Air Travel Discount
Links of interest for your travel plans
Climbing
Guides
If you’re on a rock climbing road trip or
just climbing in a new area, a climbing guide is going to be one of
your best friends. Printed climbing guides can be found for
just about every rock climbing crag in the country, well-known or
not. The route-by-route (or boulder by boulder, if
you’re in a bouldering area) guides are usually collected in
books which, in turn, generally organize themselves by geographical
area. Most guidebooks attach themselves to states or portions
of states, like the Southern California Bouldering Guide.
Depending on the size of the area and its popularity, you may be able
to find guidebooks which deal with one specific location. For
example, Joshua Tree National Park has had a host of climbing guides
written about it since the park has literally thousands of routes and
boulder problems within its boundaries. Rock n’ Road is a
guide which covers all 50 states, and though it gives general crag
descriptions instead of detailed route guides it is still perhaps a
road-trippers best weapon, since it lets him or her travel all over
and, with the help of a good road atlas, find climbing from coast to
coast.
Once you get to the crag though, an actual route guide will help you
find the routes and problems that are fun, classic, and/or within your
ability level. If more than one guide is available for your
destination, take a look at the different guides’ route
descriptions. How detailed are they? How well do
they correlate to the drawings of the crags or the photos of the
routes? Are they easy to understand? Do the guides
have overview maps so you can find your way around once you get to the
crag? Do the guides even tell you how to get to the
crag? Though most climbing guides out there are pretty well
written and will help you find the routes you want easily, a bad guide
can easily ruin your day, since a bad guide means a day of hiking
around, trying to figure out where you are and where you’re
going, instead of a day on the rock.
If you can’t find a printed guide for the crag you want, take
a look in a local outdoor shop or, even better, in a local climbing
shop or indoor rock gym. Sometimes smaller local climbing
areas have printed guides which can be found at area businesses for a
few dollars which can’t be found anywhere else.
Sometimes these guides are terrible, full of bad drawings and worse
descriptions, but often they’ll be just what you’re
looking for.