Climbing Accidents Data Repository: Analyzing 30 Years of Accident Reports

This is a data repository for a project using natural language analysis to tag factors and analyze 30 years of climbing accident reports. A summary of the results was published as a feature story in Rock & Ice in Sept. 2020. The goal of this project is to help climbers better understand frequency of factors and relationships between key factors such as experience level, type of climbing, time of day, etc.

This is not an AAC project. While this data was previously published by the American Alpine Club (AAC) online and in Accidents in North American Climbing (ANAC) publications, the accidents were published without tags, separated from tables with statistics.

The study period of 30 years starts with 1990 publication year reports (mostly 1989 incidents) and ends after with the 2019 publication year reports (mostly 2018 incidents). That time range offers a sample of accidents in which modern techniques and equipment are used, including cams, bolted sport climbs, and climbers who train in gyms and then go outside.

This project makes changes to traditional categories tabulated by the AAC: For example, accidents are tagged to climbing disciplines like Top-rope, Sport, Trad, and Ice Climbing, data not reported by the AAC. For more on categories and how they were tagged, see the category definitions file.

For more on methodology differences, please see the methodology file.

By associating accident factor category tags with each incident, researchers can do more extensive analyses on these 2,770 accident reports, including 2,724 climbing accidents (others have been tagged as non-climbing).

Climbers can also download the data in an Excel spreadsheet and simply filter the accidents by type.

Readers can learn about specific dangers by reading all reports with a certain combination of factors, for example, inexperienced climbers and top rope climbing, or experienced climbers and traditional (trad) climbing.

Provided by Eliot Caroom, climber, researcher, and product manager:

http://eliotcaroom.com/

Data Sources:

This data was gathered from the AAC’s public website in 2018, prior to a site redesign. 2019 data came from ANAC publication proofs provided by the AAC editors. The current article search tool can be found here .

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to AAC editors Dougald MacDonald and Bryan Simon for offering feedback on the project over several iterations. Thank you also to Nicholas Cohn-Martin, a data and research analyst and climber who provided valuable feedback on the project, especially on topics related to mountaineering.

Call for Collaboration:

This dataset, produced with Excel formulas and heavy review and iteration, is a starting point. It would be great to see further research with the data, whether quality improvements, additional tagging, or creation of a proper database to enable developers better access.

Contact:

• Email: eliot.caroom@gmail.com

Terms of Use:

1. This data set is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) by Eliot Caroom.

2. Attribute the data as the "an analysis of the AAC’s climbing accident reports" with the url: https://github.com/ecaroom/climbing-accidents.

3. For publications that use the data, please cite the following: "Caroom, Eliot. Climbing Accidents Data Repository: Analyzing 30 Years of Accident Reports.”

   If citing the Rock & Ice analysis that uses this data: "Caroom, Eliot. Climbing Accidents Data Repository: Analyzing 30 Years of Accident Reports. Rock & Ice Issue 265, September 2020, pages 18-23."