About this archive

On many summits there is a canister, and in the canister a register: a notebook, a few loose sheets, sometimes pages going back before your parents were born. Signing it is the summit ritual. Photographing the page you signed is already half the ritual too — this archive simply gives those photos somewhere to matter.

Registers are lost constantly. They fill up and get packed out, or rot, or freeze, or are stolen; some are removed by land managers. A fraction reach institutional archives — the Sierra Club’s registers, dating to the 1860s, rest at the Bancroft Library — but almost none of that record is digitized or searchable. Most of it simply disappears.

Here, every uploaded page is transcribed by a vision model — names, dates, hometowns, and the notes parties leave — then indexed so anyone can search for a name. Machine transcription of weathered handwriting is imperfect, so every page shows its photo beside its transcription, uncertainty is marked, and corrections are welcome.

This is a preservation project, not a scorekeeping one. There are no rankings, no verification, no accounts of who climbed what fastest. Just the pages, kept.

Photos remain the property of their photographers and are credited on every page. Registers on peaks are community property; treat them gently, sign them, and leave them for the next party.