The Future of Comprehensive Alpine Guidebooks
Predicting the future of comprehensive alpine guidebooks is about as insightful as divining the future using pigs’ entrails or tea leaves. One can find evidence for whatever one wants to believe. As the author of a number of comprehensive alpine guidebooks, I often wonder as to their future.
The author on the summit of Mount Peck in 2016, researching for Rockies South. Photo: Helen Sovdat
Alpine guidebooks, hopefully, provide useful information on possible climbing objectives; they are not “how-to” books. They should provide sufficient details so that a party can identify and access a peak or route, without detracting from the adventure and fun of finding one’s way in the mountains – less is often more! It is helpful if information is presented in a consistent format, allowing parties to compare different routes in order to determine if a proposed objective is within their capability. While historical content is not important to some, a guidebook may document the climbing history of any given peak, thus assisting interested parties in identifying opportunities for exploration, such as new routes and possibly unclimbed peaks.
“By their very nature, selected guides provide information on a limited number of peaks and routes – so where does one go to find information on alternate peaks or routes? ”
The comprehensive alpine guidebook is an endangered genre due to the advent of selected guides – a situation compounded by the appearance of various internet-based databases. Unfortunately, selected guides encourage a focus on a small number of peaks and routes, in the process increasing our individual and collective environmental impacts. These books also reinforce an attitude that only selected animals/plants/peaks are important or have value. By their very nature, selected guides provide information on a limited number of peaks and routes – so where does one go to find information on alternate peaks or routes?
Internet-based information sources potentially provide a cost-effective and easily updated alternative to printed books. At the present time, in my opinion, these databases leave much to be desired. Information is usually limited to what some party has decided to climb and post, with little or no overall editorial overview to ensure accuracy, completeness, or consistent presentation of material. Often entries are more story than route description, and they rarely provide historical details on other routes.
Information on the internet is often unreliable, which may strengthen the widespread perception/ attitude/expectation that all information should be free without regard to the amount of effort required to produce the content. The reality is that it takes several thousands of hours to produce a guidebook, such as one of the current books for the Rockies. Instead of printing books, one option might be to publish the guidebook online. At the moment, however, it is not clear whether issues such as hyperlinking pages and images that might be used in a guidebook have been solved. Then there is the matter of the business case, and how to prevent one person from paying for an e-copy and then distributing it to friends (or reposting it online for everyone to use; there is no cost-effective way for small-run publications to obtain recourse or damages). One enduring argument in favour of paper is the common comment on my guidebooks from climbers about how much they enjoy simply kicking-back, reading a book, and perusing the photographs, without needing to view the information on a screen.
A selection of the author’s published guidebooks.
On the retail side, the decimation of local bookstores and the onerous terms demanded by major online retailers are major obstacles to selling small boutique print runs such as mountaineering guidebooks.
Almost sixty years ago, when I first started climbing in the Selkirks, extensive glaciers provided easy gateways to many remote mountains. Today, with climate change and glacial recession, access to many of the more distant peaks has become more difficult. My sense is that there is currently much less interest in exploration in the ranges of the Western Cordillera.
Some will opine that comprehensive guidebooks are unnecessary because, in their opinion, many peaks of a non-technical nature are not worth climbing. In my opinion, mountains, irrespective of their stature or difficulty, have much to give if one approaches them as a supplicant rather than a conqueror. A focus solely on technical challenge and chasing numbers feeds the ego but may preclude the sublime experiences available from simply being in the mountains for their own sake.
I strongly suspect that the current crop of comprehensive, printed mountaineering guidebooks will be the last of this genre due to the amount of time required to research and write such books, the breadth of expertise necessary, the small print-runs and the financial costs with low returns. However, it may be premature to write the epitaph for such books; perhaps in the next decade, combatting climate change will lead to much less travel and to more interest in our own backyards, resulting in greater demand for the broad sweep of information available in a comprehensive alpine guidebook – just don’t hold your breath!
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