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Climbing Magazine Reviews
Climbing Magazine welcomes print, photo, and DVD material for our Reviews department, both online and in print. Please contact Julie Ellison for more information.
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 Psyche Book
California-based photographer Jim Thornburg estimates he has spent 23,000 hours over the past 20 years capturing images of climbers, and his extraordinary effort has produced a prodigious body of inspirational work. Now Thornburg has selected the best of his uncounted images to produce Stone Mountains: North America’s Best Crags ($60, jimthornburg.com), a 320-page celebration of 35 crags spanning the continent, from Squamish to the Gunks.  Sun, Sand, Sea, and Sending: Kalymnos: Rock Climbing Guidebook
People always ask about my favorite Mediterranean island to visit for climbing, and I’ve given the same answer — Kalymnos, Greece — so many times that it’s become automatic. But when a place is so clearly climber Eden, what else is there to say? Kaly’s quiet, largely untouristed west coast, home to most of the climbing, has a small strip of villages sandwiched between calm green and cerulean waters and mythical limestone scarps with hundreds of jaw-dropper, rope-stretcher slab, wall, tufa, and crazy 3-D stalactite-cave climbs from 5.6 to 5.14+.  Free (and Aid) Blasts: Yosemite Big Walls, Third Edition
The cover of SuperTopo’s stellar new Yosemite Big Walls: Third Edition, by Chris McNamara and Chris Van Leuven, tells you everything you need to know about the Valley in 2011: instead of an aid climber slamming blades on some A4 seam, we instead see Nico Favresse pimping micro edges out a rooflet on The Secret Passage, a 5.13c R… which also happens to be an El Cap VI. This is the beauty of the updated guide ($29.95, supertopo.com), an indispensable, photo-rich, text-and-topo reference to 77 of the Valley’s big-wall classics: An emphasis is placed on clean aid (with a page of tips, and C ratings where appropriate), with accordingly modern rack suggestions for cam hooks, offset nuts and cams, and the like.  Don't Try This at Home: With Bare Hands
Climbers’ bookshelves are often populated with dense accounts of historical accidents, techy how-to guides, and autobiographies concerning the inner workings of a mountaineer’s psyche. Rarely does a book come along that’s just plain fun to read. In With Bare Hands ($16.95, blacksmithbooks.com), Alain Robert, the French climber famed for free-soloing skyscrapers around the world, tells his often-harrowing and offbeat story.  Sand Castles: Desert Towers: Fat Cat Summits and Kitty Litter Rock
Yosemite Valley and southeastern Utah’s desert towers are America’s two unique contributions to climbing geography—the places that, for topography and climbing potential, are like none other on Earth. Of the two, Yosemite’s climbing lore has been much better documented. Now, Steve “Crusher” Bartlett has redressed this gap—and then some—with his 352-page, coffee-table survey of tower-bagging history, Desert Towers: Fat Cat Summits and Kitty Litter Rock ($49.95, sharpendbooks.com).  Higher Meaning: Climbing—Philosophy for Everyone: Because It's There
What if the usual mouth-breathers pontificating at the campfire morphed into keen-witted philosophers who could articulate and deconstruct the paradigms around which so much of our ethical and “why climb” discourse takes place? And what if, by doing so, they exposed the largely unexamined fallacies in stale truisms like “chipping is bad,” “soloing is selfish,” “ratings are subjective,” and “climbing sets you free”?  The Rest of the Story
The disastrous events that unfurled on K2 in August 2008, when 11 climbers died, inundated the mainstream media with survivor interviews, blog posts, and tales told by families left behind. Numerous authors have attempted to chronicle the fateful summit push on August 1, but One Mountain Thousand Summits: The Untold Story of Tragedy and True Heroism on K2 ($24.95, us.penguingroup.com), by Freddie Wilkinson, isn’t simply a reconstruction of events.  Action Packed
Sometimes all you want is to sit down for 20 minutes and read short, light, and satisfying stories of adventure. In Steve Achelis’ Mountain Responder: When Recreation and Misfortune Collide ($16.95, dogearpublishing.net), Achelis, former commander of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Team, recounts adrenaline-fueled rescue tales, from hikers who’ve fallen into rivers to mountaineers buried beneath avalanches.  Honest Huber
In his autobiographical The Mountain Within: The True Story of the World’s Most Extreme Free-Ascent Climber ($27, skyhorsepublishing.com), Alex Huber, 41, makes a pretty good case for his subtitle. Huber’s impressive exploits are well known, including several first free ascents on El Capitan and a 5.14 free solo in Austria. The Mountain Within is a book about achieved goals, recounted with precise and unsentimental reflection.  Judge This Book by its Cover
What if we held a beauty contest for climbing guidebooks? With 430 full-color pages of good looks, the second edition of Bishop Bouldering ($37.50, wolverinepublishing.com) might make Miss America. That is, if Miss A could find her way blindfolded to every bloc from Rock Creek to the Druids and pull down like a fiend.  Don't Leave Home Without It
Adventure photography couldn’t be simpler. At least that’s how Michael Clark makes it seem in his how-to book Adventure Photography: Capturing the World of Outdoor Sports ($24.95, larkbooks.com). The 15-year veteran has shot everything from yoga to surfing to expedition races, and in this book documents every detail of the who, what, when, where, why, and how of each sport.  A World of Firsts
It seems like these days, any feature film with a star-studded cast passes as a solid movie. It might be void of any real plot or storyline, but you watch it because you recognize the names on the poster. Chuck Fryberger’s CORE ($39.95, chuckfryberger.com) breaks the mold by following climbing’s A-listers on individual journeys to go “to the heart of climbing.”  Espresso Lessons from the Rock Warrior's Way
Physical training for rock climbing, or any sport for that matter, is formulaic; there is, more or less, an equation to improvement. But perhaps due to its inherent complexity and nuance, mental training has always taken a backseat to physical training in our sport, despite its equal and oft underrated importance. Arno Ilgner’s Espresso Lessons from the Rock Warrior’s Way ($19.95, warriorsway.com) takes the complicated fears, emotions, and doubts our mind creates while rock climbing and teaches us how to handle them and climb harder.  Manifest Training
Many of us find training too monotonous, even boring. Chiropractor Michael Layton disagrees. Dr. Layton has written, photographed, and self-published a unique guide to exercise, nutrition, and advanced climbing skills called Climbing Stronger, Faster, Healthier: Beyond the Basics ($24.95, amazon.com). Part textbook, part climbing manifesto, the book devotes much of its 200 pages to training and injury rehabilitation.  Adaptation
The excellent, tightly edited (28 minutes) Andy Parkin: A Life In Adaptation (£12 plus shipping, bluehippomedia.com) is a still, meditative portrait that doesn’t descend into the usual action sequences and first-person wankery about “the proj.” Andy Parkin is an ex-pat Brit who’s spent the last 25 years in Chamonix. An alpine badass (Broad Peak alpine style and the Walker Spur solo in winter), he survived an epic accident on the Rothorn in 1984 and thereafter moved more deeply into his art...  Out of Africa
Many climbing flicks focus solely on the epics — huge dynos, 50-foot whippers, clutch sends — while the ineffable, inbetween moments are excised. Happily, Chris Alstrin’s film Waypoint Namibia ($14.99, waypointnamibia.com), on granite-dome hunting, avoids this pitfall.  Double Whammy
In 1968, Yvon Chouinard, Dick Dorworth, Lito Tejada-Flores, and Doug Tompkins loaded up a Ford Econoline with surf, ski, and climbing gear and drove 5,000 miles south along the Pan-American Highway. At the road’s end, they augured into a snow cave and, when the weather broke, established their California Route on Fitz Roy, Patagonia. Tejada-Flores filmed with a 16mm Bolex, and it became the film Mountain of Storms.  The Secret's Out
The first-ever guidebook to Colorado’s best-kept secret, Durango Bouldering ($25, pineneedle.com), details more than 350 V0-to-V13s at five superb areas, including Sailing Hawks — aka The Secret Spot — and the recently discovered 071 Boulders. Southwest Adventures guide Ian Allison spent four years searching, sending, and documenting.  Joyous Struggle
Finally, an English translation of George Ingle Finch’s delightful The Struggle for Everest ($44.95, topworldbooks.com). First published in 1925 and available solely in German till now, this is the only book by an Everest team member devoted to the British expeditions of the 1920s. An eminent chemist and leading alpinist, Finch, with Geoffrey Bruce, reached 27,250 feet on Everest in 1922.  Project Orange
Go to Arkansas: the sandstone is steep, bullet, uncrowded, and kaleidoscopic, ridge after ridge fading into the Ozark horizon. The Arkansas native Cole Fennel brings us his 400-page Rock Climbing Arkansas ($37.95, fixedpin.com), cataloging 14 zones, including sport/bloc staples like Horseshoe Canyon Ranch, the trad mecca Sam’s Throne, and venerable Mount Magazine.  Race for the Nordwand
Move over CGI-heavy, testosterone action flicks. Enter the North Face (musicboxfilms.com, debuting February in theaters nationwide; DVD to follow). Set in 1936, this riveting recreation depicts the two Germans — Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser — who confronted “the last problem of the Alps”: the Eiger’s North Face. Chased up the wall and then joined by an Austrian team, the men battle avalanches and frostbite ...  Alpine Time Machine
Ever wish you could travel back to climbing’s early days and follow the earliest first-ascent visionaries? This fantasy comes to life in Daniel Arnold’s Early Days in the Range of Light: Encounters with Legendary Mountaineers ($28, counterpointpress.com). Arnold, cleverly, chose 15 classic peaks in California’s High Sierras and spent three years studying the lives of the peaks’ pioneers, groundbreakers like John Muir, Clarence King, and Norman Clyde.  A Royal Life
Most people wouldn’t need seven volumes to tell their life story — but then again, most people aren’t Royal Robbins. In My Life: To Be Brave ($19.95, royalrobbinsthebook.com), the first in this autobiographical series, Robbins lays bare the driving forces — external and internal — that have shaped him. Chapter one dives straight into his landmark solo of the Leaning Tower: the insecure belays, the pumped arms, and the stubbornness it took to overcome the ominous wall.  Progression Obsession
If a form of Tourette’s exists in which you repeatedly yell, “Holy cannoli!”, then I contracted it watching Progression ($19.95 for HD download, $29.95 for the DVD; bigupproductions.com), Big UP’s latest. It spotlights, with expert cinematography, today’s A-listers — Tommy Caldwell, Alex Honnold, Kevin Jorgeson, Matt Segal, Chris Sharma, Patxi Usobiaga, etc. — in the realms of sport, comp, big walls, highballs, headpoints, and more.  Eldo Opus
Masterpieces arrive fully realized, the creator’s toil invisible in the final product. Eldorado Canyon, Colorado, now has its masterpiece with Steve Levin’s intuitive, exhaustive, 450-page Eldorado Canyon: A Climbing Guide ($39.95, sharpendbooks.com). (See Players, of Climbing No. 281 - December 2009, p.26, for more on Levin.) This first-ever photo-topo guide comes stacked with action photos. |
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