Best Denver/Front Range Guidebooks

Hi, 

I’m looking to buy a guidebook for these areas as a gift to friend moving there and was wondering what the best one / most comprehensive one is

What kind of climbing do they like?
For the love of god do not buy them a CO Falcon guide

Mainly sport or bouldering, but an all encompassing sport/trad book could also be nice 

Hey Alex,

You're kind of already on it - the front range has pretty high MP adoption so you'll often find more routes/boulders on here than you would any guidebook (the south platte being an exception). There's no sort of good comprehensive Denver or Front Range guidebook as there's tens of thousands of routes and boulder problems within an hours drive of Denver. If they're going to be Denver based though, they'll likely spend a lot of time in Clear Creek Canyon, which has a great guidebook. Honestly, all of the main climbing areas around Denver have great guidebooks - Clear Creek, Boulder Canyon, Eldo, Flatirons, Boulder Canyon, the South Platte - even Castlewood Canyon just got a new guide.

There's not a great bouldering guidebook for the front range, so that's probably best to just use MP for, but a guidebook to any of those other areas or maybe do 2 of them would be a good buy. There's some good Rocky Mountain National Park and Mt Blue Sky bouldering guides now too. Personally, if they're sport and bouldering, I'd get them both the Clear Creek Canyon guidebook and the RMNP bouldering guidebook.

For sport get the Kevin Capps guide to Clear Creek Canyon and the Haas/Weidner guide to Boulder Canyon and they'll be set for a while. For trad get the Levin guide to Eldorado Canyon.

I honestly can't recommend any of the bouldering guidebooks that I've used for this area (especially not the Benningfield ones). Mountain Project is probably your best bet. 

Prav C wrote:

For sport get the Kevin Capps guide to Clear Creek Canyon and the Haas/Weidner guide to Boulder Canyon and they'll be set for a while. For trad get the Levin guide to Eldorado Canyon.

I honestly can't recommend any of the bouldering guidebooks that I've used for this area (especially not the Benningfield ones). Mountain Project is probably your best bet. 

Agreed the Benningfield is less than helpful, but the new Blue Sky and RMNP books are really well done, very stoke inducing for summer. 

The Big 3 canyons are a huge start. The Poudre sport/bouldering book is cool if they live up north. For summer, the Devil's Head book too unless your friend likes getting lost af. Shelf Rd book is a skip, too confusing. And the Golden Climbing guide I haven't heard good things.

Awesome thank you guys for the advice I appreciate it!!!