Synopses & Reviews
The new edition of
Climbers Guide to Devils Lake is your guide to the fractures, cracks, ledges, slabs, chimneys, and other rock formations of Devils 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 books 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 Devils 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.
Review
"A convenient pocket-size guide that should tell you anything and everything you might want to know about conquering the bluffs at Devils Lake."—The Capital Times
About the Author
Sven Olaf Swartling lives in Chicago and is a member of the Chicago Mountaineering Club. He has climbed at Devil's Lake for more than forty years.