Customer Reviews

Climber's Guide to the Olympic Mountains

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The strong points of this book are the listing of all of the names and heights of the significant Olympic Mountains, some swell photographs and very good illustrations of routes. The Introduction is very good and includes some history, geology, safety and recommended climbs. However, I feel the route descriptions sometimes lack important details. After having climbed several of these routes I could have easly added several paragraphs to better describe how to locate the route, and how to stay on the route once there. Estimates of times required to do the climbs may be low except for the most ardent climbers. No index other than the peak index. Maps are small and lack detail. This is the best guide to climbing in the olympics only because, as far as I know, it is the only one. In my estimation it does not compare favorably with Fred Beckey's climbing guides. The Olympic Mountains are a wonderful place to climb, and you will do well to have this book. However, this guide may not privide all the information you need to succeed on some of the routes.

In the early 1970s, I began to explore the Olympic Mountains. I was fascinated with exploring the hard to reach nooks and crannies of the high country. I wanted to find ways to get to the off trail, enticing high ridges and huge high altitude open spaces I found on contour maps of the time. Then this book landed in my lap and I suddenly had reliable routes to every interesting spot in the Olympics. You see, I discovered that all I had to do to find routes into seldom visited cirques and traverses was to find the name of a peak near the area of interest and plot the access route described - rarely climbing a peak, but always finding a good route to the surrounding high country. The book never failed me, and I have a collection of rarely traveled, beautiful high trips in my memory and photo albums - and in my future. For those of us who love mountaineering the Olympics, this is a valuable "back door" guide to the whole range.

This book is the only alpine guide for the Olympics that I have found. It has some quirks. Like Beckey's Guide, some routes are detailed but most routes are just simple sketches. "Get on this ridge, follow it to the summit." Even with a topo map or on site it can be hard to figure out where to go. But then again, that's mountaineering.

It is not as good at describing the roads and approaches as Beckey. It does have some nice information on traverses, winter climbing, and other interesting topics.

[2002 Update: Peggy Goldman's 75 Scrambles discusses the Bailey Range Traverse. And Jeff Smoot's Climbing Washington's Mountains covers quite a few Olympics peaks. Both of those books relate to this one the same way that Selected Climbs relates to Beckey. They have more detail on some of the most popular summits, but this book remains the only comprehensive Olympic mountaineering guide.]

I found this book not helpful at all. Maybe I expected to much, but this book said little more than a sentence about each route. It didn't describe the routes or there difficulty to any extent at all. It gave no detail at all. If all you want is a book that tells you a sentence about the directions that you will travel than this is for you, but not for me!