In the summer of 1973, Sierra Club Books published Fifty Classic Climbs of North America by Steve Roper and Allen Steck. The first printing sold out in eighteen months. The book has not been out of print since.
The work was, in part, a guidebook. It described fifty named routes, from the East Ridge of Mount Logan in the Yukon to the Salathé Wall on El Capitan, with the kind of route prose that had become standard in American climbing literature by the late 1960s.
Eleven of the fifty routes were in the Sierra Nevada. Roper, who lived in Berkeley and had spent two decades in the range as a climber and as a Yosemite guide, wrote most of them.
Last summer the climber Diana Pennell, who works as a backcountry ranger out of the Bishop office of the Inyo National Forest, set out to climb all eleven Sierra routes in a single season, with the 1973 book in her pack and a notebook beside it.
She finished the project on September 14, on the Harding Route of Mount Conness. She made notes on each route's description against the route as climbed.
The notes are not a critique. They are a fifty-year report.
"Roper described what he saw," Pennell said, in a conversation at the Bishop ranger station on May 3. "What he saw has, in places, moved."
The Mendenhall Couloir on Laurel Mountain, for instance, is described in the book as "a clean ribbon of ice for 600 feet, easing to snow at the bergschrund." In July of 2025, when Pennell climbed it, the ice was present for perhaps 180 feet. Below that, the route was loose scree on rotten granite.
This is not Roper's fault. The Sierra glaciers and permanent snowfields have retreated substantially since 1973. The route Roper described in 1972 was the route that existed in 1972. The route Pennell climbed in 2025 was a different route on the same wall.
Other descriptions held almost perfectly. The East Buttress of Mount Whitney, climbed by Pennell on August 6, matched the 1973 description pitch by pitch. The granite is hard and slow to change. The cracks that Roper described in 1971 are the cracks that Pennell jammed in 2025.
The North Buttress of Mount Goode, described in the book as "a sustained 5.7 with one short crux," was found by Pennell to be a sustained 5.7 with one short crux. The crux, a thin lieback at the seventh pitch, was unchanged.
What had changed, Pennell said, was the surrounding country. The trail to the Bishop Pass approach, much of which is described in the book as crossing meadows, now crosses scree. The Palisade Glacier, which the book describes as filling its basin, has receded by perhaps half a kilometre.
The book is, in this sense, a document of two kinds of permanence. The granite is permanent on a human timescale. The ice and the snow are not.
Roper, now ninety-two, lives in El Cerrito, California. He still corresponds, in longhand, with climbers who write to him about the book. Pennell wrote to him in November. He replied within a fortnight.
His letter, which Pennell read aloud, said in part: I am gratified that the granite has held its word. I am unsurprised that the ice has not. I would write the Mendenhall description differently today, but I am not the man to write it.
Steck, who was Roper's co-author and the older of the two by fifteen years, died in 2023 at the age of ninety-six. The book's introduction, which Steck wrote, is one of the last pieces of writing in which he speaks at length about the discipline of route description.
Steck wrote, in that introduction: A guidebook is a covenant. The writer agrees to tell the truth about the climb. The climber agrees to read carefully.
The covenant, Pennell said, was honoured in eight of the eleven Sierra entries. In two it had been overtaken by the warming climate. In one, the East Face of Mount Whitney, a 2018 rockfall had altered the upper third of the route. The new line, established by the climbing rangers, has not been written into any printed book.
There has been talk for some years of a new edition. Yvon Chouinard, who supplied many of the original photographs, has reportedly encouraged it. Roper has demurred.
Pennell, asked what she would do with her notebook, said she would deposit it with the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, where the Sierra Club papers are held. The notebook will sit, eventually, near Roper's original manuscript.
The book remains in print. It is read, mostly, by climbers who have already done the routes. It is read, increasingly, as a record of what the routes were.
