Customer Reviews

Colorados High Thirteeners: A Climbing and Hiking Guide

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This is a useful guidebook for anyone interested in climbing Colorado's Centennial (100 highest) or Bicentennial (200 highest) peaks. (I've hiked half of the Bicentennials.) For those who aren't hardened peak-baggers, "Colorado's High Thirteeners" is still a useful source of information about the state's less-visited high summits.

Garratt and Martin's route descriptions are generally adequate, if somewhat lacking in detail. The authors largely ignore the scenic highlights of their hikes, such as the spectacular Zapata Falls along the way to Twin Peaks and Unnamed 13,660.

Although I have made great use of this book, as the weathered, note-filled copy in my backpack could attest, I find it somewhat inferior to the fourteener guidebooks written by Gerry Roach, Louis Dawson, and Walter Borneman & Lyndon Lampert. I would love to see an updated and improved version of this guide with more information.

Here are some of the revisions I'd like to see:

1) More photographs of the peaks, indicating what month they were taken in.

2) Topographical maps of the routes.

3) More detailed descriptions of the hikes, both to aid in route-finding and to point out some of the highlights of the hikes.

4) Yosemite Decimal ratings of the difficulty of each route.

5) A "classic hike" rating ala Gerry Roach to indicate which hikes the authors like best.

6) More alternate routes to some of the peaks.

I have been using this guide for a bit now and it really is pretty good but you still need to do some homework and look at the maps before you do the trip. Now I have not done that for most of the climbs i have done and have on occasion been a bit confused, but overall i do like the book and i have done all but 15 peaks in the book

I got this book because it has a few summits that aren't even mentioned in Roach's Colorado Thirteeners book. This book doesn't have a single map in it. I would have much preferred maps over black and white pictures of some of the mountains. Also, there is no ranking system for difficulty. It just says things like "a long scenic trek" or "varied terrain" or "an off trail climb" or "stiff rocky climb" or "steep climb." Is a stiff rocky climb more difficult than a steep climb? Is varied terrain more difficult than an off trail climb? Who knows.

If you want more info on te thirteeners that aren't mentioned in "Colorado Thirteeners" just go to 13ers.com and read trip reports.

The guide covers a lot of peaks, but the route information for each peak is very limited, very general and there are absolutely no maps. You will definitely need to do some homework outside of what is contained in the book.