Yosemite Climbs: Free Climbs. Don Reid. Chockstone Press, Evergreen, Colorado, 1994. 413 pages, black-and-white photos, maps and topos. $25.00.

Comment: The second installment in the series is just as thick as the entire 1987 edition, which had both aid and free routes. Yosemite climbing is far from a dead scene! Don Reid has done an excellent job. All that stuff that has been done on the Chapel Wall, Arch Rock and dozens of other small crags is here. The book also includes free-climbing topos for the Nose and the Salathé on El Capitan, the regular northwest face of Half Dome and the Direct. Despite the title, not everything is a free climb. Some of the bigger “free” climbs require a little hooking, a few bolt or rivet ladders and a few other big-wall tricks to access purely free pitches.

Cameron M. Burns