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Updates

The survey changes as new data lands and review time allows — and its climb count goes down as well as up, because a measurement that fails scrutiny is retired, not quietly patched. What changed, newest first:

2026-09-04 — 284 New England climbs the map never showed

The first climbs from the inventory hunt: every state road-inventory centreline in New England was read against a coarse surface, the steep pieces with no page nearby were traced onto OSM roads and measured on the 1 m LiDAR, and 302 cleared an adoption door. 195 are ranked (most with the canopy caveat), 89 are listed but held from the rankings until the road audit's questions are answered, 15 wait on a duplicate check against a nearby page. Black Mountain Tower Road (Maine) and Gallup Road (Vermont) lead the wave.

2026-09-04 — New England's off-centreline lines re-measured on the point cloud

The road-bed check that settled England's stray lines this morning ran on the USGS point cloud for the 219 New England climbs whose line leaves the state inventory centreline. Seventy keep their page on the corrected line, thirty-four of them back in the rankings after a hold. Eighteen read under 20% on a verified road bed and are withdrawn. Fifty-eight where the cloud cannot vouch for the line keep their page and number but leave the rankings. Seventy-three lie beyond the cloud or needed no shift and stand.

2026-09-04 — England's off-centreline lines re-measured on the point cloud

Seventy-eight English climbs whose measurement line strays from the mapped road were re-lined onto the road bed the Environment Agency point cloud finds and re-measured there. Seventeen keep their page on the corrected line (most ease slightly). Eleven read under 20% on a verified road bed and are withdrawn: the steepness was the offset. Fifty where the cloud cannot vouch for the line under its steepest 25 m keep their page and published number but leave the rankings until a cross-section look.

2026-09-04 — Steep-under-cover pages settled by the point cloud

Twenty-four US climbs whose steepest 5 m reads beyond plausibility under tree cover were checked against the point cloud under their steepest 25 m: seven sit on a plain road bench and rank with the ≈ mark; seventeen leave the rankings until re-lined. A coarse independent surface now cross-checks every ranked US window, and twenty-one climbs it disputes, where the cloud finds no road bench under the maximum, leave the rankings too.

2026-09-04 — Chart cursors realigned; Maybole Bypass withdrawn

The shared cursor on 1,492 climb pages was reading a stale chart calibration, so the dot floated off the curves; the charts are re-rendered with their calibration and the cursor now follows the window centred on it. Maybole Bypass is withdrawn: the A77 bypass opened in 2022 on ground surveyed in 2017–19, so the profile was construction-era earthworks, not the road.

2026-09-04 — England gets a point-cloud arbiter

The road-bed check that settled the New England re-lines now runs on the Environment Agency's national LiDAR point cloud. Three lanes held as "off the mapped network" turn out to sit exactly on a road bed and are back in the rankings; six are re-measured on the bench the cloud finds (Willow Bank 30.6% over 25 m); five with no road bed within 30 m of their line, or under 20% once re-lined, are withdrawn.

2026-09-03 — Four climbs extended to where the road keeps climbing

Fairy Glen (+225 m at the top, 28.4% over 25 m), Hen Ffordd (+426 m), Hawthorn Road (+167 m at the base) and a lane near Orland, Maine (+300 m) are extended along ground the re-walk found still climbing at 10% or more. The published steepest sections are unchanged; only added ground is new.

2026-09-03 — The caveated door, and 85 withdrawals

Climbs whose steepest 25 m is 20% or more but sits under tree cover or beside a bridge mask now stay ranked with the ≈ mark and the caveated tag; the clean-only toggle hides them. 85 US climbs whose best uncovered 25 m falls under 20% once canopy is judged are withdrawn.

2026-09-03 — Canopy judged across the US survey; 205 extents corrected

Every US climb now carries a point-cloud canopy assessment (most had been adopted without one); where the steepest section lies under tree cover the page says so and the ranking marks it. 174 US and 31 UK pages that ran on past the summit or into a flat run-out are cut to the climb; their steepest sections are unchanged, their lengths and overall gradients corrected. Bridge and culvert masks were carried through every re-measurement and verified page by page.

2026-09-03 — Four re-measured pages and one placement fix

Pen Dref and Rosedale Chimney Bank are re-published from re-measurements that reproduce from banked inputs (Pen Dref's published 39% over 5 m was a single artefact; it now reads 23.6%). Two Welsh lanes that clear no adoption door after honest re-measurement are withdrawn. White Downs is re-measured on its recoverable line so the placement mask could apply (32.0% over 5 m is now 26.5%).

2026-09-03 — Canopy caveats restored on 74 corrected climbs

The 74 re-measured New England climbs that stayed after the retirements have been re-run on the same lines with the tree-canopy check the survey applies everywhere else. Forty-eight now carry a canopy assessment again; sixteen headline maxima moved because the steepest window sat under trees or off a road bed and the survey re-sites it to the best measurable stretch. The same check is now running across every US page that never had it.

2026-09-03 — Sixty corrected pages retired — the bar applies to corrections too

Over the last two days 146 climbs were re-measured on lines moved back onto the road. Sixty of them now measure below the survey's adoption bar on every count — typically a 20–22% page reading 15–19% on the corrected line. Their old numbers came from the off-road line, so the pages retire rather than stay at a figure they never earned. The same bar means the same thing in Maine as in Wales only if it is applied to corrections as well.

2026-09-02 — Coverage footprint, clean-only rankings, maps that stand alone

The maps now shade where the survey actually holds open 1 m LiDAR and has screened every road — computed from the tile archive, not asserted — so an empty patch reads as "not yet measurable" rather than "no hills". Every ranking table gains a Clean-only switch that hides caveated maxima. The map library is now served from the site itself, with a static map shown if it or the basemap cannot load.

2026-09-02 — Scope stated exactly, blank States filled, caveats labelled

An outside review caught three things worth fixing at once. The US section now states its scope exactly (the six New England states plus one border road starting in New York) and the site refuses to publish a ranked US climb without its state — 123 recently re-measured pages had shipped with a blank State cell. Caveated maxima carry a visible "caveated" label in every ranking, the cross-survey table says which surveys it covers, and each climb page gains a plain-language measurement card above the raw provenance record.

2026-09-02 — Five pages retired — their steepness was a mapping zig

A new check found route lines that zig sideways where the road does not, so the sampler read a gradient the road never had. Cleaned against OS Open Roads, one climb (Gay's Hill) re-measures and stays; five others fall below the survey's 20% bar and are retired rather than kept at a number they never earned. Seven more stay held for hand geometry.

2026-09-02 — Re-surveyed lines, named twins merged

Twenty-three climbs re-measured on lines traced back onto the road (nine in New England from the LiDAR road bed guided by the state road inventory, fourteen in England and Wales snapped to OS Open Roads); most of the headline gradients came down, a few went up. Nine pages that were the same climb under two names now redirect to the page that keeps it. Twenty-eight lines remain held for re-survey with the reason stated on each page.

2026-09-02 — 55 more climbs re-measured, this time from the LiDAR itself

Where neither the map nor the state road inventory agreed with the ground, the measurement line has now been traced from the LiDAR point cloud's own image of the road bed — and accepted only where two independent checks pass. 55 climbs re-measure on such lines today; corrections ran both directions, including two climbs that turn out steeper than published. The remaining held pages stay held for honest reasons, each stated on its page: the road lies beyond the tracer's reach, the point cloud disputes it, or the survey has no coverage there yet.

2026-09-02 — The same scrutiny for Britain, and 13 duplicate pages merged

The measurement-line check now covers Britain: 34 UK climbs whose steepest published sections sit where the line drifts off the Ordnance Survey road centreline leave the rankings pending re-survey, exactly as their American counterparts did this morning. A corpus-wide geometry sweep also found 13 pages that were duplicates of climbs already published under better names — each now redirects to the page that keeps the climb. And 16 US pages carry a new existence note where the LiDAR point cloud finds no road bed under their steepest sections.

2026-09-02 — 68 US climbs re-measured on corrected lines

The re-survey announced this morning has its first results: 68 US climbs re-measured on lines snapped to their state road inventory's centreline, each snap verified against the LiDAR point cloud's own image of the road bed. Most steepest-section figures came down (the old lines had drifted onto roadside ground); a few went up — the drifted line had been hiding real steepness. Twelve climbs return to the rankings with honest numbers. The remainder of the held set awaits a deeper correction, traced from the LiDAR road bed itself.

2026-09-02 — 64 US climbs held for re-survey

A new cross-check compares every measurement line against the state road inventories' own centrelines. Where a line drifts off the carriageway exactly at a climb's steepest published section — onto a cut bank or roadside ledge the LiDAR faithfully measured — the numbers describe the hillside, not the road. 64 US climbs whose headline gradients sit on such a drift leave the rankings today while their lines are re-surveyed against the inventory centreline; each page stays visible with its hold stated. Honest numbers over big ones.

2026-09-01 — 78 New England climbs recovered the same way

The same access-boundary fix that recovered 175 British climbs today applies across the Atlantic: every New England candidate the whole-route check had rejected was cut at its access boundary and the public remainder measured on its own merits — with one extra safeguard, since American road records vary by state. Each remainder was verified against its state's own road inventory (VTrans, NH GRANIT, Maine E911, MassDOT, CTDOT, RIGIS), calibrated first against roads this survey had already measured. 78 new pages join the US section, each carrying a surface chip from that inventory chain where the records support one — and an honest "unverified" where they don't.

2026-09-01 — 175 climbs the whole-route audit had hidden

When the survey grows a candidate route along the road network, the growth sometimes runs one step too far — onto a private drive, a gated track or a service way — and until now that single appended segment condemned the whole candidate: the access check judges the full route, so the climb was rejected outright and never measured. The survey now cuts such routes at the access boundary and measures the public remainder on its own merits. Re-auditing every England and Wales candidate rejected this way recovered 175 new pages — including recognised climbs like Bamford Clough (the public road clears 20% over 25 m; its famous upper section is private and is not measured here), The Struggle above Ambleside, and a cobbled John Street in Heyrod. Each recovered page records where and how much of its original route was cut. A further set of candidates whose measurements sat suspiciously close to bridges and masked structures is held back for re-measurement rather than published.

2026-08-31 — Lanes the elevation model cannot see

Some lanes run so deeply sunken between banks, walls or hedges that the national elevation model holds no road surface where they go: what it records there is the bank, and a gradient read off it says more about exactly where the route line was drawn than about the hill. The survey now recognises that shape directly — no road bench under the line, and ground falling more than two metres across the metre either side of it — and excludes those stretches, publishing instead the steepest section it can actually resolve. Eighty-eight climbs carry the new exclusion and 42 of them see a published maximum change. The largest is Cotley Lane in Devon, whose steepest 5 m falls from 43.6% to 25.7%: the model never held a carriageway at that spot to measure. As always the displaced reading is kept and shown on the page, and no elevation data was altered.

2026-08-30 — Hillpark Road and The Walk re-measured

Two Scottish climbs are back on native survey lines. The map snapshot they were originally measured against no longer exists anywhere, so they were re-measured against a freshly fetched one — and both returned their published gradients unchanged, which also confirms those roads have not moved in the interval. No published gradient moved.

2026-08-30 — Thirteen climbs re-measured from scratch

Thirteen Welsh climbs whose original measurement runs were lost have been rebuilt from the raw data instead of recovered: the survey re-ran its own discovery and route-growing steps against the same LiDAR tiles and the same dated OpenStreetMap snapshot the pages were first measured from, and regenerated each route from the road up. Every one of the thirteen came back with its published gradients unchanged to two decimal places, which is the strongest evidence yet that the ladders on these pages were right all along. Ayron Street, Brynteg, Heol y Beiliau, Irene Street and Penrhiw Lane are among them.

2026-08-30 — Hardknott Pass and four more return to native lines

Hardknott Pass, Lowfield Lane's neighbours and four other climbs are back on their original survey lines. Their measurement runs were found in the project's cloud archive rather than on any working machine — several eras of output had never been searched. Each reproduces its published ladder exactly, so as with every step of this restoration, no published gradient moved.

2026-08-30 — Nine more restored, Bank Road and Pea Royd Lane among them

Nine further UK climbs are back on their native survey lines, including Bank Road in Matlock, Pea Royd Lane in Stocksbridge and Rosedale Chimney Bank. Their original measurement runs turned out to be sitting in an older set of working outputs that the restoration had not searched, and each one reproduces its published ladder exactly. No published gradient moved.

2026-08-30 — Ten more climbs rejoin the restored set

Ten further UK climbs are back on their native survey lines, including Llandeilo Road, Mountain Road, Rushock, Carr Street and Coronation Street. These were pages whose published gradients came from a masked measurement — a bridge deck, a tunnel mouth or dense canopy, which the survey excludes and measures around — so re-deriving them from the raw terrain could never reproduce the published figure. Re-running the full measurement pipeline, which applies that masking, matched every one of them exactly. As with the rest of the restoration, no published gradient moved.

2026-08-30 — UK pages get the linked charts — and their survey lines back

The linked charts that arrived on the US pages last week are now on the UK ones: hover or touch the map, the elevation profile or the gradient trace and a single cursor follows the same point across all three, reading out distance, elevation and gradient as it goes. Getting there meant a repair first. A recovery in August had rebuilt most UK route lines from the simplified copy used for the "open in geojson.io" links — roughly one point every 40 m — rather than the metre-by-metre line the published gradients were actually measured along. Those original lines have now been restored from the archived measurement runs, and each page's charts rebuilt from the exact samples behind its own published ladder. The published gradients themselves have not moved: where a restored series did not reproduce a page's numbers exactly, that page was left as it was rather than quietly redrawn. 1,606 of 1,661 UK climbs are back on their native survey lines; the rest keep their current charts while their lines are re-measured.

2026-08-30 — The restricted-fraction gate opens — 49 held climbs join

Downe Road's story generalized: an audit found 59 measured English climbs of 20%+ that the adoption pipeline had silently held because part of their route touches restricted-access ways. A window-local check split them: 17 whose steepest section is fully on open road joined with the restriction noted (topped by Mill Lane at 31.2% over 25 m); 25 more return after their private tail ways were trimmed off and the open road re-measured (led by a 38.7% Devon lane and Lindridge Hill at 30.7%); after an imagery review, 7 more join with access notes, 2 are confirmed private and stay out, and 7 — including a 41.8% lane that would top England if it holds up — await on-the-ground verification.

2026-08-30 — London's steepest road joins the survey

A reader-era blog audit (diamond geezer's "London's steepest hills") caught a gap: Downe Road in Cudham was laser-measured months ago — 23.1% over 25 m, the steepest thing we've measured inside Greater London — but never published, having slipped through an adoption pass. It's live now, with the blog credited on the page. The same cross-check confirmed BikeRadar's "7 steepest UK climbs" list against our measurements — including their Afon Ddu in the Conwy Valley, which is the unnamed lane above Dolgarrog this survey found by machine and lists as the UK's steepest at 36.6% over 25 m.

2026-08-29 — Linked charts — see exactly where the steep bit is

Every US climb page now speaks one visual language across its three graphics. The route on the map is painted by gradient — the red stretch on the map is the red spike in the chart — with distance markers every 500 m, and the climb's steepest 25 m is highlighted on the map, the elevation profile and the gradient chart alike. Move your pointer (or finger) over any of the three and a shared marker follows on all of them, reading out distance, elevation and gradient. The home-page ranking's ellipsis rows now say which ranks they span and where the full tables live. UK pages get the same treatment in a following update.

2026-08-29 — The gate-offset sweep — 46 more US lines corrected at their steepest point

A new audit compares every climb's steepest 25 m window against the state's own E911 road centerline: 69 ranked climbs had their headline window measured 8–26 m off the mapped road — a bank or hillside beside it — while the rest of the route tracked the road faithfully. Forty-six re-measured lines validate and go live (Sodom Road falls from 32.9% to 13.9%); most corrected down, but Old Cricket Hill Road's honest line is steeper — 29.5% over 25 m, laser-verified as a built road bed. The rest stay held for deeper review. A same-day hand-check pass with the surveyor's own eyes on Street View settled fifteen more: two routes had begun on the wrong road entirely (Flagg Hill Road's 23.1% ramp belonged to Burnt Hill Road; West Cornwall Road started on a covered-bridge approach), and Taft Road became the first climb corrected by the laser alone — its line rode a stream-gully edge, so we moved it onto the road bed the point cloud itself detects (23.4% becomes 20.5%, and the cross-section now reads clean road the whole way).

2026-08-28 — The US re-line pass — 25 measurement lines moved onto the real road

A LiDAR cross-section audit found routes whose measurement line sat metres off the actual road bed — sampling ditch banks and hillsides instead of tarmac. Twenty-five US climbs are re-measured on lines snapped to their state's own road inventory, each move verified against the laser's detected road bench. Most corrected downward (the steepest window was a ditch), but two corrected up: Worden Road's honest line is 28.7% over 25 m, not 20.5%. Spiegel Road also returns: an OpenStreetMap mapper moved its mapped way onto the real road, and the fresh line measures 22.1% over 25 m. Two same-day Street View catches joined the pass: Warren Hill Road (Jay, ME) was measured up to 20 m off the E911 road at its steepest window (27.0% falls to 15.8%), and Navin Avenue (Lee, MA) began on a bridge deck whose under-span riverbank read as a 34% ramp (23.7% falls to 19.0%), and Richardson Hollow Road (Greenwood, ME) — whose line bulged 15 m onto a roadside bank at its steepest window — drops from 26.8% to 19.7%, now measured on the road's real hill.

2026-08-28 — Community-reviewed pages return, and culvert fixes reach New Hampshire

Two New Hampshire climbs retired by our imagery audit — May Street (Enfield) and Eastman Hill Road (Lebanon) — are back: an OpenStreetMap mapper reviewed our MapRoulette audit tasks and confirmed both roads exist as mapped. Their pages return with fresh measurements and the reviewer credited. The same audit round completed the New England culvert cross-section survey (New Hampshire's tiles were previously unreadable), correcting three live pages whose steepest windows sat on drainage artifacts — Hale Road's headline drops from 20.8% to 12.1% over 25 m.

2026-08-28 — The fame door opens — 47 storied climbs the dials alone had missed

An audit of every National Hill Climb Championship venue and Simon Warren top-100 entry against the full measured corpus found dozens of famous climbs that were surveyed long ago but never paged — the recognition matcher had only ever seen the published site, so a legend that wasn't steep enough for the dials had no door in. It does now. Forty-seven new pages, led by Winnats Pass (venue of eleven national championships), Park Rash's hairpins at 24.8% over 25 m, Mow Cop's Killer Mile, the world's oldest hill-climb course on Yorks Hill, and Vale Street in Bristol at 27.2% — plus Cheddar Gorge, Cat and Fiddle, Holme Moss, Hartside and Michaelgate's cobbles, paged on fame rather than gradient. Two long-published lanes turn out to be Boltby Bank and Langcliffe Scar and now carry their names; recognition chips land on seven more existing pages. Every route ran the full QA battery; three had bend-cut line offsets re-sited to the OS centreline before adoption, which is why Rowsley Bar's ladder says an honest 22.6% rather than the 48% the raw line wanted to claim.

2026-08-27 — England and Scotland join the chain wave — 54 more short, steep streets

The fragment-chain screen swept England and Scotland overnight: 26,979 English fragments chained to 295 candidates and Scotland's to 14, every one through extend, the full QA battery and the line-offset re-site round. 50 England climbs and 5 Scotland climbs (one, on the Wye at Tintern, was the same Welsh road found from both sides of the border — counted once) clear the bar and join the catalogue, led by Eden Mount in Cumbria at 29.8% over 25 m; 245 English and 9 Scottish candidates are held with recorded reasons — off the road network, unresolved line-offset flags, or simply below the page bar. No ranking crowns change.

2026-08-27 — The streets the screen was built for — 22 join Wales, and a new UK crown

A new discovery instrument — the fragment-chain screen — went looking for short steep streets that OpenStreetMap splits into pieces too small for the standard search to score. Its Wales pilot adds 22 climbs, every one through the full extend, QA and measurement-integrity battery (line-offset against the OS centreline, Terrain-50 cross-check, bridge-flank scan, road audit), with flagged candidates re-sited onto the centreline and re-measured or held. Among them: Pen Dref in Harlech (22.1% over 25 m, two streets from Ffordd Pen Llech — reported by a reader of the survey, provisional pending one review) — and a new UK steepest-25 m crown: the hydro service road climbing the Afon Porth-llwyd gorge above Dolgarrog at 36.6%, listed with a plain caveat because its riding rights are unresolved. That is the new policy working as intended: a real road lists, with its restriction stated.

2026-08-27 — Restricted-access climbs join the rankings — with their caveat

A real road now lists with its restriction stated rather than being ranked away. The US toll and state-park roads (Mount Washington Auto Road among them) join the ranking tables carrying a controlled-access note on the row, with details on each page — and the same policy will hold for UK climbs with uncertain rights of way as they arrive. Roads whose physical existence the inventories cannot vouch for remain held until verified: access uncertainty is noted; existence uncertainty is not ranked.

2026-08-27 — US pages stop speaking British — and rankings get a surface toggle

Outside review caught UK boilerplate riding on US pages, and it was right. Every discovered US climb page claimed a cross-check "against the OS road network" — there is no Ordnance Survey in Vermont; those pages now describe the checks the US pipeline actually runs (state road inventory, OpenStreetMap, point-cloud evidence). Footers now credit the sources actually under each survey's numbers — USGS 3DEP and the state road inventories for the US — and the licensing page lists the US sources it owes. The US map now frames all six states (Maine, half the corpus, sat outside the old opening view) and no longer describes overlay layers only the UK map has. The reuse credit becomes "HowSteep — howsteep.org" sitewide, shared pages (format, licensing, about, submit, updates) drop their UK-only titles, the submit form now suggests US climbs too, and the survey cards state both of a country's numbers: pages published and climbs in the public-road rankings. Pipeline working notes no longer ride into published climb documents. And every ranking table gains a surface view: paved roads are the preselected default, with an all-surfaces toggle for gravel and mixed roads (UK climbs are paved by the survey's own scope; US surfaces come from each state's road inventory) — and table notes say plainly that a ranked row may be a brief sharp pitch or a long traditional climb, with the length and overall columns telling you which. The about page now walks through what the Cefn Llan 32% sign would have to mean: the survey finds that slope only at the 2 m scale, exactly where measurement is hardest.

2026-08-26 — US homepage catches up with the UK — and every page gets a date

The US index now mirrors the UK homepage: steepest 10/25/50/100 m tables, largest net rise, and a searchable, sortable catalogue of all published US climbs with state, surface, status and confidence filters. The methodology page gained a "How the US survey differs" section (elevation sources, canopy checks from the point cloud, state road inventories, and the road-existence audit). Every page footer now carries the data-and-reviews-as-of date you are reading here.

2026-08-26 — The road-existence audit — 26 pages retired, the map thanked

A new instrument asks the LiDAR point cloud whether a physically graded road bed exists along each route, with aerial imagery covering the flat ground where geometry alone cannot decide. It audited all 10,672 measured New England routes overnight: roughly 4,600 roads came back physically confirmed, and 26 published pages failed human review of the evidence and were retired — the US count fell from 1,433 to 1,407. Verified map errors were returned to the OpenStreetMap community as a MapRoulette challenge, because the map this survey is built on deserves the findings back.

2026-08-25 — New England at full scale — 1,433 US pages

The discovery waves landed: every published US row now carries a surface chip from its state's own road inventory, rankings hold public roads of any surface with a paved-only filter, roads the inventories cannot vouch for sit in a labelled "road status under review" table rather than the rankings, and each ranked row's steepest window was checked against the inventory individually.

2026-08-23 — HowSteep US launches — New England's founding set

The survey crosses the Atlantic on the same method and the same rules, measured from the public-domain USGS 3DEP 1 m laser surveys: the famous gap roads and hillclimb courses of New England alongside steep lanes only the locals knew.

2026-08-21 — One survey, per-country structure — and settled licensing

The UK survey moved to howsteep.org/uk/ (old links redirect) and the front page now introduces the survey as a whole, with the United States (New England first) in preparation. Licensing settled and published: any individual climb's page and charts are CC BY 4.0, the dataset is ODbL 1.0, and every downloadable climb document now states its licence. The methodology page now documents how the numbers are policed — the masks, the post-batch detector battery, and the human review that adjudicates every flag.

2026-08-20 — Measurement-integrity audit — the climb count went down

A corpus-wide audit retired roughly 95 pages whose headline measurements failed scrutiny (route lines off the carriageway, masked-structure artifacts, roads newer than the elevation survey beneath them) and re-sited 156 routes onto the Ordnance Survey road centreline. 1,500 climbs live. Retirements are public policy: an error we published and caught is removed, not quietly patched.

2026-08-19 — Great-Britain-wide re-pick — 798 pages

The page-selection rules were re-applied across every measured road in Great Britain, growing the site from 523 to 798 pages (England 221→411, Wales 210→272, Scotland 51→59) and rescuing climbs earlier versions had wrongly excluded, Honister Pass among them. Area labels reworked to name where each climb starts.

2026-08-18 — Northern Ireland joins — all four nations measured

Northern Ireland's open river-basin LiDAR reaches roughly a quarter of its roads — enough to measure Belfast's steepest streets, not yet the Antrim coast. Six pages at launch, measured the same way as everywhere else.

2026-08-17 — Scotland launches on a growing record

49 climbs from Scotland's open LiDAR patchwork (the national programme is capturing the rest of the country through 2027). Published exactly what the open record supports — a famous missing hill is almost always waiting for data, not judgement.

2026-08-16 — England launches

212 English climbs measured from Environment Agency LiDAR join the survey after the bulk-tile campaign.

2026-08-13 — Recognition, provisional names and the report form

Climb pages now show which books, championships and road signs match each measurement — recorded as evidence and tested, never copied. Machine-suggested names are marked provisional (°), and a no-account-needed report form collects signs, names, gates and corrections.

2026-08-12 — howsteep.org goes live — the Wales survey

257 Welsh climbs, every gradient stated with its measuring distance, born from one contradictory road sign above Aberystwyth.