The Guidebook Odyssey - Unearthing the epic task of writing a guidebook

Bob Horan, who recently released Bouldering Colorado, a 608 page guide to over 1,000 boulders all over the state, said that his research came primarily from his lifelong pursuits of photography and journalism. “We were bouldering pretty much all over Colorado,” says Horan. “Wherever I went I would take my camera, since I was 14 years old. I have a huge archive.”

Green, on the other hand, when working on his statewide books, had less material to work with initially. For Rock Climbing Utah, he had to start from scratch. “I visit every climbing area and I climb there to familiarize myself with it,“ he says. “I never use another climbing guide as a reference for my book to factcheck.“

Granted, whenever a guidebook is published, much of the Beta has already been published in one form or another, whether as a local pamphlet or online. It might seem more pragmatic simply to collect and reorganize already published material, but MacNamara would disagree. “The best guidebooks always start from scratch,” he says. “If you’re going to find stories, you go back and talk to the first ascensionists and you try to climb the route again yourself. By doing that you become very aware of all the current issues because you are actually involved.”

Green says that, between the research, fact-checking, and writing, it takes him on average two to three years to create a press-ready book. Horan compared Bouldering Colorado to his honors thesis, calling the book, over 20 years in the making, his “PhD in bouldering.” Says MacNamara, “[Guidebook-authoring] is extremely labor and time intensive, but I think that’s the way to go forward.”

The Assembly

If you’ve set out to write a guidebook, you hopefully have the vision to sustain the project. However, the rub lies within the confines of the project. There is a limitless back story of history, culture, and route beta contained in any given area. Naturally, neither the publishers nor the writers can realistically document everything about a climbing area, especially one as rich as Yosemite or Indian Creek. The writer needs to constantly ask the question “Does this need to be included?” or else the manuscript would be 2,000 pages long and begin with the history of mankind. You need to give your end user all the relevant info—and ideally cook up a good read—but not much more than that.

Green described the process for his Climbing Europe guide: “I came up with a list of about 30 areas that I liked to go climbing in but whittled it down to the top 21 areas in Europe that Americans would want to visit,” he says. “I try to take into account this is a cool place, people like to go here, this is a classic climbing area, these are the best climbs there. If I was traveling from, say, Pennsylvania, what would I want to climb?”

This says nothing of keeping up with current information. With a sport that has nearly unlimited development potential, like bouldering, staying current is a tall task. “Bouldering, climbing, access—things are changing at such a rapid rate,” says Horan. Trying to keep up with these things was a difficult task for him when he was writing Bouldering Colorado, which received criticism for what some say are major and avoidable errors. “One of the big changes made was that Estes Park changed their parking lot,” says Horan. “McGregor Ranch closed down and moved it. The manuscript was handed in—here we are two years ago. By the time it’s ready for print there’s already changes that we need to make.”

In addition to accurately documenting an area, Green feels the importance of capturing the spirit of the local climbing community. For each area that he documents in Rock Climbing Utah, he includes its vertical history. “With all these new people coming into our sport from climbing gyms and from places where there’s not a tradition of climbing, there’s no sense of what people have done in the past,” says Green. “It’s really important that we’re able to use the historical context to appreciate these routes more.”

He also includes information about the geology of the region, which, though seemingly a bit technical and irrelevant, has as much a place in the context of a climbing area as the history. “I studied a lot of geology,” says Green, “so it’s naturally one of the things that I’m interested in. I want other people to be interested in the medium that we’re climbing on.” Such information can help cultivate in readers a greater appreciation for the rocks themselves.