Fifteen years ago Rockfax unveiled its original Peak Bouldering guidebook. This was one of the first guidebooks to comprehensively cover bouldering in the Peak District, and such was its popularity that you still see well-loved copies being used today. They have even been sold on eBay for inflated prices in recent years.
Later this year we will be finally producing the new edition of this book. Since 2000 bouldering has undergone a massive growth in popularity, and the Peak District is now generally considered to be the most popular bouldering destination in the UK. The new book will bring everything up to date with many new venues, loads of new problems plus all the old well-loved spots being covered.
Grading
One of the big changes in this book will be the grading system we use. The debate about V-grades or Font grades for bouldering has been ongoing for years without a definitive worldwide resolution at this stage. We have decided to use a dual system which will hopefully keep everyone happy by presenting all harder problems with both a V-grade and a Font grade. For the lower-grade problems we are going to use V-grades with UK tech grades since these tend to be more familiar to less experienced boulderers coming from a trad climbing background. The split will be between V2/font 5+ and V3/6A which also represents the divide line between orange spot problems and red spot problems.
More information on the book here
News update May 13 – The book will not be published this summer. Now that we are working on it we have uncovered discrepancies with many of the low-grade problems and it is taking a lot of time to sort these out. The new predicted date is before Christmas 2013.
