A Conversation with KAYA About Their New Digital Squamish Guidebook
Marc Bourguignon and Eric Jerome talk all things KAYA and the new Squamish bouldering guide
KAYA recently released a digital Squamish bouldering guidebook. Authored by Peter Michaux and Marc Bourguignon, the guide covers nearly 4,000 boulder problems in and around Squamish. Last week, I reviewed KAYA’s new Squamish guide and the KAYA app more generally – you can read that review in full here. In short, KAYA is a total gamechanger for outdoor bouldering.
With KAYA Pro – their paid subscription service that gets you access to all of their digital guidebooks – wasting time trying to find a boulder is a thing of the past. KAYA uses GPS data to map every parking location, approach trail, and boulder, which makes finding your next problem a breeze. Combine these GPS features with KAYA’s topos, problem descriptions, beta video library, send log, and search functions and you have a one-stop-shop for everything you need, merging services previously provided by lots of different platforms all into one efficient app.
To learn more about KAYA, why they’ve moved into the guidebook game, and their new Squamish guidebook, I recently sat down with Marc Bourguignon and Eric Jerome. Marc is the CTO and co-founder of KAYA and one of the authors of their new Squamish guide. He’s also a long-time resident and climber in Squamish, putting up many first ascents. Eric is KAYA’s marketing manager and a Utah-based boulderer. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did KAYA decide to get into the climbing guidebook business?
Marc: That’s a great question. KAYA’s been around for a little over three years now. We’ve gone through a number of transformations, but the soul of the team has always consisted of diehard climbers. We all have been climbing outside for decades, and we’re so passionate about the outdoor space.
About a year ago, we decided we wanted to get into the guidebook game and essentially solve all these problems we’ve noticed or experienced being outside. We wanted to provide easier access for climbers to find the climbs they’re inspired by. There’s a large sustainability component of KAYA that we’re all really passionate about as well.
We kicked things off with Joe’s Valley authored by Steven Jeffery, which hadn’t had a guide update in over a decade. It was a super awesome success – Eric has done a lot of development out there – and we got a ton of positive feedback. The nice thing about digital is that you can always have the most up-to-date information. You don’t have to wait years for the next guidebook. If there’s a misprint or some wrong information, it can be corrected in real time, and as first ascents go up, you can get access to all that rad stuff right away.
Where did the idea come from to produce a KAYA bouldering guidebook for Squamish?
Marc: We had really awesome feedback in Joe’s Valley, and then we just started going off. A lot of us have been in climbing for a long time and have good relationships with many existing authors. We reached out to as many authors as possible who were psyched to participate and started bringing in all these major destinations. Squamish is one of the biggest destinations and we have a large user base in the gyms in the region, so we really wanted to bring it in.
Let me back up and say that guidebooks are awesome. They’re works of art and I love having them in my house and on my coffee table. It’s like a memorialized history of climbing at that point in time, it’s so cool. Marc Bourdon’s Squamish Bouldering book is amazing. I have so much respect for him.
But I think we’ve all had the experience of going to a new zone or area and just getting lost. For example, any day you walk into the Grand Wall, you see someone walking around with the book doing 360s, very unsure of where they are, looking for landmarks. And guides differ – the existing Squamish guidebook is one of the best – but other guidebooks I’ve used say things like, “Turn right at the tree stump,” and you’d look and there are 10 tree stumps and the scale of the topo drawings are way off. So we really wanted to help with this experience. Less getting lost and less epic-ing so that you can optimize your time for climbing and having rad experiences outside.
With the GPS-enabled guide you always know if you’re headed in the right direction and if you’re in the vicinity of the boulder or problem you want to climb on. It also tells you exactly where to park – you see your blue dot like you do on Google Maps. And that’s just the guide experience – the social, tracking, and community metadata layer brings another whole level to the discovery experience. We’ve created a platform where climbers can get inspired, quickly find the best of the best that they want to climb, see all the information to travel to that climb, do that climb, share with friends, and then move on to the next. And keep having the best days out that they can possibly have.
Eric: For Marc, as a local developer, the Squamish guidebook in KAYA brought the product full circle. He’s spent many hours logging trail data, getting photos, and writing descriptions. Squamish is our best area in terms of trail data. Having GPS trail maps allows people to stay on the trail, reducing erosion and trail cutting while getting people to the boulders faster.
KAYA is going to make it more accessible for people to get into the forest and we want to balance that out with sustainability efforts. We’re proudly partnered with the Squamish Access Society—a portion of our profits go back to them, and we look forward to helping promote trail days and collaborate in other creative ways to keep Squamish beautiful.
How did the process work for collecting the GPS data for the Squamish guide?
Marc: The process for bringing in the data is essentially hiking every trail out to every single boulder in Squamish, logging the GPS information, and taking the photos. We have a whole system we’ve built on the back-end to bring in that GPS and photo information and then we are writing all of our own descriptions and drawing our own topo lines. All of that is crafted with love from the whole team.
So our process is very physical, but it’s super fun. The system is also designed to take into account climber feedback. People can report any discrepancies they see. We keep our eye on the data that comes out, so if a consensus grade starts shifting away or a hold breaks or there’s rock fall, we can go in and update that in real time, which is really cool.
For the Squamish guide, we’re so grateful to be partnered with Peter Michaux, who is one of the original Squamish developers and actually the first-ever Squamish bouldering guidebook author back in 2000. He has a ton of knowledge and history of Squamish bouldering. Peter and I have the goal of bringing more history to these climbs. The nice thing about digital is that there’s no limitation with real estate. You don’t have to worry about printing a fat book. Every climb that has some cool history, we can write as much as we want. Over time, our goal is to bring in more and more of that information.
Will the KAYA Squamish guide be continually updated over time?
Marc: Totally. We’ve partnered with authors across North America who are constantly bringing in new data and updating old data. Eric is so plugged into Utah, for example, and has been contributing all sorts of new climbs and areas. Otherwise, you’d have to wait years for a new physical guidebook or for word of mouth just to know some of these things existed. There’s always new climbs going up and whole new zones popping up – Squamish is amazing for that – so I’m super excited to continuously add new problems and areas.
Does the KAYA Squamish guidebook include anything not found in the existing print guide?
Marc: Yeah, The Portal is a new mega zone down south near Porteau Cove. I developed it last summer with Jack Fieldhouse and Tom Wright. People are psyched, which is rad. That entire zone is in KAYA and there’s no other resource right now for it. KAYA includes Porteau Cove and Furry Creek as well, which isn’t included in the [print] Squamish guide anymore. I’d like to bring in more of the Whistler, Squamish Valley, and Chief Backcountry zones over the summer. People will really enjoy it. Obviously you have to drive a little further but all are great options if you’re looking for a little adventure.
It’s nice to know what your options are and to be able to see the climbs and who has climbed them. It sucks when you go to a place that you’ve never been to and it’s far away, and when you finally get there you find that it’s been grown over – or you just get lost trying to get there. We’re hoping the KAYA guide can help spread people out too by simplifying access to other areas. We’ve all experienced the full parking lots at the Grand Wall. By reducing the access barriers for more areas, I think KAYA will actually spread people out more and hopefully reduce the crowds.
In the KAYA guidebook, the classics and many other problems have little blurbs describing them. However, many problems also do not currently have descriptions. Are you going to be adding those?
Marc: Yes, basically every day we’re adding 10 to 50 problem descriptions. There’s so many and we wanted to make sure we covered the most popular classics right away. Most of the obscurities have either a topo line or a video and then the descriptions are all coming – it’s more of a gradual goal now. For people who haven’t climbed in Squamish before or for people who just want to check out more classics, all that stuff is filled out already.
But that’s the beauty of digital, it can always change. There’s also a whole swath of metadata we’re adding to be able to filter for compression boulders, slopey lip travs, steep crimps, etc. So you’ll effectively be able to search for what you want to climb next, streamlining the whole discovery and exploratory process so you can find the sickest climb you want to get on.
I noticed there is no sit start label? Whether a particular problem is a sit start or not can be a controversial topic. Was that on purpose?
Marc: No, in addition to that metadata to be added, we also have a sit start tag. But in the descriptions that are already there, they should say if the problem is a sit start or not. We do try to be a little less prescriptive with beta though to give a more creative element to the climber to figure out how they want to climb it.
Can you tell me more about your partnership with the Squamish Access Society?
Marc: I really want to emphasize that for us as a company, the stewardship and sustainability component to our whole endeavor is very important. We don’t talk about it too much, but with almost every KAYA guidebook, we partner with an author and the local climbing organization.
In Squamish, that partnership is with SAS, but for other places with KAYA guides, by using the guide and climbing there, climbers are actually giving back to taking care of that place, which I think is a totally new kind of relationship. We’re super excited to keep evolving that because we believe as climbers we have a responsibility to be stewards and respect the outdoors. We’re super psyched to create this sort of relationship where by simply using the guide to climb in these places that we love, climbers are actually giving back to taking care of these places, creating this positive cycle.
Can you tell me a bit about the KAYA team?
Eric: We are such a small team of climbers. I think some people might have a perception of KAYA as being a large corporate entity but there’s ten of us and we’re all just psyched rock climbers trying our best to make a product that people really find value and community in and that contributes positive momentum in the world of climbing. Collectively we have over 150 years of climbing experience. We’re very open to feedback. We read every review and talk about it as a team and love to hear feedback. We are always improving to make the best experience possible.
What’s next for KAYA?
Marc: One path is to go international, the other is to bring in routes or at least sport crags. Our aspiration is to bring it all into KAYA. We’re building more and more momentum with onboarding multiple new guides every month across the continent with dedicated authors and moderators. Our goal is to build an essential tool for climbers, so whenever you need climb information, wherever you are, you’ll always have that access right in your pocket.
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