About The Alpine Guide

Most of my weekends start with a dozen open tabs. NOAA for the forecast, NWAC for the avalanche report, WTA trip reports to find out the road washed out in November, WSDOT for the pass, a SNOTEL station to see how much snow is actually up there. An hour of cross-referencing later I'd have a plan, and a quiet suspicion I'd missed something better one drainage over.

I built The Alpine Guide so I could stop. It pulls all of that data, live, for Washington and Oregon, and answers the question I actually have when I open those tabs: where should I go this weekend.

Now it lives inside Claude. You connect it once, then you ask the way you'd ask a friend who has somehow been to every trailhead between Seattle and the Canadian border. Is The Brothers in shape for a ski tour right now? Somewhere quiet and dog-friendly within two hours, nothing steep? Claude does the reasoning and pulls live numbers from The Alpine Guide to back it up, with the forecast and current conditions already folded in.

I ski and hike this terrain myself, so the parts that can hurt you get handled with care. Ask about anything in the backcountry and it puts the NWAC avalanche forecast in front of you, every time. It won't talk you out of a tour because the data looks thin, and it won't invent a forecast it doesn't have. Check nwac.us before you drop in. The mountains don't grade on effort.

I'm Carter, an engineer in Seattle who spends most of his free weekends in the mountains, usually on skis. I made this for myself first, then put it online because friends kept texting me "where should we go." If it sends you somewhere good, even better.