bechtel guide- wind river range-- do not bother buying

Steve is a class act for sure. And back-country mountain guidebooks shouldn't be awash in detail; there's more than enough of that type of minutiae for all our local crags, where the people who can't do without that type of instruction should stay.

As for MP being a "better" source, something about that has always bothered me. People use guidebooks like Steve's and Joe's to get into and explore an area, post more detailed descriptions at best and thinly-veiled plagiarism at worst, and then we read complaints that MP is "better." A whole lot of MP wouldn't exist at all without the guidebooks, and I think the guidebook authors don't get their due.

So here's a contrary thought: if you use MP and find it helpful, then even if you don't use the guidebook, go out and buy it anyway as a gesture of support for the person whose hard work and dedication made most of those descriptions possible.

Matt's response is similar to a simpleton who goes to walmart, looks at a chinese made piece of nicely formed plastic of dubious quality for $5 and then bitches about the american made, more simply formed but of robust quality for $35 version... i wonder if s/he gets "cynical" over higher priced higher quality american made product as well? or just free photos on the internet?

want to get stuff for free... cool.

My main point is that many, perhaps even most, of the people writing things up for MP and SP would never have made it into the areas they are documenting if not for the existing guidebooks. Even if they have improved on those guidebooks (and not introduced new errors), those improvements owe a significant debt to the guidebook authors who opened the doors for them.

So I think that almost everyone who uses information from MP and SP is piggy-backing on the work the guidebook authors put in (with the exception of one or two horrendously bad guidebooks whose authors deserve no credit for anything). Those authors are not getting rich, their hard work and expertise has been churned into free information, and I'm saying do the right thing and buy the guidebook anyway, because you wouldn't have gotten that "free" information without it.

And those people all studied and learned from the $35 widget before attempting to make their own.

Well THERE'S the fundamental problem with info/topos/descriptions from the internet - they are just that - a collection of random stuff from random folk who may or may not know what they're talking about. In France we have 'camptocamp' in place of Mountain Project. Topos/descriptions of any route anywhere can be posted by anyone and then further edited/added to/updated ad nauseam by anyone. C2C's champions are an ever growing community of consumers with an incredible sense of entitlement, however they overlook the fact that A LOT of the material available on their site is at best sketchy and at worst just plain wrong. With a guidebook written by a knowledgeable author you're going to get accurate descriptions and just as importantly, a consistency that is impossible with hundreds or thousands of folk's input.