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The Crack Climber's Technique Manual: Jamming with Finesse
Whether your goal is to be the rope gun at Indian Creek, swing leads on Astroman, or improve and expand your current skills, this comprehensive work goes well beyond other instructional resources, both in scope and detail. Written by a true master of crack climbing, this book takes an engineer’s approach to the mechanics of jamming and combines it with detailed, realistic illustrations. The result will have you climbing cracks with the finesse and efficiency that takes most years to master. The author, fondly known among his friends as “The Sender,” has hundreds of first ascents of difficult desert cracks to his credit. Take advantage of his tremendous experience and the secrets he reveals, and you will soon be enjoying those cracks you now avoid.
- GenresClimbing
208 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2015
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30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 20, 2016
Excellent illustrations!! A must read!
August 6, 2019
Good book with lots of great illustrations. In spite of the many illustrations it's still sometimes hard to figure out the fine details of what he's describing, but this is probably always a problem for text descriptions of precise physical movement in 3D space. The section on climbing off width cracks is really in depth, and I'm still far from internalizing most of the techniques described there.
My main complaint about the book is that the section on basic finger crack technique is very short, and I continue find basic finger jams difficult to set well. For example, for thumbs down finger locks in parallel cracks, if I insert my hand with my palm oriented vertically and my fingers pointing straight in, my knuckles often get stuck (in a bad way) when I try to rotate my elbow down. Instead, for me, it seems I have to cup and stack my fingers, and point my elbow down, before inserting my fingers into the crack.
Presumably like any book describing physical techniques, reading the book alone doesn't get you very far. But I've found it helpful to go back and review the book after having trouble with a particular crack size, or reviewing it before hand when I know what size I'll be climbing.
Besides crack climbing technique, it has also in an depth appendix on hand-taping techniques, and a brief appendix on building artificial practice cracks.
Another nice aspect of the book is that the author emphasizes the basic physical principles that make the jams work, namely opposition wedges and camming. This makes it easier to remember some of the techniques.
My main complaint about the book is that the section on basic finger crack technique is very short, and I continue find basic finger jams difficult to set well. For example, for thumbs down finger locks in parallel cracks, if I insert my hand with my palm oriented vertically and my fingers pointing straight in, my knuckles often get stuck (in a bad way) when I try to rotate my elbow down. Instead, for me, it seems I have to cup and stack my fingers, and point my elbow down, before inserting my fingers into the crack.
Presumably like any book describing physical techniques, reading the book alone doesn't get you very far. But I've found it helpful to go back and review the book after having trouble with a particular crack size, or reviewing it before hand when I know what size I'll be climbing.
Besides crack climbing technique, it has also in an depth appendix on hand-taping techniques, and a brief appendix on building artificial practice cracks.
Another nice aspect of the book is that the author emphasizes the basic physical principles that make the jams work, namely opposition wedges and camming. This makes it easier to remember some of the techniques.
February 9, 2016
As a crack (climbing) addict, I looked forward to this book and picked it up almost immediately when it was published. While I did find a number of useful tips and tricks, I personally feel as though much of the information is fairly obvious to climbers with even moderate experience with crack climbing. There were definitely tips and new techniques that will help me, but crack climbing is best learned, as many things, through experience.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews