How to Climb: Advanced Rock Climbing

Rating:
Summary: Award Winner
Review: First Prize winner at the Banff Book Festival!!!!!! Congratulations Mr. Long & Mr. Luebben!

Rating:
Summary: The book I recommend
Review: I am a professional climber/guide with over 25 years of experience, and I am an owner of a climbing guide service in Moab Utah. While there are many good climbing "how to" books on the market, I heartily recommend this book to all of my friends and clients over all others.
The material covered in this book is both comprehensive and easy to understand. The authors both have extensive experience climbing and teaching climbing which gives the book a credibility lacking in many other "how to" books. Also the material in Advanced Rock Climbing is extremely current and gives many techniques and suggestions you will not find anywhere else.
If you are looking for a great climbing refference book this is the one to get!

Rating:
Summary: The book I recommend
Review: I am a professional climber/guide with over 25 years of experience, and I am an owner of a climbing guide service in Moab Utah. While there are many good climbing "how to" books on the market, I heartily recommend this book to all of my friends and clients over all others.
The material covered in this book is both comprehensive and easy to understand. The authors both have extensive experience climbing and teaching climbing which gives the book a credibility lacking in many other "how to" books. Also the material in Advanced Rock Climbing is extremely current and gives many techniques and suggestions you will not find anywhere else.
If you are looking for a great climbing refference book this is the one to get!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book on this sport
Review: I get acrophobia just from standing on a deep-pile carpet, so this isn't something I'm ever going to do myself, but I still found it interesting to read about it. I think the people who do this are some of the bravest people I know (as well as probably being completely nuts. :-)). Just looking at some of the pictures showing climbers going up almost featureless, smooth, sheer walls along a little crack set my heart to pounding a little bit.

The book contains a wealth of detail and information on rock climbing and much space is devoted to climbing techniques and strategies. I didn't know there were so many different kinds of grips and holds one could perform, and how they'd been adapted to specific situations and needs, but it was very interesting reading about that, and I discuss some of that further below.

The book is divided into seven chapters: Face Climbing, Crack Climbing, Rapelling, Sport Climbing, Adventure Climbing (this was one of the most interesting chapters), Training, and Self-Rescue.

Each outdoor sport has its own special vernacular and and special skills and techniques and rock climbing is no different. As I said, there's so much info here it would be hard to pick and choose a topic, but I did want to mention one thing I found interesting, which was the crack climbing and crack skills. The authors say you have to become "crack fluent" and must develop at least some competence in this since they point out that historical big walls and free routes invariably follow crack systems. To become a true "crack-master" requires patience, practice, and technique. Cracks vary greatly. Some cracks are so small that all you can do is use fingers jams. Other cracks are bigger and you can get your whole hand in the crack and use a hand or a fist jam, and several of those are discussed too.

Cracks are noted for requiring "an even combination of applied technique and physical enfurance." One of the special techniques for very narrow cracks is the "finger stack" and "butterfly jam." In the former you put your hand into the crack and stack the index. middle, and ring fingers against one another and vigorously twist downward. The butterfly jam involves placing the thumb into the crack and stacking the fingers against it. These are just a few of the dozens of special techniques that were discussed and that I learned about in this book. All of the different finger and hand jams and other techniques are fully illustrated so you can see exactly what's going on.

The authors also spend some time discussing the dangers of free-soloing and climbing in general. One author (C.L.) said he knows 14 climbers who had died in the last 6 years alone. This sobering statistic certainly points up the dangers of rock climbing, and yet the authors say that more and more people are being attracted into the sport. So as I said, while I doubt I'll ever try this myself, I found it interesting to read about and learn something about what's involved.

This is an excellent book on the subject which will be of use mainly to already experienced and skilled participants in this interesting and exciting but very risky sport.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining know-how
Review: Long has, with the aid of guide Craig Luebben, written a long overdue book for the not-so-novice rock climber. Sure, much of this information is available elsewhere, but this is written in Long's typical humorous fashion, and is a delight to read. The only problem might be to assimilate the knowledge whilst laughing one's way through the pages.

Rating:
Summary: never again from the same authors
Review: technically useful, but written in an irritative prolo-supposed-funny language, and culminates with offensive comments about "European trash" climbing sites. Must be good to promote the patriotism of the USA climbers.

Rating:
Summary: never again from the same authors
Review: technically useful, but written in an irritative prolo-supposed-funny language, and culminates with offensive comments about "European trash" climbing sites. Must be good to promote the patriotism of the USA climbers.

Rating:
Summary: Good Book For All The Basics
Review: This book covers many subjects from clipping bolts on sport routes to building anchors on trad climbs and techniques from the crimp grip to knocking of the figure four. It really doesn't go into to much depth on any of the many subjects (because there are so many)it covers but in my opinion I think it gives sufficient advice about them. It covers Techniques, Anchors, Protection Placements, Sport Climbing, Aid Climbing, Soloing, Crack Climbing and many more.

Rating:
Summary: A little bit about a lot of topics
Review: This book gives a little bit of information about a lot of different topics. Therefore, you may find a tidbit here or there that adds to your knowledge. However, because the book covers so many topics, the amount of in depth detail is very limited. For this reason, rather than getting this book, I would prefer to spend my money getting more specialized books on specific climbing topics rather than trying to get a little bit about everything from this book. If this is the only advanced climbing book you are going to buy and your experienced friends can fill in the blanks, then it would be a good introductory book for you.