Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)PROS: The organization of this book is outstanding. It has an overview map with location of each hike clearly marked by its number. It has a table of hikes with difficulty ratings, length, usage, and activities. It has brief summary of how to handle high altitute, ticks, bears, and mosquitos, and what to put into the backpack for a hike. Each hike comes with a little individual map. Each trail is rated as suitable for hiking, biking, or both. 58 trails described in the book is a very manageble number which makes choosing the right one easy. It is quite well described what to expect during the hike. It is the best organized book on hikes I have ever seen!!!
CONS: the information in the book is not always up-to-date; small details which could help you to find trailhead or the right turn are often not there; maps appear to be traced from topographic maps and are accurate, but show very little besides the trail and starting and final points. Very mathematical approach requires meticulous counting of distances.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: we took this book for a two-day weekend at Tahoe. On our first day, we decided to take trail #6 to Watson Lake. The book suggests taking unpaved Watson Lake Road and turn left on road 16N73C in 5.9 miles. In reality it turned out that the road is called "Mt. Watson Rd.", that it is paved for at least 12 miles, that there are quite a few roads on the left, but none of them has sign "16N73C". There are no hints in the book how to find the right road other than distance from the highway, and we of course did not realize that the distance was the only way to find that road. We were looking for a sign, missed the 5.9 miles reading, and then wasted 2 hours driving back and forth, but did not find the turn to the lake and gave up.
On the next day, we went for #16, Five Lakes Trail. The book suggests to drive on Alpine Meadows Road for 2.1 miles to the trailhead which is opposite to Deer Park Drive. We found Deer Park Drive 1.6 miles from the beginning of the road, were confused by why it is not 2.1 miles down the road, thought that perhaps it was a typo in the book, and spent 15 minutes looking for the trail - until we asked a local who told us that Deer Park Drive is a half-loop which intersects Alpine Meadows Road twice, here and half a mile down the road.
In both cases, we got a good deal of frustration. I will not repeat here what my wife said about this book and what she suggested to do with it! A good map could certainly help us - but we did not have one, and the maps in this book do not show anything except for the countour of the trail and the final destination - as a rule, neither landmarks along the trail nor intersecting trails are indicated.
BOTTOMLINE: If your family enjoys hiking with a GPS unit and a topographic map and loves the idea of counting 3.1 miles along the road, then another 2.7 miles after a turn, and you never forget to reset your trip meter after a turn when you are driving - you will get the most from this book and will love it. On the other hand, if you like to rely on verbal descriptions more than on accurate numbers and want a book that warns you that there are two crossings with Deer Park Drive and you should park at the upper one, or expect the book to describe what you will see when you arrive to an important turn to make you feel safe that you did not miss it, or if you like to see detailed maps or even fragments of topographic maps on one of the pages - then you may find this book very frustrating because the language it talks to you is not the language you expect to hear. It seems that instructions were very carefully verified against the map - but were not necessarily checked by real-life family hikers! A few more touches could've made this book really great. Maybe I was unfortunate to choose poorly described trails, or was not a kind of hiker that this book was written for - but I got my share of frustration which could be easily prevented by just several words in the text. My advise - if you get this book, carefully track the distances, expect that some things written in the book do not match the reality, and keep a topographic map at hand - and you'll be fine.
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