This Data Nerd’s Climbing Topos May Have Saved Your Day

I stared up at the rock-spitting couloir in horror, as rotten snow snaked its way into the opaque fog. “We’re supposed to go up there?” my climbing partner questioned. He looked almost nauseous at the prospect of ascending nature’s finest bowling alley.

“I think there’s a bypass up the rock, but I’m not sure where it goes,” I replied, hopelessly scanning the Cascadian granite for an obvious line.

We scrolled through poorly lit phone photos of Fred Beckey’s guidebook, but our uncertainty was thicker than the fog. Where do climbers go to evade the couloir? Just as we were about to admit defeat, I found some screenshots I had taken from the blog of some math nerd named Steph Abegg. The clouds of doubt parted.

Steph had taken a photo from exactly where we were standing. A red line showed us an unobvious path through blocky alpine rock. We ultimately were able to summit and descend uneventfully. And we even begin our drive back to our college campus earlier than planned. As the sun set over the moody Cascades, I couldn’t help but think Steph Abegg was the real savior of the day, not our experience or skills. I’ve been faithfully reading her trip reports ever since.

“Jobless, homeless, and single”

If you’ve never heard of Steph or used stephabegg.com for route beta, it’s time. While she currently self-describes herself as “jobless, homeless, and single,” Steph leads a storied life as a climber, calculus professor, data analyst, writer, and photographer who’s unapologetically shy.

Against the backdrop of traditional life paths, Steps lives a life of mountainous vagabonding, quietly amassing a resume of hard repeats, first ascents, and even a coveted FKT. She meticulously documents and shares all of it online, like a mathematician unveiling a formula so precise it feels like poetry.

This year marks the 20th anniversary since Steph started her trip report website. Her first report? An account of Disappointment Cleaver (4,000ft, moderate snow) on Mount Rainier in the summer of 2006. “I just thought I’ll publish a little write-up and share it with my friends and family, and then… my website was born,” she tells me over the phone from Siurana, Spain.

Twenty years later, Steph’s website now spans more than 1,000 trip reports across 14 states and four countries. She has documented every route she’s climbed, though offers more of a summary approach while cragging. Her digital archive covers everything from sport climbs to alpine routes. And she offers the public free access to highly accurate topographic overlays, detailed descriptions, and on-route photos. Steph also shared a multi-year account of her recovery after a 2010 leader fall on Vesper Peak. The fall resulted in a severe tib-fib fracture that nearly cost her her foot. It also precipitated an ongoing mental journey on the sharp end.

While the number of routes on Mountain Project continues to grow and new comprehensive guidebooks publish every year, stephabegg.com focuses on quality over quantity. She shares hyper-detailed, trustworthy information for must-do lines. If Steph hasn’t climbed it, it’s not on her website. Beta for traverses can also be hard to come by. Steph explains that her traverse accounts get a lot of traffic “cause you can’t really find them in guidebooks or Mountain Project.” Considering Steph’s attention to detail and her multi-generational mountain roots, I trust her first-hand accounts more than most.

The Abegg Family Climbing Tree

Steph Abegg and her sister Jenny mostly grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Their mountaineering parents literally met on the trail, “My dad was hiking one way. My mom was hiking the other way, and that’s how they met,” Steph says. “I feel like that was the beginning of it all because the mountains were already part of the blood.” Her parents married shortly afterwards and have been happily together ever since.

By the time many of us were learning to ride a bike with training wheels, the Abegg girls were deep into the backcountry. “As soon as we were able, we were taken out into the mountains for backpacking trips that lasted as long as a week,” Steph recounts.

At 11 years old, Steph went on her first alpine climb: Overhanging Tower (5.2, 400ft) in the Wind River Range. But it wasn’t until her time at the Stanford Alpine Club during college that her technical climbing really took off. Under the tutelage of Clint Cummins, a prolific climber of his generation, she ticked classics like the North Ridge of Mt. Stuart (5.9, 3,000ft), Liberty Crack on Liberty Bell (5.11-, C2, 1,200ft), and the Beckey-Chouinard on the South Howser Tower in the Bugaboos (5.10, 2,000ft).

Word got out

By the time Steph completed her first trip report online, she had become a self-sufficient and seasoned climber in her own right. While working as a civil engineer, she continued ticking dozens of classics across North America. Then she noticed that her blog posts were resonating with other climbers.

“Two or three months into writing trip reports, I started to realize total strangers were reading my work and leaving comments on my posts,” Steph remembers. “That kept me going, I realized others were finding value in what I was doing.”

Since then, Steph’s website has grown to 30,000 to 50,000 unique visitors each year. Meanwhile, she has earned three master’s degrees over the years in mathematics, applied mathematics, and civil engineering. She has also established home bases in Bellingham, WA, and Estes Park, CO, where she purchased her first home in 2023.

Present day, due to the tough data analyst job market, Steph has had to rent out her Estes Park home. With a storage unit in Leavenworth, WA, she now lives on the road, climbing and writing full-time out of a Ford Transit. “Hopefully, that’ll be my new home on wheels for the indefinite future,” Steph shares.

What’s next for this data nerd?

At 43 years young, Steph still hasn’t prioritized her love life. “I hadn’t dated anyone until I was 37, because I was just on the road, having fun, having friends, and pursuing adventure,” she says. “But you know, I do want to settle down eventually. Ideally, I’d like to find someone that fits this style of life.”

What’s next for Steph Abegg besides someday finding a life partner? “I’m writing a book,” Steph reveals to me. She is highlighting 50 to 60 of her favorite climbs. “Writing it has kind of become my full-time job now,” she says. She hopes to publish her book by the end of 2026.

After thousands of hours documenting climbs around the world, I ask Steph why she spends so much time working on a free resource (though she does accept donations). She answers, “It’s like a math problem: once you start it you have to complete it.”

Steph isn’t done climbing, which means she’s not finished writing trip reports either. If you’re climbing anywhere in the Western U.S., where Steph has done most of her climbing, visit her website before you launch into your next mission. Steph’s beta may very well save your day.

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