Making plans for Memorial Day weekend (May 25 - 28)? You might want to put Mountainfilm in Telluride on your radar. The little mountain town of Telluride, Colorado, boasts great mountaineering, a nice boulderfield and the world famous Ophir Wall for trad climbing. Add an appearance by climbing's master of stone, Chris Sharma, and a passel of the best mountain movies and you have an exemplary spring destination.

Mountainfilm in Telluride has a celebrated history in mountaineering. The event began in 1979 with a few screenings of climbing films and, since then, the festival has attracted leading names in alpinism, such as Sir Edmund Hilary, Royal Robbins, Yvon Chouinard, David Breashears, Conrad Anker, Lynn Hill, Timmy O’Neill and Alex Honnold.

Find more info on Mountainfilm here.

Sonnie Trotter is one of North America's best trad climbers with ascents of Rhapsody (5.14b/c), Cobra Crack (5.14) and The Prophet (VI, 5.13d). Friends rap about what makes Sonnie tick. Including footage of bad ass Squamish trad first ascents.

Crescendo |krəˈ sh endō| Sonnie Trotter AliasCinema from Alex Lavigne - AliasCinema.com on Vimeo.

We’ll start with the one that is in season. If you saw our issue 199, on stands until a month ago, you might remember the gorgeous photos and varied, spicy history of ice and mixed climbing in Maple Canyon, Utah.

Considering that the last guide to this area was 11 years out of print, “long-awaited” is almost inadequate to herald Wasatch Mixed: A Guide to Northern Utah’s Mixed and Select Ice Routes. The book is written by Nathan Smith, primo photographer and author of the above article, and the prolific Doug Heinrich, who has been climbing in the region since age 12 and who with Chis Harmston was responsible for an outsize number of major milestones, essentially (also with Seth Shaw, Tim Wagner and Robbie Colbert) opening winter climbing in Maple.

A “selects” guide, comprising 200 mixed  ice routes throughout the greater Wasatch Front region, this edition is the most comprehensive guide to mixed climbing in Utah. It covers a range from short hard drytooling caves to multipitch trad lines connecting hanging daggers. Over 70 ice routes, comprising the majority of lines climbed in the Wasatch on a given winter weekend,  are described, many for the first time in a guidebook. Various of those, which range from the Great White Icicle (WI 3) in Little Cottonwood to the usually four-pitch Stairway to Heaven (WI 5/6) are said to have come in fat this year.

Tips and specifics include what ice and rock gear to bring, best belays,  descent info,  avalanche-threat info, and generally useful lines such as, “Great movement on the rock and a solid ice finish to weed out the drytoolers … if [the pillar] is thin there is additional drytooling required, raising the grade.”

Other info: many color photos, FA history, 94 pages. Available at www.pullphotography.com (also at rockandice.com), $23.95.

Several other recently published guidebooks are:

The Obed, a Climber’s Guide to the Wild and Scenic, by Kelly Brown (that’s “Mr. Obed,” as noted in the foreword, to you). This is the first complete guidebook to this beautiful sandstone area of big roofs (with big holds!), clean faces and arêtes, which boasts routes of the whole range of grades, and it is the first guide of any sort to the well-known Lilly Boulders. A very personal book, it contains essays and perspectives by eight members of the Tribe that holds this place dear and is now sharing it. Developed over the last 30 years, the place was formerly trad and is now considered one of the best sport crags in the country.

The guide contains route and boulder problem info on six major crags and the Lilly Boulders. According to the publisher, the book covers every legal route in the Obed, leaving out only perhaps 15 routes, which are located in restricted areas: The area is under NPS management for a Wild and Scenic River. Climber-ranger relations are described by visitors as excellent, with climbing considered a valid use of the area, and a centrally located climbers’ camp costing a mere $5 a night is said to add to the relaxed atmosphere.

Other: FA info, 216 pages, action and cliff photos, maps. Humorous and nicely subjective route descriptions with such helpful tidbits as, “Move up the face staying right. Prepare for a shocking finish on the upper headwall.” GreenerGrassPublishing.com, $29.95.

Yosemite Big Walls, Third Edition, by Chris McNamara and Chris Van Leuven. This third edition has been increased to 64 select routes, 14 of them new classics,  and features much big wall free-climbing info. New additions include free routes such as  El Cap's West Face, Freerider, and Golden Gate, the Regular NW Face of Half Dome and the South Face of Watkins, with new beta provided on now-free pitches on many more routes. All routes contain updated gear info: “Chris Mac” personally went through all route-beta posts on his site SuperTopo for it.

This edition contains expanded FA history for about half of the routes, with much detail and many key quotes from written and spoken word; also: clean-aid info, updated info on racks needed for every pitch, strategic info for all routes, GPS coordinates for some approaches, and detailed and useful (especially in case of storm) retreat and descent beta.

Other: 208 pages. Photos by many standouts including new images from Tom Frost and Tom Evans. Mini bios of many historic and current players, and a timeline of key events.

See www.supertopo.com, $29.95 for print book, $26.95 for ebook, and specials for combos. Varying prices for overseas orders.

Sublime Climbs, by Kevin Lindorff, Josef Gooding and Jarrod Hodgson. Four years (“of blood, sweat and tears,” in the words of one author)  in the making, this is a selects guidebook to the Australian state of Victoria, which contains three of the most popular areas in the country: Mount Arapiles (but of course), the Grampians and Mount Buffalo. The last select guide to the Grampians national park area came out in 2001, and the area has seen tremendous development since. Additionally, info is now available on some areas formerly closed due to access issues. This book covers a grand 700 routes.

Every area described is shown in images, maps or both, with aerial photos and jazzy action images from many photographers.

Other: FA info; 380 pages, 123 action shots, 32 locator shots, 158 photo-topos. Sold at www.rockmaster.com.au; within Australia $65 USD; $85 USD for an overseas order.

Did you know that Maestri’s gas-powered compressor was hauled up to the summit of Cerro Torre in 1990 during the filming of Werner Herzog’s film Scream of Stone?

The plan was to helicopter the infamous power tool down to El Chalten and have it brought to Reinhold Messner’s—one of the film’s screenwriters—mountain museum in Italy. Very few people lived in El Chalten at the time—it was nowhere near the “Jackson Hole of South America” destination that it has become today—and there was no protest from the “locals” about the plan. However, many climbers were working on the set of Scream of Stone, and they complained. So did Adrian Falcone, the park’s head ranger at the time.

After some debate, the compressor was lowered back down to its last resting place on Cerro Torre’s headwall, and it was bolted to the rock with cables so it could not be easily removed again.

It’s been about a month since, as they say, shit went down on Cerro Torre, the slender queen of Patagonia ... and if you feel as I do, then you too are no doubt sick of reading and thinking about this Gordian knot of a climbing issue. But I thought the above anecdote was a zesty morsel of trivia in a topic that has otherwise been chewed to flavorless, unrecognizable cud.

If you’re a subscriber, you’ll be receiving our annual Photo Issue (No 201) in the mail any day. (Click here to buy the photo issue. No shipping!) In it, you’ll find my article “The Tyranny of History,” which I hope provides new light, hard facts, depth and background to “CT 2012,” as I call both this issue as well as my robot. If going around in circles for 40,000 posts—99 percent of which are absolute misinformed garbage—on various climbing forums hasn’t sated your appetite for reading about all things Cerro Torre, and you’re actually still interested in this juicy vertical imbroglio, I hope you will take the time to stand in your local specialty climbing shop and check out my essay and, hell, maybe even buy the magazine itself. (What an original idea!)

But I understand that you are a hardcore climber—you don’t have money; you don’t like to read anything longer than an 8a.nu comment; magazines are for gumbies, etc.—and so here I will offer you a slimmed-down (though not dumbed-down) guide to this ethical conundrum. Because, after thinking about it every day for the last month, I’ve actually come to realize that this issue isn’t that impossible to understand. In fact, even a dummy can “get” Cerro Torre, if it’s properly explained. Allow moi to do so:

A lot of bolts were placed up a beautiful, hard mountain. No one liked the way the bolts were placed, and a lot of people said the bolts weren’t necessary to climb the peak. As years passed, the original sting faded as people continued to rely on the bolts to get to the top—because that’s what everyone else before them had done, and they wanted to get their summit, too. Finally, the route was climbed without the “bad” bolts. Less than one third of the bolts were taken out. Five days later, the route was climbed again without the bolts, this time for its first free ascent. Twice in one week, a new generation of climbers proved that the bolts weren’t necessary to climb this mountain. End of story. What’s the big problem?

Back at his old stomping grounds, the Swiss cave called Eptingen, where he has pushed dry-tooling standards since 1997, Robert Jasper has redpointed Ironman, given M14+. The route, completely devoid of ice at present, is a 40-meter link up of Superman (M13+), Batman (M12) and finishes up Winner (M11-). According to planetmountain.com, Eptingen has about 20 mixed routes graded M6 to M14+. The crag usually has ice, but this season started out too warm, then got too cold for ice to form. Jasper commented: "But the drips are beginning to form now. It'll be great to see how it all develops."

Here's a video of Jasper's mega linkup.

Robert Jasper | 1st Ascent | Ironman from funst on Vimeo.

New video about new router Dani Andrada:

The old adage that watching an ice/mixed competition is like watching paint dry couldn’t be more wrong. It is like watching someone paint. You stand there, knees locked, and observe a roster of super strong athletes sweep their brushes across the canvas, some in little strokes, others in broad statements. Mostly, though they hang from their tools, shaking the left arm, then switching and shaking the right, then the left, then the right, then the left, fighting back the pump that builds steadily and as surely as the setting of the sun, which is about how long these comps take if they start early in the morning. Occasionally someone clangs a cowbell to keep everyone on their frostbitten toes, and the people who know a word of French yell, “Allez!”

By the end of it, your knees have calcified and you hobble away straight legged, which becomes your situation until an orthopedic surgeon cracks you behind the knees with a Louisville slugger and gets the joints moving again. It’s expensive, but a fair price for watching the masters paint.

Two young Americans have claimed what may be the longest route in the Fitz Roy region, a giant linkup of the Northwest Ridge of Mermoz to the North Pillar of Fitz Roy, including the first complete and first alpine-style ascent of the NW ridge.  Scott Bennett, 26, and Cheyne Lempe, 20, both from Colorado, climbed around 2000 meters of vertical gain, with much route-finding and ridge-winding trickery, and 500 meters of new terrain.

The idea for the long route arose the year before, on Bennett's first trip to Patagonia, brainchild of his friend and partner Blake Herrington. At first the idea struck Bennett as simply another variation

Word has trickled out of the loss of Herb Conn, who with his wife, Jan, formed the original great pioneering partnership in the famed trad stronghold of the Needles of South Dakota, to cancer at age 91.

A doctor attended to Herb Conn to the end, but he died in his own bed in his and Jan's off-the-grid "Conn Cave,"  a stone home with no electricity or running water, in the Custer area.

The original nomad climbers, the Conns climbed across the country from Seneca Rocks to Big Bend, Texas, and Zion. Arriving in the Black Hills in the 1950s, they picked off the great lines in the Needles and made this bold area of pegmatite crystals their fearsome playground. They named many formations as well as establishing hundreds of routes including multipitch area classics such as the Conn Diagonal (5.7) and East Gruesome (5.8). Jan Conn, 87 and healthy today, was the first woman to climb a technical route on Devil's Tower.

You have to admire David Lama. After placing high in the World Cup circuit in 2009 he changed his focus to alpine walls. His sponsor, Red Bull, funded trips in exchange for images, video and stories, and Lama traveled the globe, honing his skills in frontiers like the Yosemite-sized granite canyons of Cochamó, Chile. It was in Cochamó, in a climbing magazine, that Lama laid eyes on the “shriek of stone” Cerro Torre, and decided to free climb it. Red Bull gave him the thumbs up in exchange for the story and media.

That first expedition ended in a clusterfuck when the Red Bull film team added bolts to the Compressor Route, the line that Cesare Maestri forced through blank rock in an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cerro Torre. Ironically, that crappy route—probably the biggest botch job in the history of the sport—doubles as the climbing world’s heartstring and Lama was savaged online in climbing forums and even physically threatened—despite the fact that he hadn’t drilled a single bolt.