Customer Reviews

Southern California Bouldering, 2nd (Regional Rock Climbing Series)

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This guide is extremely comprehensive and has excellent information, decent maps and topos. However, new bouldering developments in the last several years have rendered the book a bit dated. A must to own if you plan a visit.

A friend and I wanted to do some bouldering in Joshua Tree and had a really difficult time finding bouldering guides specifically for that park. There is a massive, comprehensive guide but it's currently out of print so the copies are ridiculously expensive and we decided to give this one a try.

Big mistake! We had such a hard time just reading the maps. We would locate the general section of the park on the park map and tried to match it with the hand drawn maps in the book and it was impossible. I don't know if it's because the scale was really off or the roads have changed since when the book was published but we literally couldn't find the rocks themselves the book was talking about.

Mayyyyybe if you are not a complete newbie to JTree you may be more familiar with some of the names of the rocks and be able to find them - since we couldn't even do that I can't judge how accurate the route descriptions are. But there are just really vague descriptions - no pictures.

We ended up going to the climbing store in town and buying a book that had both color photographs and was specific to JTree and had an amazing time bouldering, and then returned this book back to the store because it was useless to us (we bought it at REI, luckily).