Book Review – Crack Climbing!

Finally, there is a book dedicated to the painful wonderful world of crack climbing. Aptly named, Crack Climbing! (yep, with the exclamation, guess they are really excited about it) was written by Lisa Gnade and Steve Petro, two folks who surely know something about wedging their fingers and toes into crevices in the rock.

The book covers a wide range of topics, from how to jam different-sized cracks to training to protection, but appears to be geared mostly toward people with little to no experience climbing cracks.

Visually, the book is pleasant to look at, with full color photos throughout. Most of them happen to be of the authors sending hard cracks in Little Cottonwood Canyon and Indian Creek, which may be inspirational or disheartening, depending on your point of view and experience level.

Overall, this would be a great resource for the novice crack climber, but most others I doubt would get much out of it. Nintey percent of the material is aimed at beginners, with a few deeper insights scattered here and there. To close, I’ll leave you with this gem from the book: “there’s no such thing as a bad size.”

Buy Crack Climbing! now at Amazon.com.