Palisades-Kepler Bouldering Guide

Finally, I've found a way to turn this old guidebook into a .pdf to distribute on the web. For those of you that have the old photocopied guidebook that I gave away for free at an Iowa City store, you will notice that this guide contains much of the same. A few climbs have been added to this guide. My original intent was to cover all the bouldering that I've done and that I know about and list all the good leads and top ropes that I've enjoyed in the park, only leaving out the bad ones from Ferguson's book. I didn't want to duplicate Ferguson's fine book, Rock: a climber's guide to Palisades-Kepler by putting all the climbs listed in his book into this one, and besides there have been at least 20 new routes done since Ferguson's book; many of those are very bad. I'm sure there are more, but I only know of those that I know about.

Also, since I first started this guidebook, many talented climbers have been working on new bouldering problems in the park. Since, I no longer live in Iowa, I haven't had any updates about new problems put up since 2002 when I really stopped climbing rock. I had an update here and there from a few people, including something about a new V3. Travis any more news??? But, I'm out of the loop now.

Anyway, there is still a good amount of rock in the Pal that hasn't been done, or is waiting to be rediscovered. If you want one of your problems added to this guide, let me know. I will need a picture, rating, name and a location (GPS preferred.)

Lastly, I never did get around to finishing the guide as I intended to do, and have little motivation to do so at this point. I still have all my notes about the climbs, and I have all the pictures shot. If I hear from enough people wanting me to finish it, I'll again add it to my long list of projects. It will have to go behind a second new cedar strip kayak that I've designed myself, a set of half-finished Ojibwa snowshoes, traditional wooden cross country skis, and my new web site. Or maybe, like the first edition of the guide, I'll just have a whim and finish it in a day.

This guide is an Adobe Acrobat file. You need to have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer to view it. The good news is that Adobe gives it away for free here.

How To Download This File

1. Click on the link below. Adobe Acrobat will open in your browser and the file will display. Then save or print from there.

or

2. Right click the link below and select Save As..., then save the file to your hard drive.

The file is 396K, so with dial up, it's going to take a few minutes.

Palisades-Kepler Bouldering Guide

I also want to thank the people at www.pdffactory.com, who provide a demo of their pdffactory program, which produces a working .pdf with only a small nag line on each page of the doc. It's also a bargain for anyone needing to produce .pdfs on the cheap. It's only $50! Check it out.

Enjoy,

Bryan Hansel