California Institute of Technology

Links

General climbing sites

If you think a link should be added, please email alpine@its. It would be nice to compile good links on avalanche conditions and weather, so please email the sites that you find useful. These links below are from the old website, plus a few new ones. There are many specific links in the Local Area Guide page and the Equipment page. Links are in no particular order.

Subtopics: General Mountain Related Sites, Social networking sites, California and Sierra Nevada sites, Local organizations, Ultra races and lightweight hiking, Maps, Other links on the club site, our club's funding sources, related Caltech clubs, personal websites.

Local rock gyms

See our local gyms page.

General Mountain Related Sites

Social Networking groups

Sierra Nevada and California Related Sites

Local Organizations

Long-distance Running in SoCal and the Sierra

  • Angeles Crest 100, a 100 mile run in the San Gabriels, held every mid September. Registration without late-fee penalty is due around March; trail-work is also mandatory in order to participate (also limited to 150 participants).
  • SoCal Ultra Runners Grand Prix Series, with a list of upcoming ultra runs
  • backpackinglight forums These can be very active, with good advice on going lightweight

Online maps

  • All 7.5' minute USGS topos of the US are available online -- you shouldn't have to pay for them! And no company, whether it is DeLorme or National Geographic or someone else, has better resolution maps for the whole country, so don't get suckered. The club did pay $100 for the 10 CD set of National Geographic's scans of the USGS quads; these have been combined nicely for seemless scrolling. You may borrow these from the club's library.
  • One of the good online depositories of the USGS quads is LibreMap.org. They have very high resolution scans, in tiff format. You can convert from tiff to other formats with common software (e.g. ImageMagick, GIMP, Photoshop).
  • There are also sites that give you free access to the USGS quads meshed together, like our National Geographic software. One of the best sites is mattj.net, which is someone's project to display Google Maps with various overlays. You can choose the base and the overlay from "Map", "Terrain", "Satellite", "USGS Topo", etc., and modify the transparency. You can save a particular view by saving the URL, which updates constantly. Ex.: Mt. Whitney area, with Google Terrain and 70% overlay of a topo may. Matt describes his site on this summitpost forum thread.
  • Ever wanted to save a large area from a google map (i.e. so large that it doesn't all fit on the screen)? There's the tedious method: take a screenshot of several areas, and blend them together yourself. Or the clever method. Here's what you do. Pick out the resolution in Google Maps that you want, and center the map. In the right corner is a button called "Link"; click it, and copy the code in the second box. Save this code in your own bare-bones html file (use any editor). In this code, modify the "width" and "height" numbers to something that's as large as you want. Open your new html file with Firefox. You still can only see a bit of the image. But, there are several Firefox add-ons (e.g. screengrab, fireshot) that will allow you to save the entire underlying image (just be sure to tell the add-ons that you want the whole page, not just the visible region). So, now you can save a giant image!

Other types of links on the website

Funding sources and major Caltech organizations

The undergraduate association is ASCIT; we recieved $120 from them in 2006/07. The ASCIT webpage [we have a brief listing; you must be on campus or logged in to view it]. The graduate student association is the GSC; they typically give out funds as well, although we did not recieve funding in 2006/07. The GSC webpage.

The new clubs.caltech.edu site -- we have a webpage on that server: Alpine Club site. There is nothing there currently, but this server lets us run scripts and other things that we can't do on the ITS server. update Dec '07: this server is going down

The Moore and Hufstedler Funds, a source of major funding for Caltech projects. They have sponsored three of our grants in the past year, funding us roughly $10,000 (for new holds in the bouldering cave, and fully subsidizing a Wilderness First Aid course and an Avalanche course). The Student Investment Fund (SIF) funds capital purchases. They gave us about $340 in 2006 for the purchase of ice axe and crampons, then about $300 more in 2007 for updating our library, and then almost $900 in 2008 for a portaledge. Thanks!

The Caltech Y is a large, multipurpose organization on campus, partially devoted to the outdoors. They rent camping equipment, and store our equipment for us. They also have meeting rooms. Occasionally they fund clubs. They have several email lists, including the Y-Outdoor list (which is not particularly active, although it's a good way to hear about major trips). We have sponsored several initiatives with them, including a purchase of the complete set of Tom Harrison maps in 2007, and a Wilderness First Aid course in May 2008.

Related Clubs

All of these have mailing lists

Personal Websites

We can link to your personal site - just email us the URL.