Red Rocks and Guidebooks

Red Rocks looms out of the desert, facing all the lights and endlessly turning gears of the strip. Every year the sprawl of tract homes reaches closer, and Charleston gets more congested but Red Rock Canyon stays more or less the same.
Red Rocks has, in my opinion, some of the best rock climbing in all the hugeness of the West. From 2000 foot 5.9's to boulder problems as sexy as the classics at the Buttermilks, it's all there, like 30 miles from the Strip; there truly is something for everyone. It can be surreal, looking back off a route or boulder to see a city growing from the sand, gridded like a computer chip. Vegas is perfectly out of place; a city like that couldn't exist anywhere else, except maybe some oil-rich country in the Middle-East. I love the anonymity of a Casino, the faux glamor of their hollow decor, and all the blinking lights and chirping, ringing, talking machines stretching off in great empty rows.
It takes about three minutes for me to want to leave.
Even looking over at Vegas from Red Rocks it's hard to imagine all the people inside, staring blankly at a screen, pushing a button that makes their money go somewhere else.
It seems as if more and more climbers are adding Las Vegas and Red Rocks onto their winter circuit. A new route guidebook and a new bouldering guidebook have been released in the last few years.
The route guide, Red Rocks: A Climber's Guide, by Jerry Handren is excellent in its descriptions, directions and photography. It's written well, as if Handren actually studied writing and spent more than  45 minutes editing. The bouldering guide, By Tom Moulin, is perhaps the best guidebook I've ever read. Not only does it do all the things a guidebook should, like get you to the area and boulder problem you want, it provides a much more detailed history (way back to pre-history) and a great natural history chapter. I love to know where I am, as in what bioregion, and what plants and animals I'm seeing, so perhaps this part excited me more than it would the average boulderer. But I think it's important for some Southern California bred gym climber to have pretty much undeniable (unless they ripped that chapter out) access to information about why, for example, Creosote is such a badass plant. This guidebook really does set a new bar, as it claims on its website.