About This Site

Our Mission

I learned how to climb on the Coast, where the crux of the route was often just getting to be the base. The forest wants its revenge, and roads that were easily driveable one year can be impassible the next. Access routes that used to be practical quickly become masses of slide alder and devil's club, and it was impossible to tell from the guidebook whether or not a route was still practical. Snow and ice conditions change from week to week and sometimes even from day to day, and it was hard for a neophyte climber to guess whether or not a route would go from the safety and comfort of the couch.

Alpenglow is a free site that lets backcountry users exchange exactly this kind of information. We don't pretend to be a comprehensive mountain encyclopedia, and nor do we want to replace your guide books - we like paper guide books too! But we would like to be a place where you can check routes for the latest info before going, and find out if the access road is still in good condition before you go.

Alpenglow is Free

My primary purpose for starting Alpenglow was to provide a service to the community. I feel that one of the most important parts about Alpenglow is that it is free. It is free like free beer (although I'm more than happy to accept donations), and free like free speech.

I don't want to force people pay money to use Alpenglow for two reasons. First, because I think that the most valuable part of sites like Alpenglow is the content that users put in - freely. I'm a user too, and as a user, it just feels wrong to be forced to pay money to view my own content. And second, because charging people money to enter data means that much less people will participate. And user participation is what makes this service useful. My view is that making paid memberships mandatory inevitably degrades the usefulness of the content, and I'll personally fight to avoid mandatory paid memberships in any way that I can.

This brings us to the second part of free - free like free speech. Every bit of content, text or images, that you add to Alpenglow is also free. All user-entered content on Alpenglow is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 (Unported). For details, you should view the Copyright and Licensing page. In essence, this means that when you enter content, it's automatically shared with anyone who would like to use it, for any purpose, as long as they give you, the author, proper acknowledgement and credit, and they extend the same rights and conditions to everyone else.

Incidentally, this provides you, the user, with some additional protection. If, hypothetically speaking, in some alternate future Alpenglow should suddenly turn evil, or if Alpenglow runs into trouble and ceases operation (Alpenglow may be free, but our server bills are not!), another site can start up and use the content in this one as a base to build anew, with our blessing (and yours!).

Editing Alpenglow

Text Formatting

Alpenglow uses markdown to format text descriptions. We use markdown because it's fast, simple, and clear. You can also use HTML to accomplish the same tasks but be warned - we do filter out tags that we feel are inappropriate

Community Moderation

Any registered user can edit the content on Alpenglow. The exception is bulletins and photos, which only the original author and site administrators can edit. We'd like the community (that's you) to be responsible for keeping this site useful and spam free.

Alpenglow keeps a history of each and every edit made on the system, including the user who made the edit and their IP address. In the future, we'll allow you to view this history on the site, but for now, it's enough that you know that it is present, and that we can audit and restore damaged content.

Future Plans

There are several things I'm planning an adding to the site. Site History, Articles, Routes, Trip Reports, Cragislist style flagging for bulletins and photos and GPS uploads and downloads are probably top on the list. If you have an opinion on what we should add next, feel let us know in the forums.