Published in late 2010, Desert Towers was shortlisted the next year for both the Kendal Mountain Festival and Banff Mountain Film + Book Festival. At Banff, Desert Towers won the category “Best Book – Mountaineering History” for 2011.

Within its 350 pages, Desert Towers features photographs and tales from Ed Webster, Layton Kor, Harvey Carter, Huntley Ingalls, Bill Hatcher, Andrew Burr, Tom Till, David Brower, John Sherman, many, many more.

Want to know what it’s like to stand atop a never-before-touched summit, far above the Earth? Desert Towers conveys something of this excitement.

Before the publication of Desert Towers there was little information available about climbing history in the Southwest desert. Eric Bjornstad’s 1988 Desert Rock guidebook, Layton Kor’s 1983 Beyond the Vertical memoir, and Katy Cassidy and Earl Wiggins’s 1989 Canyon Country Climbs each contained a part of the story. By the early 2000s these books were long out of print with worn copies commanding premium prices—a measure of the their worth.

Desert Towers fills in the gaps and reclaims a century of desert climbing from obscurity. Since publication, recent development of extremely difficult, horizontal roof cracks like Century Crack suggest that creativity and exploration is far from over. Long may it be so! The desert has an inspiring history and for those with the right eyes, an exciting future.

Desert Towers. Buy a copy from Sharp End Publishing, our local, Boulder, CO, publishers.