Customer Reviews

Idaho, a Climbing Guide: Climbs, Scrambles, and Hikes (Climbing Guides)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Tom Lopez knows Idaho mountains better than nearly anyone in the state. This book covers nearly every mountain range and nearly all main peaks in Idaho. It gives class ratings and very good directions for access to the peaks and hikes. His book helped my dad and I climb the 9 peaks in Idaho over 12,000 feet. We wouldn't have been able to do it without this book. If you want to climb Idaho mountains, you need this book.

This is the only published source of climbing Idaho's mountains, alpine climbs, and rock climbs on peaks. This is a much revised and improved version over the first. While the book doesn't contain climbing topos or get into extreme route detail, it gives enough to get you interested, inspired, and up most peaks. My only critique would be on the Approach section- which can be a bit cumbersome to reference and the fact that it covers the whole state and can seem "thin" on info at times- Idaho is a huge state with so many mountains. The photographs and sketches are excellent and so is the brief history. Many mountains have more than 1 route described and the Sawtooth section is so much better than last edition. Great job and I can't wait for the next version.

I have been using Tom's book for years now. I have used it to successfully lead me to the top of hundreds of Idaho peaks. The book doesn't have every route on every peak, so you will have to put some time into studying the topo map on some of the lesser known peaks (that is one of the fun aspects of hiking/mountaineering anyway). However, the number of peaks the book contains is impressive.

If you want to get to the top of Idaho's peaks, there is no better book than this one!

Tom Lopez can be commended for attempting to fit a whole state worth of mountains into one book. However, as one would expect with such bredth, it suffers greatly in depth. In many cases routes are mentioned but not described, multiple descriptions are incorrect or contain factual innacuracies rendering the description potentially dangerous (for example The Book on Finger of Fate -- no mention is made of the several 5.8 pitches that form the body of the climb in the dihedral, the only reference to 5.8 refers to the summit block, and the majority of the climb is described as a scramble!). It appears as though the author may not have climbed many of the routes described. Save your money unless you want an inventory of the names of peaks in Idaho and various thin and potentially misleading descriptions of locations and routes.

This book is more of a collection of the main summits in Idaho than a hiking book. I enjoyed the historical and geaolical information to understand a little bit more on the area I'm living but otherwise it just list the main summits (there is a lot of them thought) in Idaho. You can't just use it for planning purpose but it is a nice addition and collection of information for planning.

We took this on our trip to the Sawtooth Mts. near Stanley, ID, and also used to expore the near-by Cloud Mts.