated, so he went public with his concerns. On August 13, Lloyd published a blog post called “The Trouble with KAYA,” which later made it to Reddit. KAYA responded publicly on Reddit and Lloyd’s Instagram.

“I didn’t accuse them of plagiarism, exactly, but I did accuse them of plagiaristic practices,” Lloyd says. “It’s reference data they’re copying—the route names, grades, first ascensionists.” DeSantis confirmed on Lloyd’s Instagram that he got the first ascent information from Lloyd’s guide, but added that he independently collected all of the pins, pictures, and trail data. He wrote on Reddit that he added about 70 additional problems not featured in Lloyd’s list.

But is that a legal issue or a moral issue? Or both? To answer that, I contacted Michael Cohen, an IP lawyer in Southern California who has represented Hyundai, Walgreens, and Kia and been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, BBC, and Los Angeles Times.

“When you’re plucking out bits of information,” Cohen tells me, “Facts and numbers and statistics, etc., that’s not protectable.” But subjective descriptions could be.

Cohen tells me about a case he studied in law school called “The Feist Case.” Somebody had duplicated exact information from a phone book and was getting sued. The court came back and said that there was not enough creativity involved in names and phone numbers for duplicating them to be considered a copyright violation. A copyrightable work needs to be an original work of authorship with at least a minimal degree of creativity. So what does that mean for guidebooks?

“If it’s just an app that’s extracting factual information,” Cohen concludes, “It’s very unlikely you’ll find a copyright issue.”

Cohen did not comment on the ethical issue.

What about the black oaks?

David Gurman says it’s a “bummer” that David Lloyd decided to air his grievances the way he did, and that KAYA has little recourse to get him to pull it down. He also says that he thinks it forced important dialogue in the guidebook space.

“We’re not trying to destroy print guidebooks,” Gurman tells me. “We’re not trying to destroy guidebook authorship. If anything, we believe that a Mountain Project-like format sucks up all the data and cuts guidebook authors out of the monetization equation. And we want to continue to support guidebook authors. If there’s no more monetary incentive to create guidebooks, then there’s no more guidebook authors.”

Lloyd doesn’t agree with that: “Guidebooks are a labor of love, not money. A huge motivation when I write these guidebooks is that I fall in love with a place and I want to share it. And I’m trying to write the guides in a way that leaves people with a good experience and helps them love the place, too. Guidebooks have done that for me. They’ve changed my life and helped me appreciate places so much more. When I get on an app, it’s just about individual problems. And you don’t know the history or get the feel for the area as a whole. Guidebook authors fall in love with a place and that’s what they’re trying to pass on.”

In the future, Lloyd thinks there will always be a place for printed guidebooks, but only at the major destinations. “Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Squamish … [in] the areas that people travel to, spending another $50 for a good guidebook won’t stop anyone. With the little local areas, KAYA will take those over.”

Gurman disagrees. He says the wave of digital is inevitable, but the death of printed guidebooks is not. Gurman has a giant bookshelf in his office that is filled floor to ceiling with guidebooks. “It’s just different use cases. People enjoy sitting down the evening before and flipping through guidebooks… there’s just something about the tactility of having what really is a tree in your hand and just feeling it and reading it. Getting away from a screen for a second. Which, I admit, is really important.”

I spoke to another guidebook author who works with KAYA for one area, but turned them down for another: SJ Joslin, the author of the Yosemite Bouldering guidebook. In January 2022, KAYA contacted Joslin about putting the Yosemite Bouldering guidebook on KAYA. Joslin wasn’t interested.

Both Joslin and their co-author, Kimbrough Moore, did, however, publish the digital guidebook for Golden State Bouldering with KAYA. “The Bay Area is a really tech-forward place, and people are interacting with apps all the time, so KAYA was more suitable for it,” Joslin says.

Joslin adds that what’s really important to the community of Yosemite is that people get out into nature, and the Park doesn’t get consumed by social media and technology. “By and large, Yosemite is the kind of place you should be able to check out and interact with people more than platforms,” they explain. The author didn’t want to work with KAYA on the Yosemite guide, and they sent KAYA literature from the National Park Service about the Wilderness Act as a response. The excerpt talked about preserving the wilderness character of wilderness areas.

Eventually, KAYA sent someone else to the Valley to gather information. “They ripped off all of our work,” Joslin tells me. “It stinks, because I know many of the people at KAYA, and I really like them as people. If you’re going to put a guidebook out there, you should do it with the support of the community. You have those awkward conversations with people you’ve been climbing with for decades. It’s a relationship. And if the community says no, respect that.”

When I present Joslin’s case to Gurman, he responds, “We thought SJ [Joslin] was going to moderate and potentially come on as the guidebook author. “We had a guy go there and collect the GPS data. We pushed ahead, thinking we were collecting data to work with SJ later.” Gurman admits that Joslin saw the data live in the app and thought KAYA was competing with them. “It was a draft, but we didn’t have a draft mode. So, to be fair to SJ, that’s what it looked like. But that wasn’t the intention. It really was to collaborate and proactively add information so we could work with SJ on it in the future.”

Gurman took down the Yosemite guide and apologized to Joslin and Moore in an email. He says that KAYA won’t publish Yosemite until they have a local author and moderator.

KAYA may not have initially listened to Joslin, but, to their credit, when the pushback got louder and they started hearing from mutual friends as well, they took the Yosemite guide down. Legally, it was fine. Ethically, they finally agreed, it wasn’t.

On September 25, 2025, after Climbing interviewed Gurman for this article, KAYA published a press release addressing their communications with several guidebook authors. They called visualizing the Yosemite data in the app “a crucial mistake.”

“What I want when people come to Yosemite,” Joslin says, “is to notice the black oaks, and how Indigenous people have been using acorns to get food for thousands of years. And how they’re still doing prescribed burns, and that there are frogs in the pond. Not just how to get beta on a boulder. That doesn’t convey at all if my work is just uploaded to some app.”

Erik Sloan, guidebook author of Yosemite Big Walls, The Ultimate Guide, and Rock Climbing in Yosemite, the 750 Best Free Routes, agrees that guidebook authors don’t get the credit they deserve. “I think they’re a pretty misunderstood breed,” he tells me over the phone from the Valley. “I’ve been self-publishing for 11 years, and it’s exhausting work. The books take up my whole garage, and it takes forever to break even.”

Sloan hadn’t heard of KAYA. He uses Mountain Project, and he likes it, but he doesn’t always trust it. “The comments and updates on Mountain Project are a cool element, and you’d think a bonus over physical guidebooks, but so many of them are wrong. Maybe someday ChatGPT can go through there and comment about which human comments are right and which ones are wrong.”

Back to the Singularity

If physical guidebooks are gasoline-powered cars, and AI is electric, that would make current climbing apps like onX and KAYA hybrid vehicles. A more efficient way to travel now, but soon to be outdated themselves. Placeholders, if you will.

In September 2024, Apple released its newest form of Maps, which now includes customizable trails in national parks. Currently, this threatens apps like AllTrails, Gaia, and onX more than it does the climbing space. But with the popularity of climbing rising, will Apple someday go vertical? And when it does, will it come for digital climbing guides, too?

I ask Gurman how KAYA, a company run by six climbers, plans to protect itself against AI from larger companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but he seems unimpressed with the tech giants’ progress so far. “If Apple were able to somehow snag the GPS data for every notable climbing and bouldering route across the world, then the question would be, are there other augmentations to the data set that would make KAYA’s data more valuable? Like the ascent data, the suggestion engine stuff—height and reach, the beta videos, and the metrics that personalize in-app experience.”

I joke with him that maybe when the Singularity happens, KAYA can pivot to printing guidebooks. “That’s not even a joke,” he says. “We’ve been in discussions with several print publishers about doing that someday.”

Lloyd and I talk about AI as well, and though he admits that he “wasn’t too techy,” he has experimented with it. “I played with ChatGPT while trying to find The Multiverse (V14/15) at Neverland one time,” he says. “I heard some rumors that AI was pretty good at GeoGuessr, and I thought, Whoa, then it might be good at finding boulder problems.” He says it was hallucinating at first, but then it finally put him in an area that could have been the right spot. But without a guidebook, he couldn’t be sure.