A Brief History
To understand the guidebook, it’s best to start at the beginning. The rough concept of a guidebook (i.e., mapping a crag or line) surely pre-dates formal documentation or mass distribution — it could have been as simple as a map of a ridgeline drawn on a napkin in a mountain café in the Alps. Here in America, the formal guidebook’s history is easier to track.

Early on, climbers in two crucibles of American climbing, Yosemite and Colorado’s Front Range, both relied on oral transmission to disseminate route info. According to Stewart Green, who started climbing in 1965 around Colorado Springs, “There weren’t really any climbing guidebooks available at all...everything was passed on by word of mouth, even into the 1970s.” And given that there were few climbers and FAs ripe for the picking, it makes sense that few recorded info on their lines.

Then, in 1967, Pat Ament and Cleveland McCarthy published the first guidebook for the Front Range: High Over Boulder. The book covered the Flatirons, Boulder Canyon, and Eldorado Canyon, using photographs of the crags and short descriptions of the routes. It also included a brief discourse on ethics and the geology of the Front Range, information still standard in today‘s guidebooks. For Green, as well as other Colorado Springs climbers like Jimmy Dunn and Billy Westbay, when they went up to climb in Boulder, the book was their Bible — “We tried to climb all the routes in High Over Boulder,” says Green of the 200+ route tome.

Yosemite followed a similar progression. Steve Roper wrote the first guidebook for the area in the early 1960s, using a model similar to High Over Boulder’s English route descriptions. However, as Jim Bridwell states in an introduction to a later Yosemite guide, “The format…was lengthy and inappropriate for the flocks of climbers arriving from non-English speaking countries.” As Yosemite grew, a new format was needed.

In the 1970s, George Meyers created a system for mapping routes, using lines and symbols to represent roofs, corners, cracks, and other features. His hand-drawn topos more easily translated to the the realities of a climb and transcended language barriers. He published a collection of 350 select topos in his book Yosemite Climbs (circa 1977). Such topos have continued to change and evolve into the forms seen in most guidebooks today.