FAQ's
What is DrTopo?
This website was created by some dirt bags who learned computers by themselves, day by day. Our goal is to incite other climbers to travel and to do it with as little money as possible. So go ahead, pack up your car with your gear and a lot of peanut butter and hit the road.
Free guidebooks are the best way to incite people to stop at places they would never have thought of before. Don't be shy, surf this website and help yourself to all the guides you want.
What does F & R in the guides means?
"F" is for Flash (doing a route on your first try) and "R" is for Redpoint (succeeding it after a few tries).
We included the checkboxes for those who like to keep track of what they climb. You might think you'll remember, but if you come back to a place after a few years, you'll ask yourself. .. "Did I climb this arete last time?"
If you checked the boxes, you'll have your answer.
Where do you get the betas to make your guides?
Like all guidebook authors, we get our informations from various sources. If there is already a guide for the place, we'll use that as our starting reference. Then we ask locals to help us with updates.
Working with locals, we have done a bunch of guides to places that were never documented before, from California to Alabama.
Of course, all the drawings and descriptions are our own.
Can we submit guides?
Of course, you can... This is actually one of the main ideas behind DrTopo. Although we have done most of the guides on this website, several guides were done by other climbers, some we never even met.
It is with the help of people like you that climbers will have a complete database of free guidebooks. Whether it is for a small boulder in Nebraska, or for the new hot spot in Bishop, we are interested.
What do you use to draw?
Adobe Illustrator. This is THE software. The drawings are vectorial which means that even if you would zoom a billion times on a circle, you would always have a perfect curve. The better your printer is, the better the guides will look.
Another big advantage of Illustrator is that you can easily save the files in PDF without loosing any quality while making really small files.
There is a mistake in one of the guides...
Yeap, this happens. Tell us about anything you notice, whether it is a mistake, a new route, or when you think the ratings are incorrect.
It is by working together that we can keep the guides accurate and up to date.
If you tell us that you think a V4 is in fact V5, it can happen that we won't change it, but we always appreciate feedback, so don't hesitate to contact us.