I was in a bookstore today and saw for the first time, with my own eyes, the 50th Anniversary Edition of "Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills"!!!

I was fortunate enough to have the honor of working on it. It made my day to see it in print. I hope you'll check it out!



Amazon Link

They've been puttin' that thing out almost as long as I've been climbing. My climbing friends and I studied the first edition assiduously. There was hardly any good information available at the time, and we were teaching ourselves from what few sources we could find.

The American Alpine Club published something by Kenneth Henderson---Handbook of American Mountaineering I think it was called---that was, by and large, disastrously bad. There were pamphlets on belaying by the Sierra Club which were actually useful. There were some outdated and peculiar British books touting the advantages of nailed boots over "rubbers," and recommending the Tarbuck Knot for tying in. I think one of these was called On Climbing. I recall a French text by Edouard Frendo that recommended manila ropes over nylon for their superior resistance to cutting. It was a jungle out there.

We might not think the information in Edition 1 is all that great now, but it had an air of sanity about it that was in short supply in some of the other treatises.

Perhaps one of the advantages, in a funny way, of those years was that there was so much obviously bad information out there, that we rapidly acquired a healthy scepticism about the recommendations of "authorities," something which served us well as time went on.

I remember when I picked up my first copy (5th Edition) about 15 years ago. It's crazy to think that I went from learning from it to contributing to it. 99% of my opportunity to contribute was just dumb luck and knowing the right people, but it was a huge honor for me nonetheless.

I was at the bookstore looking for Arno's "Expresso Lessons" amd ran across it and decided to thumb through it. Now I know everyone think of it as a "bible" of climbing and I respect what RG@ is talking about. But I think even the 50th anniversery edition has a lot of dated information like, three points on the rock at all times except for the odd situation. Personally, I find I have 2 points and sometimes 1 point, more often then three points. I even find myself dyno'ing while crack climbing. The section on crack climbing technique was woefully poor. Face climbing marginally better and only showed a fairly inefficient and dated ice climbing technique in that section (while money hangs re somewhat of a basis for more efficient techniquesits only one).

Ok, I'll stop being such a critic.

Good points Chas. I think the thing you need to realize is that it's written for the beginning climber. In fact, it's actually specifically written for the people who take the Basic Alpine Climbing Class with the Mountaineers, many of whom don't have a ton of interest right off the bat in climbing at a high level on rock. Most members of the class will only do one alpine rock climb in their first season (plus a few glacier climbs). I didn't work on that chapter specifically (I worked on Basic Safety Systems) so I can only make guesses - I assume they left some of the more "advanced" stuff for guidebooks that focus on just rock technique.