CLIMBING GUIDES 

If you’re on a rock climbing road trip or just climbing in a new area, a climbing guide is going to be one of your best friends.  Printed climbing guides can be found for just about every rock climbing crag in the country, well-known or not.  The route-by-route (or boulder by boulder, if you’re in a bouldering area) guides are usually collected in books which, in turn, generally organize themselves by geographical area.

Most guidebooks attach themselves to states or portions of states, like the Southern California Bouldering Guide.  Depending on the size of the area and its popularity, you may be able to find guidebooks which deal with one specific location.  For example, Joshua Tree National Park has had a host of climbing guides written about it since the park has literally thousands of routes and boulder problems within its boundaries. Rock n’ Road is a guide which covers all 50 states, and though it gives general crag descriptions instead of detailed route guides it is still perhaps a road-trippers best weapon, since it lets him or her travel all over and, with the help of a good road atlas, find climbing from coast to coast.

Once you get to the crag though, an actual route guide will help you find the routes and problems that are fun, classic, and/or within your ability level.  If more than one guide is available for your destination, take a look at the different guides’ route descriptions.  How detailed are they?  How well do they correlate to the drawings of the crags or the photos of the routes?  Are they easy to understand?  Do the guides have overview maps so you can find your way around once you get to the crag?  Do the guides even tell you how to get to the crag?  Though most climbing guides out there are pretty well written and will help you find the routes you want easily, a bad guide can easily ruin your day, since a bad guide means a day of hiking around, trying to figure out where you are and where you’re going, instead of a day on the rock.

If you can’t find a printed guide for the crag you want, take a look in a local outdoor shop or, even better, in a local climbing shop or indoor rock gym.  Sometimes smaller local climbing areas have printed guides which can be found at area businesses for a few dollars which can’t be found anywhere else.  Sometimes these guides are terrible, full of bad drawings and worse descriptions, but often they’ll be just what you’re looking for.