A couple weeks ago at the Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City, Globe Pequot Press and Falcon Guides received a few advance copies of their forthcoming guidebook Bouldering Colorado by long-time Colorado boulderer and author Bob Horan. The hefty 598-page volume, detailing around 4,000 boulder problems, was quickly perused and then dissed by a small posse of Boulder climbers attending the show.

Their primary beef was that a couple of their pet “secret” areas—Chaos Canyon at Rocky Mountain National Park and a handful of boulders in the Mount Evans Wilderness Area—were included and were, as Jamie Emerson noted on his B3Bouldering blog, “rife with gratuitous mistakes.” He also wrote, “I flipped through the book in 20 minutes or so and what I saw was appalling, embarrassing, and the source of much entertainment.” Based on this quick 20-minute review, Emerson and a handful of other climbers quickly spread the rumor throughout the OR show as well as on various internet blogs that the book was filled with mistakes and have actively campaigned to have the book banned…even though it hasn’t even been released yet. All this based on a 20-minute review. Hmmmmm.

I, however, looked very closely at the book, took it to some of my local areas in central Colorado, and talked to some active Colorado boulderers about some of the sections. They related that, yes, there are mistakes in both the Rocky Mountain and Mount Evans sections. Some problems are misnamed and misrated. Some boulders are misnamed and some have the wrong problems on them. Some directions are confusing. So there are misaccuracies. It’s not an excuse, but almost every climbing guidebook out there has errors. Guides detail thousands and thousands of bits of factual information, so errors creep in. If you’re dealing with thousands of problems on hundreds of boulders, there will be mistakes. That’s life.

The question then is how factual is Bouldering Colorado? Are there sufficient errors to warrant the wholesale trashing of the book? Does the book work in all the other areas included besides Rocky Mountain and Mount Evans? I asked another group of experts that aren’t as invested in those two areas as the Boulder posse to have a look at the book and give me their honest opinion.

These are some of the comments I heard: “Wow, there are a lot of problems and boulders in there that I never knew existed. I’m psyched to get out to some of these new areas;” “Most climbers aren’t going to be going to Chaos Canyon and Mount Evans anyway since most of the problems are too hard for them;” “Those are just a bunch of elitist little s—ts that don’t like it that a bunch of no-names are going to go to their secret areas—but they should have thought about that before they sprayed about the problems all over the net and in the mags;” “I don’t like it that Horan felt like he had to name all the problems but for the area around Grand Junction it looks pretty good;” “I counted just 33 problems in Chaos Canyon and 63 at Mount Evans in the book and there are some mistakes with them, but heck, that’s not many problems in the book and the season at those areas is just a few months each year;” and lastly, “I don’t see many problems…problems ha ha…with the book, just a few areas. I say if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Better yet, put your money where your mouth is and do something better—that I would like to see!”

I’ve worked with Falcon and Globe Pequot for over 20 years now and they’ve published most of my books. I say this as a disclaimer though—I have no vested interest in Bouldering Colorado and I see mistakes with the book too. Nonetheless, after conversations with Executive Editor Scott Adams and other Falcon editors, I feel that Falcon is seriously addressing the book’s mistakes and trying to rectify them in a fair manner. When I first saw the book, I asked if Rocky Mountain National Park had had an opportunity to review the section before publication, and yes, the park did read and approve the manuscript and asked for some corrections to be made. Likewise, Globe Pequot Press has long worked with the Access Fund and is a major contributor to their efforts to keep our climbing areas open. What else is a book publisher supposed to do?

I’ve always found Globe Pequot to be a responsible outdoor publisher, as well as extremely sensitive to environmental abuses and human impact, which can occur as a result of guidebooks. They tell me that they are taking all constructive criticism and suggested corrections from boulderers very seriously and will publish all that updated information on their Falcon Guides website. Globe/Falcon, like every other publisher, relies on their authors to give correct and vetted information that has also been properly approved by management agencies like the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management. In this case, Falcon has to rely on Bob Horan, a long-time Colorado climber, to put together an accurate and factual manuscript and have it approved. This is what he did and if there are mistakes in Bouldering Colorado, they are his responsibility—after all it’s his name on the cover.

What are your thoughts about Bouldering Colorado? Should the mistakes warrant the trashing of the book? Are a few climbers just being elitist and not wanting anyone else invading their secret turf? Do climbers have a right to complain about a guidebook when they’ve been publishing articles and photos about their areas in the magazines and on the internet? What happens with guides at your local areas? Don’t boulderers do a lot more environmental damage with their crash pads compacting the ground below problems and creating trails to boulders through fragile sub-alpine and alpine ecosystems at Mount Evans and Rocky Mountain National Park than a guidebook? Go to the Climbing Forum and put your thoughts down. Let’s keep it civil though!

Photo above: The cover of Bouldering Colorado by Bob Horan.
Compare prices and buy Bouldering Colorado

An already deadly summer in the European Alps turned even more tragic with the deaths of eight more climbers on 15,780-foot-high Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain, early last Sunday morning. As of today the climbers, five Austrians and three Swiss, are missing and presumed dead and buried after an early morning avalanche swept over them as they ascended Mont Blanc du Tacul, a sub-peak of Mont Blanc, along a popular climbing route to the highest summit. After heroic attempts by French rescuers, including digging some survivors from the snow, French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said, “There’s no chance of finding anyone alive.”

Early Sunday morning, August 24, a large group of climbers was ascending the route to the summit of Mont Blanc du Tacul, undoubtedly to witness a beautiful alpine sunrise. They were doing everything right, having left in the early morning hours when there is less avalanche danger and following the worn path across the upper glaciers. At about 3 a.m., a huge block or serac of ice, 218 yards long or twice the length of a football field, broke away at 11,800 feet and quickly engulfed the climbers. One survivor, Nicolas Duquesne from France, recalled, “The guide shouted ‘Run fast! Run fast!'” He and six others were able to escape the avalanche, but eight were caught and swept 3,000 feet down the mountain’s north flank.

The area where the avalanche occurred is prone to avalanche. A similar accident occurred in mid-August 2006, when a slab avalanche, also on Mont Blanc du Tacul (4248m), hit 10 climbers and killed two French men. Last week a 68-year-old Japanese climber fell off Mont Blanc while descending from the summit. On August 7 Ian Jackson, a 19-year-old British climber, died in a sport climbing accident after apparently incorrectly threading the chains at an anchor on Les Gaillands crag below Mont Blanc. He recently wrote on his blog: “These last years I've lost my belly, and took climbing seriously, finding it a vent from life, and somewhere to push myself competitively. I've learned a lot about myself, some of it good, some of it bad. Climbing is my demon, but it's also my cure.” In late July this year, an accident on nearby Mont Dolent claimed the lives of four Dutch climbers, a father and his son and two daughters, after they fell while descending. This summer, over 100 climbers have died in the Alps since June 1, with over 25 on the Mont Blanc massif alone.

Photo above: The avalanche occurred in the middle of the glaciated north face of Mont Blanc du Tacul.
Photo courtesy Neil Wilkie

Last week I was guiding a climbing trip for Front Range Climbing Company over at Colorado National Monument near Grand Junction. Our clients were 46 kids from Cyprus on a U.S. State Department-sponsored trip. Half the kids from the divided island were from the Turkish sector and the other half from the Greek. The idea is that by coming to a neutral site in the United States, the teenagers will become friends and understand each other better in hopes that eventually Cyprus will be re-united. Cool idea. Great kids.

All that aside, it was hot out at the Monument. We got there well before seven in the morning to get the top-ropes and rappel line set up, then the kids came and were outfitted with shoes and harnesses. By the time we hiked to the Monument Slabs it was close to 90 degrees. At noon the storm of sunlight had reached a baking 96 degrees in the shade. I followed four of my five tips to avoid heat-related illnesses by drinking lots of water and sports drinks, replacing essential salts, wearing light-colored clothes and a hat, and keeping alert for signs of over-heating in both myself and the kids. The only tip I didn’t follow was avoiding the heat of the day. But four out of five ain’t too bad!

To find out more about keeping cool and avoiding summer heat problems, read my newest article on Summer Rock Climbing—5 Tips to Avoid Heat-Related Illness. It has lots of great ideas to keep cool on the remaining hot days of summer when you’re out rock climbing.

Photo Above: Greek and Turkish Cypriots belaying at the Monument Slabs.
Photo © Stewart M. Green

In the 1980s British climber Johnny Dawes, born in 1964, was simply one of the world’s best and most singular rock climbers. Dawes climbed with boldness, a compact dynamism, and a sure strength. His best medium was gritstone—a solid, fine-grained sandstone that forms short cliff edges in central England’s Peak District. To climb extreme gritstone routes requires an innate sense of balance, the precision of a gymnast, and an understanding of the nuances and subtleties of the rock itself. Dawes had all these qualities.

British climbing writer Jim Perrin calls Johnny Dawes one of the “four great gritstone climbers,” along with rock legends Joe Brown, Don Whillans, and John Allen. Dawes climbed ahead of his time, putting up heady 5.12 gritstone routes like Gaia at Black Rocks and End of the Affair at Curbar Edge. Johnny Dawes was also the subject of the 1987 film Stone Monkey, which still ranks as one of the finest climbing movies ever made.

This quote comes from a 1987 article about Dawes entitled “Playpower and The Cosmic Rascal” in the British magazine Climber by Jim Perrin, who himself was a leading Brit climber in the sixties and seventies as well as an astute observer of the climbing scene. Perrin also wrote some excellent climbing books, including Yes, To Dance from which this quote comes, On and Off the Rocks, Menlove, and the recent absorbing biography The Villain: The Life of Don Whillans. Dawe’s quote is about the climbing god that occasionally enters you and elevates this sometimes banal irrelevant activity to the sphere of creativity and art.

“It’s…the Roman idea that the gods are not creatures out there in space, they actually come into people and the people become gods—gods of love, gods of war. There’s definitely a climbing god which comes into you in the Roman sense. You don’t know why you’re climbing so well—it’s nothing physical, you could have been porking away for two or three weeks and suddenly you’re climbing brilliantly. It’s not mental, it’s soul, it runs deep. That’s why on-sight climbing is so much more compelling and important than any other climbing. If you want to produce a piece of climbing art, you’ve got to bleed to produce it."

More About Johnny Dawes:
Johnny Dawes website
Clip from Stone Monkey

Buy books by Jim Perrin:
The Villain: The Life of Don Whillans A superb intimate biography of the great British climber.
On and Off the Rocks A collection of climbing stories.
The Climbing Essays A collection of the best of Perrin's climbing essays.

Photo Above: Johnny Dawes on his runout masterpiece “Gaia.”
Photo courtesy johnnydawes.com