How to Track Your Munros: Log Book, Spreadsheet or App?

Every Munroist tracks their round somehow. For some it is a pencil tick in the back of a battered guidebook; for others a colour-coded spreadsheet maintained with the devotion of an accountant. Increasingly, it is a Munro tracker app that does the counting automatically. None of these methods is wrong — but they are genuinely different, and the right one depends on how you like to remember your days on the hill.

The paper log book

The traditional approach: a notebook, a printed list, or the index of a guidebook with summits ticked off in pen. There is real charm here. A paper record never runs out of battery, survives decades, and a tea-stained page recording your first Ben Lomond ascent in 2009 carries a weight no database entry can match.

The weaknesses are practical. Paper records one thing — that you climbed the hill — and everything else (date, weather, who you were with, which route) depends on your discipline at the kitchen table afterwards. Lose the book and you lose the round. If you want a printable starting point, our free Munro checklist lists all 282 peaks by region with tick boxes.

The spreadsheet

The Munro spreadsheet is a beloved institution. Columns for date, height, region, companions, weather; conditional formatting turning rows green; a running total in a frozen header. If you enjoy data, a spreadsheet is endlessly customisable and it is yours forever — no app shutdown can take it from you.

The drawbacks are the flip side of that freedom. You build everything yourself, you update it manually after every trip, and it lives on a laptop rather than in your pocket. A spreadsheet also knows nothing about the hills themselves: no maps, no routes, no weather. It records your round but cannot help you plan it.

The tracker app

A dedicated app does the bookkeeping automatically. Log a climb in our Munros app and the totals, percentages, regional breakdowns and "what is left" lists update themselves. The log lives on your phone — the device you already carry up the hill — so climbs get recorded on the summit rather than reconstructed at home. Photos, dates, companions and conditions attach to each entry, and because the app also carries routes, maps and summit forecasts, the same tool that records your round helps you plan the next outing.

The honest caveats: apps need a charged phone, and your data lives with a provider rather than in a drawer. Choose one that lets you export your log (ours exports GPX and CSV) so your round is portable.

What most people actually do

In practice, many hillwalkers combine methods: an app as the working record, with an occasional export or a paper list as the permanent archive. That gets you automatic counting and on-hill convenience without trusting your twenty-year project to any single system.

However you track, the important thing is to start with your very first summit — reconstructing fifteen years of half-remembered climbs is a winter project nobody enjoys. Pick a method, log the round so far, and keep it current from here.