Rock Climbing Guide to the Castle Rock Area

If you've seen one climbing guide you've seen them all. Well, not really, but there is nothing unexpected or lacking in the coverage.The style is classic climbing guide: photos and line drawings with routes described with lines.I'd like to see an update to the format with additional descriptions of walking routes to reach the rocks in question.

This is by far the most complete book on Castle Rock State Park and the surrounding area. I also have Thornburg and Black, and this one has tons of climbs that the others omit. The maps are hand drawn, but I haven't had much issue following them. In some cases they are more informative than the pictures. Great for locals who already know the area and want to try some of the less popular climbs.

"With detailed maps, cleaner topo's, color photo's, updated routes, the addition of new climbing areas (such as garden of Eden) and the incorporation of the bouldering circuits into this book make this is your best buy guide to climbing in the Santa Cruz mountains."BayAreaClimbers.comDecember 2007

I own many climbing guides and this is the worst guide book I've seen by far. All the routes are hand drawn which makes finding the features near impossible unless you already know the area. There are no trail maps to locate the rock locations. There are no coordinates to locate the rock locations. And there are no pictures to mark the routes. I took it to Castle Rock last weekend and found myself completely lost looking for a route only to find that the book was outdated. Someone said, "For the Castle Rock area, mountain project is far more accurate." Don't waste your money on this book.

This is THE guide to have for climbing and bouldering in and around Castle Rock State Park - hands down!!

This is the most comprehensive guide to climbing in the Santa Cruz mountains and silicon valley because it's the only one. Aside from a few scant mentions in the Falcon Guide for the Bay Area (which focuses mostly on North and East bay climbing), this book is the only reference for South Bay climbers. Too bad for us.Rock Climbing Guide to the Castle Rock Area does have a fair number of routes and problems but don't be fooled by the size. Morris's book makes enthusiastic use of large print fonts, entire sections in bold type, and lots of white space. There's also a surplus of grainy, poorly-lit, half-focused, amateur photographs. The low printing resolution is apparently to protect us from seeing too much detail on the guys with 70s-porn mustaches wearing overly tight cut-off jeans shorts.The first and most frustrating issue is the lack of organization. One would blissfully imagine that any climbing guide would have sections for areas sharing a common access point or close proximity. This book seemed to strive to keep all sections at a similar length rather than in helpful divisions. Which climbing spots are accessible from the Castle Rock parking lot? Who knows? Not the author! You would have to look up each of the chapter names on one of the maps scattered around the book and cross reference them to figure out which ones are near each other. Like other guides there are appendices for listing climbing routes and bouldering problems by difficulty rating. Unlike other authors Morris seemed to delight in making more work for the reader by leaving out the page numbers and forcing the user to look up the route names in a separate name-only index.The descriptions range from barely adequate to vacuous waste of space. Though perhaps "waste" is a bit strong given that the alternative is probably more pictures of men wearing jeans cut off so short that the pockets are hanging down and crotch hair would be visible if the photographer could have stopped shuddering long enough to hold the camera still. The info is badly out of date with some of the routes and boulders covered in decades of moss and shrubs. The route heights are often greatly exaggerated and easily contradicted by the climbing info pamphlet handed out at the CRSP entrance. The difficulty ratings are sometimes decent and sometimes picked with a dart thrown by a drunken right-handed monkey using his crippled left hand. The book starts off telling you the gps coordinates for each section but gives up less than half way through. Perhaps their gps device was broken after being operated by the same person who operated the camera and measuring tape.I pity anyone struggling to use this book. But English majors will need an extra measure of sympathy for their pains. My only recommendation is to focus your anger at the mixing and matching of unnecessary quotation marks around bold and/or italicized names according to no apparent formula. This may allow you to miss the parade of typos, bad punctuation, inconsistent use of diacritical marks, and generally piss-poor writing.To those who do purchase this book: good luck brave sirs!

This is the only climbing guide book that focuses on the santa cruz mountains area, so if you're climbing that area you might want to have a copy of this book. BUT, this book will frustrate you more than anything. The directions that morris gives to most of these rocks are so terrible you can only draw two conclusions: 1. that he has no clue how to get there, and was vaguely told how to get there by someone who heard from someone else while tripping on acid, or 2. he doesn't want you to find the spots. If you do manage to miraculously find the rock, there are usually no descriptions about routes, poor diagrams, and almost definitely a picture of some weird porn star climbing it in the 70's. This book also has zero organization. The main thing that book has done for me, is given me just enough information to want to climb a spot, and then force me to look elsewhere for how to actually find it. Save your money, and talk to someone who has been to these spots.