good guide books?

Another must have is "50 classic backcountry Ski and Snowboard Summits in California" by Paul Ritchins, Jr.

now for all you guide book and mountaineering book fans Ive got a tip .Even though i'll be creating my own competition try Tacoma book center by the Tacoma dome on 25th .Used book store worth taking a look at. disclaimer I'm just a customer.

pin!head, I like your style.

One step farther: "Good guide book" is an oxymoron; all you need are good aerial photos, a bunch of topo maps, and copious libations. A great plan is sure to follow.

Here's my list...

[Edit: changed URL to text link to get rid of formatting problems. --Charles]

It's out of print but if you can find it used I think Steve Barnett's "The Best Ski Touring in America" is a great guide to multi-day backcountry ski trips where the objective is more backcountry touring then steep descents. It's been an inspiration for me to get out and do some longer trips.

Ronco

Thanks. I've not been happy with any of the modern guidebooks for Washington. Martin's is good but serves only a limited area. The others (and Lou Dawson's book) don't give much of a sense of what is characteristic of North Cascades skiing, of what is best, of what is desirable, and what is to be avoided. Further, they don't include the most interesting of modern routes, such as the traverses, or ski mountaineering epics, None of them says a word about the huge area of the Pasayten Wilderness, likely the best place for long midwinter trips in the range. Beckey's guides are really the most useful, even though they're not ski oriented. He knows and loves the range, is sensitive to its quirks, and has lots of good photos.

I did like the old Mountaineers guide (from the '60's), Northwest Ski Trails. Maybe that reflects when I started getting interested in the sport, but, despite its limited route selection, it seemed to inspire me to want to get out and explore things. That's what a good guidebook should do.

Northwest Ski Trails, written by Ted Mueller and published in 1968, was 20 to 30 years ahead of its time. It was the first modern guide to ski mountaineering published in North America. Last time I looked, Lou Dawson credited H.J. Burhenne's Sierra Spring Ski-Touring with that honor, but Northwest Ski Trails was published earlier, and it includes true glacier skiing trips.

In his Foreword, Harvey Manning wrote, "The purpose of this book is to introduce touring to skiers who may have wondered about the snow country over the ridge from the chairlift, in the quiet valley beyond, but haven't known how to get there." The strategy of growing backcountry skiing by appealing to lift skiers was revived by Couloir and Back Country magazines over 20 years later. By the mid-1990s those magazines were backed up by movies and improved equipment (especially wider skis) which made backcountry skiing easier. The campaign to promote backcountry skiing finally gained traction then.

I believe that Northwest Ski Trails was the brainchild of Tom Miller, who started the Mountaineers book publishing program with Harvey Manning in the 1960s. Manning told me that the book didn't sell well. It was too far ahead of its time. There were a handful of people doing ski mountaineering (the same people who'd been doing it for years) but all the growth at that time was in skinny skiing.

Notes about the book can be found here: www.alpenglow.org/ski-history/notes/book/mueller-1968.html