Using this Guide

This guidebook is a living scaffold. The words came first; the hand-drawn maps, the topos and the photographs are on their way, and every reserved plate you see is a promise. Until a page says otherwise, treat its contents as researched from the public record — Mountain Project, the published guidebooks, and the memories of the internet — rather than verified underneath our own hands.

Grades

Rock climbs are graded on the Yosemite Decimal System (5.0–5.15), with letter grades from 5.10 upward. Boulder problems use the V-scale. Where sources disagree we print the consensus and note the argument.

Stars

Quality stars follow guidebook convention: one star is worth doing, two is worth planning around, three is worth the drive from another state. Stars in Part II are ours; stars elsewhere are the consensus of the sources cited.

Reading the rock

Every crag page carries a geology section, and the spec card at the top of the page carries three fields that go with it: Rock, the lithology in the plainest useful terms; Formation, the named geologic unit, where one can be named; and Age, how old the stone is. They are there because rock type is not decoration. Jointing decides whether a crag gives splitter cracks, columnar corners or blank slabs; grain size and mineralogy decide friction and how fast the holds wear; welding grade decides which band of an ash-flow tuff is worth bolting; and the same processes decide the hazards — which rinds sound hollow, which cliffs shed blocks, which rock must not be climbed wet.

Two conventions in those sections are worth stating plainly. First, a named formation is a claim, and we only make it when a source makes it. Where regional mapping makes a unit near-certain but no source names it at the crag itself, the page says inferred and says what the inference rests on — usually the crag’s position inside a mapped block, and which unit forms the cliffs in that block. Second, where climbers and geologists disagree about a rock, we print both. Climbers use “granite” for anything coarse and crystalline and “rhyolite” for anything hard and pale, and they are often close enough for the purpose; when a state survey maps something different, the disagreement is more interesting than either answer alone.

The deep geology files behind these sections — one per state, with statewide frameworks, area-by-area entries and full bibliographies — live in the repository under research/geology/.

Access and honesty

Access is fragile everywhere and especially on the small crags this book loves. Respect closures, raptor seasons, private land and tribal land — some areas named in the Gazetteer are documented precisely so we can say do not climb there. Where our record is thin or unverified we say so on the page.

Sources

Every page carries its sources. The deep research files behind the whole project live in the repository’s research/ directory, one markdown file per area, with full bibliographies.