climbing Zen

Today i received my copy of the long awaited boulder guide “Odenwald en bloc”, written by “Sascha Jung” and “Jo Fischer” and published by Panico.
I first read about the new guide almost a year ago when the 4Th edition of the
climbing guide “Kletterfuehrer Odenwald” came out, which was a stripped down
climbing guide without any boulder problems and a reference to a separate guide to be released in the early summer 2008. After some delay, which the Panico guys told be has been
due to “Axel Öland”, the graphics guy behind the guide, writing his diploma thesis,
it now finally got released.

Overall information:
On the first look the guide makes a very good impression. Although it is not that big, about 144 pages, it lists hundreds of boulders from 7 different areas namely:

- Riesenstein
- Lautertal
- Felsenmeer
- Lindenfels
- Lützelbach
- Fischbach
- Frankenstein

The guide starts with a list of the hardest boulder-problems and some nice pictures
and then straightly goes to the first area. If you are a happy owner of the guide “Pfalz en bloc” you may miss a bit of a history lesson about the development of bouldering in the Odenwald here, but it seems that the Odenwald people simply didn’t document their actions as well as the Pfalz people did. Maybe this is also about not knowing the leagalness of climbing on some blocs but that’s only a guess. Also the guide is not history less overall and contains a few sentences of history at the beginning description of each area.

Content:
At the beginning of each area-section you get the obligatory map and description of how to reach the area by car or sometimes even by public transport. Then you get a description
on the type of rock and how it is climbable on different weather as well as the mentioned small history section. Then there’s a small list of recommended problems of the area and the description of how to get to certain sectors. Here i give another small minus because one could have written the sector or bloc number right to the recommended problems.
After these introductory pages every bloc is listed by a number and picture and the different lines are marked on the pictures. As i haven’t been to any area listed here except “Riesenstein” i cannot comment on the information, Topo or grades here yet. It all looks very high quality but one doesn’t know before he was there himself.
If i will gather new information about the content i will make an update to this article later.

Design:
I’m very impressed by the design of the guide and think “Axel Öland” did a very good job here. Every area is layout ed in a different color so if you are reading fast through sections or you are searching something you immediately recognize the area with its associated color. Also the pictures in the book are very nice photographed and fit into that color scheme as well. When i took the first look into the guide i was a bit irritated about the Topo’s because they were part of the background of each page, but one gets used to this very fast. Doing so is not a new but a nice idea as you have the Topo on every page and don’t need to thumb through the book all the time. I can only give one small minus to the design because i think the pictures could have been a bit bigger but that’s only a minor thing and maybe is only my personal taste.

Conclusion:
This Guide is absolutely worth its price and should be in the bookshelf of everybody
who likes bouldering and lives in the area between or near Darmstadt-Heidelberg. The
design of the guide is very good and motivates you to go to the listed areas while you are reading it.
I’m glad i now have some alternatives to the Pfalz boulder-areas and at this point want to thank “Sascha Jung”, “Jo Fischer”, “Axel Öland”, “Panico” and the many people involved who made this guide possible.

References:

http://panico.de/de/panico_buecher/boulderfuehrer/bf_odenwald.php

http://www.rokblog.de/2008/11/05/odenwald-boulderfuehrer/

http://news.climbing.de/neu-im-shop-kletterfuehrer-lenninger-alb-und-odenwald/