Melissa Utomo and Project Beta Are Trying To Save Climbing, From Itself
Boulder-based climber, web developer and UI designer Melissa Utomo is campaigning against hate speech in the climbing industry. Photo credit: Leah Bowen (Cheyenne - Notameohmésêhese and Heévâhetaneo'o & Jicarilla Apache ancestral land)
If you’ve been following climbing news lately, you may have heard about the recent public outcry against hate speech. That includes pushback against climbing routes with racist, queerphobic, ableist and misogynistic route names, and a demand for greater accountability. After all, climbing guidebooks, climbing websites and major outdoor brands stayed silent on the issue for decades while continuing to publish offensive content.
Last summer, I wrote an article titled How Mountain Project Stole from a Woman of Color & Spent Years Defending Hate Speech in the Climbing Community to help shed light on this important issue. If you’re wondering why mostly white authors would publish digital or print guidebooks with climbing route names like Slant Eyes, Lynch Mob, Case of the F*gs, Full R*tard & Tr**ny Swazy, we were wondering too.
At the center of the uproar was Boulder-based climber Melissa Utomo. As a web developer and UI designer, Melissa is an advocate for accessible tech. While she isn’t the only person trying to hold the climbing community and outdoor industry accountable, she’s been the subject of a lot of media attention for her ideas on how to move forward.
Melissa Utomo
Melissa is the web developer and UI designer who originally drafted a proposal to address offensive content on the Mountain Project app—currently the most well-known climbing app in the industry. She pitched it to REI, which owned Mountain Project from 2015-2020, and was rejected in late 2019. She subsequently pitched Mountain Project directly and was rejected again in early 2020. Next, Mountain Project debuted a new function for flagging offensive content that was curiously similar to what Melissa had proposed. They did not pay or credit her.
Project Beta
Project Beta is a next-generation digital climbing app with a focus on universal design and accessibility. The 13 UI/UX designers, product managers and community stakeholders are mostly women of color. Project Beta’s goal is to move beyond the one-note depiction of climbers as white, cisgender, able-bodied men and create a diverse user experience that makes the community more accessible.
In the fall of 2020, Melissa crowdfunded over $6,000 and hired the Project Beta team: 13 UI/UX designers and community stakeholders to design a brand-new digital climbing app, aligned with her vision of a more diverse and accessible climbing community. That vision is shared by grassroots diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) organizations like Brown Girls Climb, BelayAll, Climb the Gap and Climbers of Color.
The Project Beta leadership team includes Melissa, Community Research Coordinator Jade Gutierrez, and Product Manager Irina Wong - a youth climbing coach with a background in UI/UX research.
Their goal is to create an app that follows principles of universal design and accessibility. They are currently in the research and ideation phase. This groundbreaking project will finally hold the climbing community accountable for the myriad ways it has made the outdoors less accessible to marginalized people, while major outdoor brands stood idly by. Melissa is also trying to create something entirely new.
“Initially things were really hyper focused on hate speech and route names and trying to correct Mountain Project,” said Melissa. “Through that process, myself, and other folks who felt really passionate about this—we felt that we have the power to create an entirely different app and a different community.”
Part of the team’s approach is to dismantle methods of research and design that have helped reinforce systemic racism and discrimination in the past. Instead of building a rigid model of what their user looks like—a marketing and software development strategy that isn’t helpful for capturing the diverse and multifaceted climbing community—Melissa and her team are identifying obstacles that prevent new climbers from fully engaging in the sport. “We’re asking, what are my challenges; what keeps me away from climbing and what brings me towards it,” said Melissa. The intent is that, by focusing on content and a diverse user experience, they can move beyond the one note depiction of climbers as white, cisgender, able-bodied and male.
I asked Melissa to describe the process so far, and she outlined representation as a priority in slowly building the app. “Yes, we’re really grateful that we have a lot of women of color, but we recognize and acknowledge that the majority of the women of color are Southeast Asian/South Asian representation,” said Melissa. The team is excited to be working with community stakeholder, Tiffany Blount, from Black Girls Boulder and is interested in working with Black and Indigenous UI/UX designers as well.
Since the crowdfunding campaign closed, Melissa has focused on forming an LLC in order to host panel conversations and provide “donation-based education around the topics of online accessibility and outdoor interaction.” The funds from these events will go towards hiring more staff to work on the project.
Melissa’s app is just one example of a larger movement to dismantle white supremacist culture and capitalist culture within the outdoors—so no one will think it’s ok to name a climbing route “Up Her Skirt” or “Lynch Mob”—and so climbers can reallocate time and energy toward building communities that feel better for everyone.
“We want to help you get outside,” reads the introduction to Melissa’s now-closed Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. “Climbing is a risky sport, especially if you don't feel safe or welcomed where you go. Unreliable data, information gate-keeping, climbing jargon, violent language, harassment, discriminatory behavior— these are all too common experiences people have dealt with in our current landscape of online guidebooks.” We couldn’t agree more.
You can listen to Melissa’s conversation with climber and podcast host Mario Stanley on Episode Eleven of Sends and Suffers or read more about her efforts in Conde Naste Traveler, Men's Journal, Jezebel and The Washington Post.
Keep an eye out for upcoming events by following Melissa on Instagram. You can also donate to Project Beta at @project_beta on Venmo. If you have specific skills in trademarking, branding, fundraising, public relations, legal or accounting that you’d like to share, please send a brief e-mail to hello.projectbeta@gmail.com.
Disclosure: The writer is affiliated with Canadian grassroots climbing group BelayALL.
As knowledge of the outdoors tends to be handed down generationally, this broken chain has denied today’s black youth the tools they need to be able to tackle the outdoors with any degree of confidence […] we have effectively become an urbanised people.