411 - REVIEWS


				Urban Climber Mag Reviews Urban Climber Mag welcomes print, photo, and DVD material for our Reviews department, both online and in print. Please contact Andrew.Tower@skrammedia.com for more information.

California Road Trip: A Climber's Guide - Northern California
California, as you very well know, is massive. Finding and climbing all of California’s rocks could cost hundreds in guidebooks alone because of the hundreds of areas spanning the coastal state. Planning a road trip there could turn into a logistical nightmare pretty quickly. Luckily for you, Tom Slater and Chris Summit have authored California Road Trip: A Climber's Guide - Northern California ($39.99, tomslaterphotography@yahoo.com).

Sport Climbing: From Top Rope to Redpoint
Six years ago, I would have told you that the idea of writing an instructional book about sport climbing was a ludicrous idea. Sport climbing is pretty self-explanatory, right? The most complicated thing to learn was threading an anchor, and it seemed any Luddite with 10 spare minutes should be able to figure that out. This was when I carried hexes up single pitch routes.

Eldo Opus
Masterpieces arrive fully realized, the creator’s toil invisible in the final product. Eldorado Canyon, Colorado, now has its masterpiece with Steve Levin’s intuitive, exhaustive, 450-page Eldorado Canyon: A Climbing Guide ($39.95, sharpendbooks.com). (See Players, of Climbing No. 281 - December 2009, p.26, for more on Levin.) This first-ever photo-topo guide comes stacked with action photos.

Kootenay Craggin'
The West Kootenay region in south-central British Columbia is one of North America’s most beautiful mountain areas, and there’s now a rock-climbing guidebook that does justice to its splendor. Written by local climbers Vince Hempsall and Aaron Kristiansen, West Kootenay Rock Guide describes 22 areas and more than 400 routes — from Nelson, to Slocan City, to Castlegar — and includes day-trip alpine climbs in the Valhalla Mountain Range.

THE RISE OF THE EBOOK
Tuolumne Bouldering, by Chris Summit - This 72-page, full-color guide to the knobby, slabby, and super-historic high-altitude (read: summer) California bouldering spot selects the 20 finest zones and offers up the dirt (topos, photos, and basic info) on the best problems from each zone (275 in all). Adventure & Travel Photography, by Aaron Black - Taking pictures of your friends climbing is easy. Taking pictures of your friends climbing that don’t suck? Now that’s hard. If you want to emulate the pros, check out Adventure Photography and Travel, an eBook that combines vivid photos and concise instructions ...

The Players - Reviewed
“A player in the rock-climbing world is someone who’s there every single day,” says Dave Graham early in Brian Solano’s new DVD, The Players ($29.99, theplayersmovie.com). “And they’re obsessed with climbing on an infi nite level.” To be atop the rock game, like the film’s cast — Graham, Emily Harrington, Joe Kinder, Chris Lindner, Ethan Pringle, Alex Puccio, Lisa Rands, Chris Sharma, and Daniel Woods — you must put climbing before all other masters.

Jerry Moffatt's Revelations Wins Grand Prize at Banff Mountain Book Festival
Revelations, the autobiography of British rock climber Jerry Moffatt, has won the Grand Prize at the 2009 Banff Mountain Book Festival – one of the biggest prizes in publishing in the outdoor, adventure and environment genres, and arguably the most prestigious prize in mountain literature.

EXCLUSIVE: PROGRESSION PREVIEW
I often have superhero dreams, where I can fly, jump to the top of a building, and basically climb whatever I want. In those dreams, my fingers never tire and my body feels light and hollow. The climbers in Big Up Productions' Progression are living my dreams. The first thing you need to know about this movie is that it’s no bullshit — fancy scene transitions and text effects from past Big UP flicks like Pilgrimages, or The Dosage series are gone, leaving only stark images of gifted humans pushing themselves like mad demons to the edge of the possible.

Girl on the Rocks
Since the 1990s, pro climber Katie Brown has blazed the trail for hard sport climbing and aspiring women climbers. Now she relays that inspiration to the written page with her Girl on the Rocks ($19.95, globepequot.com). Big on color and with an easy-to-read, conversational voice, this ‘climbing 101’ for women fills an important niche for those dipping their toes into the sport.

Who's Who in British Climbing
In the comprehensive, humorous, and highly irreverent Who’s Who in British Climbing (£24.00, theclimbingcompany.net), author Colin Wells catalogues the “romantics, eccentrics, and buffoons who have made British climbing what it is.” Packed with mini-bios on nearly 700 bigwigs, the book pulls no punches, painting ribald—and sometimes flippant—caricatures of each personality’s quirks and foibles.

Call It Good
How does a climber change in the course of a year? That’s the premise behind the film Call It What You Want (£19.99, steepmedia.com), which follows a “year in the life” of the fresh-faced but ballsy George Ullrich as he throws himself against mean climbs in the UK, California, and Spain. At one point, we see the tousle-haired Ullrich skyhooking and cable-saging his way up the Bachar-Yerian (5.11c R) on the Medlicott Dome, Tuolumne Meadows—while skipping all the bolts except the last one (as well as bolts for belay): “I did it for fun,” Ullrich explains.

Flatiron'ed
Much-needed and much-welcomed is Jason Haas’ new Climbing Boulder’s Flatirons ($32, sharpendbooks.com), a 220-page, comprehensive, full color, photo-topo guidebook that pulls together all the roped climbs. A bona fide Flatirons disciple, Haas spent three years on the book, climbing almost every route on its pages — no small feat when you consider that more than a few of these climbs are obscure, dangerous mystery routes up poison-ivy-choked gullies and on formations most Boulder climbers barely know by name (Schmoe’s Nose, Nixon’s Nose, or Hillbilly Rock, anyone?).

Love, A Vue
No climbers were (permanently) injured during the making of this film. Such should be the disclaimer for Alastair Lee's new UK-based frightfest Onsight (£19.99, posingproductions.com), a straightforward look at the eponymous niche in our sport.

Table of Colors
North Table Mountain (NTM) holds a unique role in the climbing world: it’s a steep, sunny basalt sport climbing zone that’s urban (the cliffline overlooks the Coors Brewery in Golden, with views to not-so-distant downtown Denver) yet pristine (Golden itself stops a good half-mile from the cliffline, and the mesa land has been preserved).

To the Limit
By Mike Adamson - Thirty-one pitches and 2,900 vertical feet climbed in just 2:45:45—watch as the über-strong Huber brothers (Alexander and Thomas) push themselves To the Limit ($29.95, firstrunfeatures.com) to set what in 2007 was then the speed record for the Nose of El Capitan.

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