Why I built Mountain Passes
The story behind Mountain Passes. Why an app for tracking mountain pass crossings exists, and who it's built for.
Mountain Passes started as a small favour for my sister and her boyfriend.
They're both motorcycling enthusiasts. Every summer they ride off into the Alps for a week or two, come back with hundreds of photos, and spend the next few weeks trying to piece together which passes they actually crossed. Names blur together after a long day in the saddle. Their photos help, but they're not organised. Strava logs the ride but doesn't know what a pass is. Notes apps and pinned maps all failed the same way. They required you to do something at the moment of crossing, which is exactly when you're least inclined to stop, take your gloves off, and type.
So I started building something simple. An iPhone app that detects when you ride over a mountain pass (by motorcycle, or anything else) and logs it automatically. No buttons. No check-ins. Ride over the top and the app notices.
Then I realised I wanted it too.
The cyclist side
I live in the Alps and ride a bike. Some passes I've crossed thirty times. Others I've missed despite living here for years because they're in the next valley over. Mountain Passes gave me what I didn't know I needed: a map of what I'd done and what I hadn't. I started planning rides to fill the gaps. I added a 20 km detour to pick up a pass I'd driven over but never cycled. The app turned the collection into the reason to ride, not just the record of it.
The driver side
The same thing happened when I was driving with friends. We'd take a long weekend through the Dolomites or the French Alps, I'd open the app in the evening, and there'd be passes on the map I hadn't known we'd crossed. Tiny tertiary roads that happened to cross a col. Service routes that technically counted. The collection kept surprising me.
The posters
That's where the vintage travel posters come in. Three hundred and eleven of the most storied passes in the world (Stelvio, Tourmalet, Grossglockner, Transfăgărășan) have a collectible poster that unlocks when you cross that pass for the first time. It's a small reward, but it turns a GPS coordinate into a moment. Something to show off to your sister.
What's free, what's Pro
The free version is the collection. Auto-log, browse all 9,300+ passes, unlock posters, earn achievements. That's what my sister and her boyfriend wanted, and it's free forever.
Pro is for people who want to look back at their rides and plan new ones. A ride timeline that shows every crossing, every rest stop, every kilometre. Multi-day trips that group rides into a story. A bucket list of passes to chase. POI marking so you remember that perfect viewpoint or the mechanic who saved your chain.
The way I think about it: free is for collecting. Pro is for storytelling.
What's next
Mountain Passes launches on iPhone this spring. iPad and Mac come along as companions, with bigger screens for browsing passes, reviewing rides, and admiring the poster wall. The database grows weekly. The poster collection grows as I finish each new batch of illustrations.
If you want to know the day it ships, drop your email on the homepage. One email, launch day, that's it.
