The Vision
With the immense amount of work required to produce a guidebook, and all the grumbling and outright criticism (from climbers who’ll nonetheless use the book), it’s a wondered anybody undertakes writing a guidebook at all.

For some, however, the prospect isn’t one they seek so much as it falls in their lap. Consider Chris MacNamara, founder of Supertopo: “I got fired up on Yosemite, climbed El Cap as much as possible and realized I was probably one of the few people who was climbing all the routes. Rock & Ice asked me to write an article on the top lead routes on El Cap, and since that got a great response I decided to write a guidebook.”

For MacNamara, the vision was the climbing, not the writing. “I never set out to write a guidebook—I was just in a position to do it and I got psyched…That’s the cool thing about guidebooks: they come from people who are psyched to climb a lot in the area.”

Aaron Huey, the author of the Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming‘s guidebook, described the genesis of his books similarly: “I never planned to write a proper guide, but since all the new routes were in a completely new area with completely different climbing, it seemed appropriate to have a small guide for it.“ For him, the guidebook concept wasn’t one to take too seriously. He referred to his books as spiritual guides: “It was a little sloppy and irreverent, but we liked it that way. ‘Climbing is our religion‘ was our slogan, and ‘bolting is bliss.‘“

Sometimes, though, the necessity for a guidebook is apparent to those who aren’t resident experts. Stewart Green’s first climbing guidebooks were comprehensive statewide surveys, covering the key climbing all over states such as Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. It’s reasonable to assume that someone might be the authority on a single area, or maybe a region, but three states? That’s an undertaking on a completely different level.

What makes someone like Green want to make such comprehensive books about areas to which he’s not local? “Through the 1980s and early 1990s I had done a lot of traveling and climbing,“ he explains, “and for some of these places you’d need a [single] guidebook for just one or two days of climbing. I had written some other books for [the guidebook publisher] Falcon [falcon.com], so I said we should do a climbing guide to Colorado because there’s a real need for those kind of books.” But recognizing a need and actually meeting it are two very different things. ...

The Research
Any good guidebook contains a wealth of knowledge, and not just about the climbs. Supertopo’s (supertopo.com) Alaska Climbing, for instance, contains extensive information on weather patterns and storm cycles in the Alaska Range. Owing to the unpredictability and severity of high-altitude storms, such information is critical for safety.

Even for trips to tamer areas, such as Indian Creek, the greatest tactical dilemmas might not unfold on the rocks. Green was well aware of this when he wrote Rock Climbing Utah. For each area he included he also included info on camping, climbing seasons, nearby gyms and mountain shops, and access issues. When planning a trip to any of these locations, such information streamlines logistics, so you don’t have to figure everything out when you drive up at 2 a.m., braindead and exhausted.

And info harvesting is a long, drawn-out process. In addition to collecting all the necessary background knowledge, there is still the not-so-simple matter of familiarizing yourself with the rocks themselves. “You do some climbing, yeah,“ says Green, “but you also have to do some research and factchecking, take photos and contact local climbers.“