“You cannot become a human being in isolation,” argues philosopher Lars Svendsen, in his book, A Philosophy of Loneliness. “Your connections to other people and the experiences you have with them shape your very humanity.” 

In the latest issue of Summit Journal, Hannah Provost explores this idea — not through the traditional tethered-by-adventure motif but by way of the surprisingly intimate affairs of self-published guidebooks.

Can print media be a mithridatum against feeling alone? You'll have to subscribe + get the current issue to find out. 

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Hannah Provost lives in Golden, Colorado with her cat Cedar. As the Content Director for the American Alpine Club, she wears a lot of hats, but her favorites are being the Editor-In-Chief of the AAC’s quarterly magazine, The Guidebook, and hosting The AAC Podcast. Within her work at the AAC and her freelance writing, she loves covering environmental issues, climbing history, and exploring new ways to structure climbing stories. Whether it’s the science behind pooping in the backcountry, the drama and gossip that happened after the first ascent of Mt. Logan in 1925, or reporting on Eric Gilbertson’s research into how much Rainier is shrinking, she’s determined that climbing storytelling hasn’t hit its golden age 

yet, and the resurgence of print is going to get us there. When it comes to climbing, she’s a vert girlie in recovery, and a diehard tryhard. She’s not on social media, but you can find her writing through AAC channels or in magazines such as Alpinist and Summit Journal. 

Hannah's essay, “A Defense Against Loneliness,” appears in SJ 324.

Q&A With Writer, Hannah Provost

SJ: You work at the AAC, and you have access to the library (lucky you). As a writer, climber, and Content Director at the AAC, how has the archive, and your perusal of it, influenced how you think about storytelling in climbing?

Hannah Provost: The AAC Library is one of the biggest collections of climbing books, archives, and ephemera in the world — and it’s also not fully catalogued. There is so much to climbing history we don’t know, or that has been forgotten, and a lot of it is sitting in the AAC archive. That’s just one illustrative example. 

I regularly find myself talking to a climbing elder on the phone, getting them yapping about this or that, and suddenly I’m realizing that they are telling me a story that isn’t written down anywhere, that’s literally never been told after it initially happened. And there are so many people who are going to die with that knowledge in their head, because as a community we haven’t totally realized there's a lot more climbing history than the tales that have already been celebrated and documented. It’s just like the self-published guidebooks — for such an individualized sport, we have to lean into history-keeping that isn’t hierarchical. It’s in our dirtbag roots. 

Basically, there’s so much more out there to discover, gaps to investigate (why are so many women’s climbing stories lost to history??) and things to learn. It’s honestly really exciting. 

SJ: In SJ 324, you write about unpublished, self-published, or underground climbing guidebooks. Where did the idea come from for this piece, and what were you hoping to explore through it?

HP: A couple years ago, I had been pursuing the stacks of the AAC Library, looking to verify some first ascent information for a story I was writing. I was pacing along the guidebooks section, and of course, kept getting distracted by guidebooks for places I want to climb. With the internet, the demand for guidebooks is changing, but I think they still have a key pull — tactile comprehensiveness, a reassuring single source. And they are really good for daydreaming too. 

I distinctly remember picking up Mountaineering: Freedom of the Quad and An Underground Guide to Above Ground Memphis that first day and just laughing out loud. Going through those, I started gravitating to the amateur guides on the shelf — ones that were stapled together or in a binder for preservation because they were loose pages. I realized there was something really special here, something a little grittier and more textured.

I sat on the idea for a while, and later the AAC Library team reshelved the self-published guides in their own section of the library, so all of them were there together, right at my fingertips. When I returned to read through every single one of them, the philosophical, poetic writing in Adam Grosowsky's guide, The Gritstone Mountaineer, pushed me over the edge. It was all so personal, so real. And it felt like what my college friends and I had tried to do way back when. It had felt like just a funny joke at the time, but if this was so universal, I wanted to explore the motivations that would push so many climbers to create and document in such a vulnerable way, especially when they weren’t sure anyone would ever read it. 

Inside the cover of the Spring 1970 issue of Vulgarian Digest. Photo courtesy of the American Alpine Club Library.

SJ: I’d heard of the Vulgarian Digest before, read The Climbing Zine, and supported various indie guidebooks over the years, like Buildering-Spots International. Even though zines and self-published guidebooks have some overlap and share a similar ethos, they aren’t the same thing. How do you distinguish them?

HP: I see self-published guidebooks and zines to have a key similarity — creation by the amateur. They are rooted together by the umbrella of DIY publishing. The difference in genre comes in the sliding scale of informational on one end, to art for art’s sake on the other. 

The most archetypal guidebooks have no tone, they are just straight facts. Just as dry as the manual to your dishwasher. They have a function — convey essential climbing information. In a similar way, the most archetypal zine is a piece of art, created outside of the mainstream accepted art world, something that changes your relationship with ideas of self, or the world. 

But both zines and self-published guides are rarely that extreme in their genre, and in fact that’s where it gets the most interesting. There are many, many examples of zines that are deeply political and informational — for example, LGBTQ communities educating each other on how to get lifesaving healthcare in the 80s when that wasn’t very accessible. And there are many self-published guidebooks that are more cultural performance piece than helpful and informative. The examples where the genres bleed together are the most interesting to me. 

SJ: The title of your essay is “A Defense Against Loneliness,” and central to your essay is the coupling between our desire for authentic representation and connection — as a buttress against loneliness. In that sense, these guidebooks could be highly vulnerable affairs. Did you get that sense when reading through the collection you were researching?

HP: The philosopher Lars Svendsen argues, in his book, A Philosophy of Loneliness, that: “you cannot become a human being in isolation. Your connections to other people and the experiences you have with them shape your very humanity.” Svendsen also argues that loneliness is a subjective experience that comes from a lack of satisfying relationships with others — that most people experiencing loneliness aren’t alone really, it's more that the relationships that they do have aren’t meeting their needs or expectations for what relationships should be. And on the most basic level, what we look for in relationships is belonging, which can only come with authenticity, with being truly ourselves. 

That sense of authenticity and vulnerability was most obvious to me with Adam Growsowsky’s guide, but the real truth of it only hit me after interviewing him. Clearly, there is a lot of emotion and unfinished-ness to the artwork and the poetic writing in the guide, but after I interviewed him, I realized that this guy was 15 years old when he created this, and his main goal in life after being a climber was being an artist. 

In the interview, he told me he was really inspired by the climbing writing of Pat Ament at the time. For his drawings, this might have been the earliest time he’d put his work out there in the world — and now he’s a very accomplished painter. I think there is a big tendency to believe that if someone publishes something they must be really confident in what they are putting out there — but it takes a lot of guts, and there is often a lot of doubt swirling around in the background behind the scenes. 

Putting it out there is worth it, because it can create connection, which we all need so badly. 

Front and back covers of 88 Smith Rock's Topo-Guide. Photo courtesy of the American Alpine Club Library.

SJ: How did you decide on the title?

HP: What makes self-published guidebooks so interesting is how much it epitomizes the side of the sport where we yearn to connect through climbing. If you get too caught up in the grades and your own performance, this sport is really lonely. Trying to connect through the sport, while hard because it is so unique for each person, is worthwhile. 

The phrase that makes up the title is from a quote from the scholar Hua Hsu, reflecting the essence of zines. For me, the title pulled together the connection between self-published guidebooks and zines, and turned the scope toward the connective tissue of the sport — the desire to share our utter devotion, in whatever form we know how. 

SJ: What is the state of “amateur climbing guidebooks” today (and has the medium changed)? 

HP: There are absolutely still self-published amateur-made print guidebooks getting crafted these days, but much more popular is a totally new medium: the beta video. 

I know of many prolific boulder developers — in Hueco, in the Front Range of Colorado, in West Virginia — whose main mode of operation is taking a video of the first ascent, and then posting it online: sometimes with just a name and a grade, sometimes with or without coordinates, rarely with much other background information, and certainly with not much artistic flare. The beta video as a genre is like self-published guides in that they are most often super low quality, kind of from a bad angle or too far away, and rarely get any real editing.

But this practice is still a reaching-out for an audience, the same root motivation that seems to underlay the historical self-published print guides: I made/found/crafted a thing, do you want to be a part of it?

What’s interesting is that such a method is more accessible than printing 100 copies of a DIY guide, in that most anyone can get on the internet and search for something, it’s not a scarce resource. But because these videos are not methodically organized and labeled and curated, like a guidebook is, a lot of this information is just dispersed and floating around out there, and unless you hit on exactly the right search terms and are super patient with your googling, you may never find some of these videos. 

The guidebook/new development landscape is also just interesting in general right now because of access issues. Some developers will bolt “secret crags” — putting together a topo/PDF that is often in the vein of hand-drawn on computer paper, or a spreadsheet with coordinates—and only pass along the information to close friends or locals who ask directly for several years, either to keep away the crowds (in a “I like climbing in solitude” way), or because access to the land the crag is on it precarious and large crowds would jeopardize it. They intentionally don’t post the information on Mountain Project or Kaya or other locations, in order to keep things “secret” — and then you’re having a whole other conversation about creating in-groups and out-groups with the distribution of the information, a circumscribed audience rather than an expansive one. But this is absolutely not a new phenomenon — some of the “underground” guides mentioned in the SJ article were doing the exact same thing, printing a guide to some routes that were otherwise kept from the general climbing public. 

But making guidebooks takes a lot of work, and so some people really want to work with a guidebook publisher and have the chance of getting paid for that work — it’s not super lucrative, but we have a different culture around paid labor in more recent years, that potentially makes it less compelling to create a self-published guide, though plenty of folks are still making it happen.

Title page of Provost's article, “A Defense Against Loneliness,” in SJ 324.

SJ: One thing that’s been interesting about climbing for me is that there is a “before and after” when it comes to noticing. Specifically, after I started climbing, I began seeing objects and landscapes through a different lens, which boils down to: is it climbable? You touch upon the idea of how guidebooks changed your own act of seeing in the article, so for you, what do you see differently now after diving into the world of unprofessional climbing guidebooks?

HP: For a long time, I was largely driven by my craving for legitimacy: as a climber, as a writer, as a person. You want to be validated that you’re doing life right, you know? It’s a pretty common experience. I would look for that acceptance through pursuing accomplishments that already had baked-in validation — projecting the classics that everyone said were hard for the grade, trying to be a dirtbag because I thought that's what defined real climbers, or only writing when I was on assignment and sure I was going to get published. 

The Tree Beta guidebook that my college friends made didn’t initially register for me as valid or legit — it was only mimicking the form and methods that deigned legitimacy, and so wasn’t the real deal, in my limited view. 

But as I read more and more of these self-published guidebooks, and did a much deeper dive on zines, I realized that they represent a much more coherent history than the five historical moments that every climber can name — because it represents what normal people who were partaking in the culture were prioritizing, thinking, and doing. I think differently about what makes history now, and actually prefer to look at the amatear to guide me. 

SJ: Lastly, if you had the time, what self-published guidebook would you make?

HP: In the last few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Mitchell Creek, which is a bouldering area outside Castle Rock, largely developed in 2020. It’s the same drainage system as Castlewood Canyon State Park, but outside of the park. I’ve only ever seen information about it online — Mountain Project, Kaya, and random beta videos on the internet. As far as I know, no one has ever published a guidebook to the area. 

I’ve bouldered there plenty of times alone, and with my closest friends, and some of it’s a chosspile, some of its sharp as hell, and it’s not the biggest area in the world. But in many ways, it feels like it’s mine, just as, after spending years and years at Ten Sleep and the Red, they feel like mine too. Once you own enough memories of a place, it becomes part of the geography of who you are, and it would be cool to try to channel that feeling into a guidebook for this silly little subzone that admittedly has its gems. 

Plus, it already has a strong connection to self-published guides. One of the earliest examples I came across during my research was a 90s guide to Castlewood Canyon by Thomas Hanson, which you can still find here and there. I’ve heard through the grapevine that someone else is working on an updated guide to Castlewood, with all the development that has exploded over the last few years — we’ll see how weird and delightfully amateur it ends up being. 

Limited Edition: “A Lone Ascent"

Feature Image: "A Silent Tree" by Son Jungkee. Acrylic on paper. 41x30cm, 2023. You can read our interview with Son in Scree.