The Weagle Register publishes claims about a man who documented most of his own records.
That problem shapes the whole system: the evidence stamp is a component, the milepost is
a component, and nothing on this site states a fact without saying where it came from.
Every page loads weagle.css. This page is the only place the tokens are
explained. The swatches below read their values from the live stylesheet at runtime, so
if a hex here looks wrong, production is already wrong.
Birch fog and spruce ink, with one loud yellow lifted off an Auto Road toll stub.
Nine values. Yellow is the only fill. Red is a verdict, never a button.
--paper
Page ground. Cool birch grey-green. Deliberately not cream: cream plus a serif is every other history site.
--rime
Raised surfaces only: panels, demo boxes, table fill. Named for the ice that grows on the summit buildings.
--ink
Body text and the footer rule. Spruce black, never #000.
--ink-2
Lead paragraphs and secondary copy. One step down, not a grey.
--fog
Meta, captions, milepost numbers. Clears 4.5:1 on --paper, so it is safe down to the 11px micro size.
--toll
The signature. Tickets, milepost markers, the road centre line, the “claimed” stamp. Always with ink text on top, never white.
--toll-deep
Toll yellow as text. Raw --toll sits at 1.5:1 on paper and is unreadable; this is the text-safe substitute at 5.1:1. In dark mode both resolve to the same value.
--spruce
Links and the “documented” stamp. Green means somebody checked.
--hazard
“Disputed” only. Sources conflict, reader beware. It is not an error colour, not a delete button, not a hover state.
Dark mode
Toggle “Rime” in the top bar. Dark mode swaps ground and ink and lightens spruce and hazard so they
stay legible; --toll does not move. The choice persists in localStorage
and defaults to the reader's system setting.
Milepost 2.0 · type
Three families, three jobs
Bricolage Grotesque for headings, because its narrow widths read like mid-century road
signage. Newsreader for body, because the primary evidence for almost everything on this
site is a 1950s newspaper. IBM Plex Mono for data, because dates and grades are data.
Lead paragraph. Newsreader 300, 19px / 1.5, capped at 58 characters.
Body copy. Newsreader 400 at 16px / 1.62, capped at 68 characters. Numbers stay specific and sourced: the road is 7.6 miles, the summit is 6,288 feet, the sack of sugar was 100 pounds.
Meta · 13px mono · uppercase · tracking 0.1em
Micro · 11px mono · captions, mileposts, stamps
Sentence case is a rule, not a preference
Headline-style capitalisation makes a fan page sound like a press release. This site is a register. Registers are written in sentence case.
Numerals are tabular
Use .num anywhere figures stack: years, mileposts, participant counts. font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums keeps register columns from wobbling.
Milepost 3.0 · controls
Tickets and ghosts
Two buttons. The ticket is cut from a toll stub, perforated edge and all. The ghost is
an outline. Hover lifts one pixel and changes nothing else.
One ticket per view. It goes to the thing the page exists for: file a first, read the register, open the source.
Don't
Don't build a red button, a gradient button, or a third button style. Don't put white text on --toll. Don't round anything past 2px.
Milepost 4.0 · evidence
The stamp
Asked whether her uncle's records were ever verified, Weagle's family answered:
he said he did. That is the honest position, and it is the reason this
component exists. Four grades, applied to every claim on the site.
Documented
A contemporaneous newspaper report, photograph, or official Auto Road record exists and is linked.
Attested
Repeated consistently by multiple independent later sources. No primary document has been seen.
Claimed
Traces back to Weagle himself, or to a single retelling. Printed here because the claim is part of the story, not because it is settled.
Disputed
Reliable sources contradict each other. The conflict is shown, not resolved.
.stamp.stamp--{documented|attested|claimed|disputed} · 3px left border carries the grade
Worked example — the death year.
The current site says Weagle died in 1979. The Auto Road, the Conway Daily Sun and a 2011
Associated Press story all say 1984, the AP adding that he was 73 and quoting his niece
Barbara Weagle of Groveton. One source is a website; three are independent and one is
contemporaneous reporting with a named family member.
Documented1911–1984 · AP via Bangor Daily News, 30 May 2011
Milepost 5.0 · register
Entry rows
The register is the site. One first ascent, one row: when, who, what the “first” was,
and how well it holds up. Rows are ruled like a ledger, not boxed like cards.
1950s
Pushed a wheelbarrow carrying a 100-pound sack of sugar the length of the Auto Road without setting it down.
Alton Weagle
Attested
1955
Married Cora Carter aboard the Cog Railway at Jacob's Ladder.
Alton Weagle
Attested
2017
First ascent of the Auto Road dressed as Walt Whitman, reading aloud from Leaves of Grass.
Dan Szczesny
Documented
2019
First ascent while dressed as a can of Tab.
Michelle McElroy
Documented
1950s
Climbed Mount Washington in every month of the year.
Alton Weagle
Claimed
.entry · grid 5.5rem / 1fr / auto · collapses to one column under 620px
Panels and callouts
Panel
Rime fill, hairline border, 2px radius. Presentational. Panels do not have hover states because panels are not links.
Callout
Toll-yellow left rule for things the reader needs to notice. Swap to .callout--hazard when the note is a caution or a source conflict.
Dates live in one file
The old site hardcoded Weagle Day twice, as 2 May 2026 in index.html and
23 May 2026 in script.js, and both went stale. Event dates now come from
event.js and nowhere else, and an unconfirmed date renders with its own
wording rather than a silent countdown.
Milepost 6.0 · photography
Archive images carry their credit
The surviving photographs of Weagle come from his family, published with credit. They are
not stock. Every <figure> ships with a <figcaption>
naming the source, and the caption is not optional markup.
Alton Weagle setting out on one of his record-breaking climbs. Courtesy of Barbara Weagle, via Dan Szczesny, Appalachia 69:1 (2018).
Treatment
filter: grayscale(1) contrast(1.04) on every archive image. The originals are halftone newsprint and family prints; a uniform grey keeps a 1950s photograph and a 2019 phone snapshot from fighting each other.
Hairline border. No rounded corners. No drop shadows. No duotone.
Rights are not settled by attribution alone. Before publishing any family photograph,
get permission in writing and record it on the Sources page. A credit line is a courtesy;
a licence is the thing that matters.
Milepost 7.6 · summit
Hard rules
Break these and the page stops looking like the Weagle Register.
No ungraded claims. If a sentence asserts a fact about Weagle or an ascent, it carries a stamp or it links a source. “Legend has it” is not a grade.
Toll yellow is the only fill. One ticket per view. Hazard red is a verdict, never a control.
The road is 7.6 miles. Plenty of published accounts say eight. Mileposts run 0.0 to 7.6 and stop there.
Sentence case everywhere. Headings, buttons, captions. Mono labels are the one uppercase exception.
Three families only. Bricolage Grotesque, Newsreader, IBM Plex Mono. A fourth font is a bug.
Archive photos ship with a credit. No caption, no publish.
Dates come from event.js. Never hardcode a Weagle Day into a page again.
Radius budget is 2px. This is a ledger, not a dashboard.
Be funny about the ascents, straight about the facts. The subject matter is a man who climbed a mountain backwards. The sourcing is not a joke.
