A Climber's Guide to Yosemite Valley

Rating:
Summary: Outdated, but still useful
Review: Twenty-five years ago, this was THE guidebook to climbing in Yosemite. We used to play trivia games to name the first ascent parties, the dates, etc., of the most obscure climbs Roper listed. Another part of the game was figuring out Roper's idiosyncrasies - for example, each sentence describes a seperate pitch & the adjective "adventurous" means dangerously loose & dirty. Nowadays, the book is mainly an historical artifact. The number of climbs is many times greater than in 1971 & the level of difficulty of climbs has similarly increased. But Roper's book is still useful for both the history of climbing in the Valley & also for descriptions of how to get to the various climbing areas, with verbal descriptions of the climbs (a rarity in this age of topos).