Guidebook: Zion Climbing - Supertopo PDF
10th Jun 2010
Supertopo have been producing PDF download guides for a while now. Clearly it's a successful enough medium for them. This guide to Zion is a whopping 232 pages long and 28.5Mb in size so you'll need a half decent connection to download it. The reason it's such a large file size is clearly to allow you to print it out once downloaded. The beauty of such a PDF download it that you can print out just the pages you need and take them on the route with you. This works particularly well for Zion routes as they tend to be very long multi pitch affairs where travelling light weight is the order oft the day and a single page is far better than a whole meaty guide. A friend of mine recently printed the relevant pages from the Rockfax deep water soloing PDF guide on waterproof paper which I thought was a good idea. I've been known to laminate pages if I am worried about their longevity. The downside to PDF guides is that it's difficult to imagine sitting at your computer for any length of time to appreciate the decent quality images, and accomplished Rock Monkey artwork by Renan Ozturk, let alone the wordy history and geology sections.
The guide itself looks great. I've not had the pleasure of travelling to Zion since receiving the PDF, so can't comment on the accuracy of the topos, but with Supertopo's track record it's a safe bet to assume that the quality is as good as ever. Th full page images are stunning. It includes 250 routes.
Zion Climbing by Bryan Bird - PDF download - 28.5Mb - 232 pages - $26.95 (the price for the actual book is $29.95) including 3 years of updates...
A sample page:
