Book Description

The new edition of Climber’s Guide to Devil’s Lake is your guide to the fractures, cracks, ledges, slabs, chimneys, and other rock formations of Devil’s Lake State Park, the most popular climbing spot in the Midwest. This bible for climbers locates and describes more than 1600 climbs. With more than 10,000 copies of the first edition in print, this handy volume remains the only comprehensive guide to climbing in the panoramic park located near Baraboo, Wisconsin. It describes many more climbs on recently acquired park land as well as in relatively unknown areas, encouraging exploration of new routes to decrease the overuse of, and damage to, the most popular areas. Major changes in the new edition include revisions of the hiking trail descriptions, the climbing safety and ethics sections, and the rating system, which has been changed from the National Climbing Classification System to the Yosemite Decimal System. A new chart compares these two systems to others. This edition is useful to climbers of all abilities and preferences, and the book’s excellent organization, along with fifty-nine new and revised diagrams, eleven maps, and twenty-two photographs, enable both novices and experts to locate challenging routes easily. Author “Olle” Swartling draws on his own forty years of climbing experience at Devil’s Lake and elsewhere, comments from other climbers, and information from out-of-print guidebooks to improve this edition, retaining the informative geologic and natural history of the Baraboo hills contributed by Patricia K. Armstrong.