Cascade Alpine Guides, Climbing and High Routes: Stevens Pass to Rainy Pass and Rainy Pass to Fraser River. Fred Beckey. The Mountaineers, Seattle, 1977/1981. 354/328 pages, black-and-white photographs, line drawings, maps. $11.95 each.

One frequent question asked when mountaineers get together is, “Hey, what does Fred Beckey do for a living?” The answer is never definite, but is always modified by the observation that Fred travels and climbs a lot, has frequent address changes, and lives pretty frugally—often out of the back of his sedan. Fred also writes climbing guidebooks. And by their voluminous contents it’s obvious that if he doesn’t make a living on them, they take up a lot of his life in meticulous research, hanging around libraries and archives, heavy letter-writing and reporting on the phone.

Reviewed here are two of the finest Beckey contributions to the guidebook form. They cover two-thirds of the Cascade Range and bring to a conclusion his updating of the original volume back in 1949, Climber’s Guide to the Cascade and Olympic Mountains, published by the American Alpine Club. Well, a lot has happened since then, to climbing and to Fred. Comparing the 1949 version, the 1961 editions and the latest offerings is a good way to measure the accelerated tempo of climbing in the Northwest over the past three decades.

The 1949 edition described routes on 60 peaks in the Olympic Mountains and 253 peaks in the Cascades; the 1961 edition covered 94 peaks in the Olympics and 546 in the Cascades; the combined coverage by the four guidebooks now describe 211 peaks in the Olympics and 1279 in the Cascades. The 1949 edition had 246 pages of text, compared to the current combined coverage in 1100 pages.

Beckey’s three Cascade volumes are identical in size (7? × 8½?), but differ in color. In their attractive wine-brown, green, and red covers they look good on the den shelf, while their tough, plastic-coated paperbacks also make them good travelers in the pack or car.

The guides do more than describe routes up peaks. By sub-areas within each book they include laboriously researched information on the areas’ geography and geomorphology, flora and fauna, geology, human history and Indian lore, land-management policies, and the types and availability of pertinent maps, along with descriptions of road approaches. The historical information alone—early explorations and discoveries, first mining and logging, and subsequent recreation and land-use developments—make the guides enjoyable bedtime reading. Quotations extracted from the notes of early-day explorers, miners, and geologists bring the past to life, while information on weather and climate, precautions in wilderness travel, and the effects of human impact on the fragile alpine areas dramatize the present.

The photographs provide excellent introductions to the various terrains of the Central and North Cascades, but some suffer in reproduction. Large shadowed areas reveal little detail in valley bottoms and sides, and ridge crests tend to blend into one another. The sketches compensate for these problems in some selected views, and for route definition are often preferable to photos. Some “vertical maps”—“topos” to rock climbers—are included and show important features of technical climbs.

At the close of each of this long succession of guidebooks, there’s a photograph of the author. Each succeeding volume shows Fred with a few more furrows on his weathered face and a little more grey in his beard. The lack of flab is noteworthy.

Still, I wonder what does Fred do for a living?

Dee Molenaar