Your Guide to The National Parks

This book is a mile wide but an inch deep. It's a highly ambitious project that seems thrown together too hurriedly with not enough attention to crucial details. IMO, poor information is sometimes worse than no information at all and attention to accuracy, details and good maps are critical in a travel guide, far more so than entertaining reading and beautiful layouts. Credit is certainly due. It's quite a task to cover all 58 National Parks. You can imagine the amount of time and effort it would take to actually visit a quarter of all the places mentioned in the book and I feel bad even criticizing the book after all the work it must have taken. But the bottom line is I'm re-selling the book, because I don't trust the recommendations. I find many of the comments and "don't miss" recommendations to be random and superficial. You might assume what the book highlights are the best. But in fact they may be totally random and even mediocre compared with the other options on places to check out. That or they are the most crowded popular places that everyone hears about. Don't expect to find "hidden gems" away from the crowds with this book. I don't get the feeling the author stuck around long enough or asked locals enough questions to find them.First the good. The book is a feast for the eyes. It is very colorful with beautiful layouts. The text is very compelling and exciting, and is just the thing to get family or friends excited about visiting these places. There's lots of information here, it's well-organized and some is quite good. Because each park section is laid out in a similar format and there are colored keys to quickly find each park, it's a good way to compare parks by flipping pages much more quickly than you could look all this up online. For instance I like the way each park shows a graph to tell you what normal temperatures are at different times of year. If you're the "don't make me think" type who doesn't enjoy planning a trip and you want a recipe, then you might like the Vacation Planner sections that give you an itinerary of high points.Now the bad. It's not that the sections are short (the book is thick already), it's the uneven quality of the recommendations which are there seem totally random sometimes and not necessarily based on good solid information. You don't know which information is good and which is poor unless you already know the park (and if you know the park well enough to tell the difference you don't need this book!). I get the sense of someone who's very colorful and entertaining to listen to and always sounds very confident of what they say, even when in some cases they don't know what they're talking about. Once you pick one or two parks to visit, I'd strongly recommend you buy guides specific to these parks by people who really know the area. I've been to Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, and spent many, many weeks in the backcountry of Rocky Mountain National Park and I bought this book to check out some other national parks I'd like to visit outside the central/southern Rockies. Problem is, the recommendations seem really random-to-poor for the places I know in the Rockies. And if they're random-to-poor for the places I do know, then I don't trust the other sections to recommend the best things to check out in places I haven't been yet.The map for RMNP highlights "Backpacking - Skeleton Gulch." Since it's the only place on the whole 2-page map that mentions backpacking, does this mean Skeleton Gulch is one of the best places to go backpacking in the park? Uh, not exactly. Grand Ditch is an irrigation ditch, as opposed to all the countless natural streams and riverbeds found at practically every other trailhead in the park which the author might have picked. In all fairness, I've never backpacked around Skeleton Gulch. That's because Skeleton Gulch doesn't figure prominently in guides specific to RMNP and when I've asked park rangers about this area they don't recommend it too highly either. Does the author pick these things with a dartboard? More likely, was it the only place on the crammed-full map with room left to put something? Perhaps the map looks more "visually balanced" this way because previously there was nothing in the top left corner of the map? It's your vacation - is this what you want in a vacation guide recommendations?There's key places on many of the 2-page maps you can't see at all because they're hidden. The 2-page map for Arches has a half-inch gap where the two pieces of the same highway don't meet up at Panorama Point because so much of the map is missing in the book binding. Does the Salt Basin Trail meet up with El Capitan trail at both ends or only one end? You can't tell - too much is buried in the binding. Trails seem to meet up with highways and highways seem to meet up with trails at the binding of the 2-page map for Hot Springs. The RMNP section highlights Estes Park and Grand Lake, but you can't see the actual location of Grand Lake the town on the 2-page park map. You can see a road goes down the west side of Grand Lake (the lake) but you can't see that a road also goes along the north shore to the east side as well, unless you totally broke the binding of the book to lay it open flat. The map problems would be especially frustrating if you rolled into one of these parks near dusk and were trying to read the map in the car until you could get to a visitor center. I expect the problem with all the 2-page maps is the fault of the publisher, not the author.There's fluff and filler like: "There are 66 mammals residing here. Most popular are big and furry or small and mischievous." I realize you could find a sentence like that in most any guidebook, but I choose it as an example of the flavor of many of the comments you'll find.There's gross overstatement and hyperbole: p. 335 "Visiting [RMNP] during winter provides the sort of tranquility you won't find anywhere around the roadways and hiking trails in summer." Huh? You won't find tranquility anywhere hiking trails in summer? I've been on trails in the summer where I saw at most one or two people in a whole day. I'm sure even Yosemite has trails where I could find tranquility. Help me find them, don't make useless sweeping and misleading generalizations. When someone writes this glib and carelessly, I don't want to plan my fantastic vacation around this patchy and uneven guide.

My wife and I are in the process of hiking in all 59 National Parks. Hiked in 35 Parks, so far. As you might imagine, we already have four different guidebooks on the Parks. This is number five and is a fairly complete handbook for 58 of the 59 national Parks. Pinnacles is absent but the book was published before Pinnacles was upgraded to National Park status.Of our five guidebooks, this one has the most complete coverage of nearby lodging and dining options, which is commendable and very useful. I appreciate the "Best Of" discussions, which list the "must do" attractions. One of it's best features is the consistancy of the info for each Park. Every Park includes When to Go, Transportation and Airports, Directions, a comprehensive overview, a discussion of the different regions of the Park, Visitor Center info, Camping and Lodging (including a section listing many, many dining and lodging option, both inside and outside the Park), the most popular hiking trails, available tours, Ranger activities, Winter activities, flora and fauna info, Accesssibility features, Weather (precip and temp by month) and a very brief coverage of a "Vacation Planner".Our other guidebooks contain much of the same information but "Your Guide to the National Parks" has the most complete listing of Dining and Lodging options. Having a listing of nearby grocery stores is a nice touch!On the other hand, I would like to have seen the elevation change of each trail. The trail info does include "Strenous, Moderate, Easy" descriptions, but "Strenuous" is a little too broad. Elevation would give a more informative picture of how strenuous. For most of the Parks, each has a chart listing the most popular trails, location of the trailhead (sometimes not too useful since, for example, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison description of the trailhead location for "Rimrock Trail Nature Trail" refers to "Campground Loop C" but the map doesn't show any "Campground Loop C" or a trail labeled "Rimrock Trail Nature Trail". Perhaps just a proofreaders oversight but it's a little disappointing. Admittedly, our focus is on hiking so my comments have to be taken in context. Generally, the hiking information ranks as the fourth best of our five guidebooks. Overall, it's the best of the five Guidebooks I own on the National Parks of the United States.

Great guide for planning our upcoming trip to multiple national parks. It's straight to the point, contains very useful information about walking trails, and really gives an 'insiders' outlook on what to do in the parks. This is exactly what I was looking for. If you're the type to look over online reviews for the 'best walking trails in XX park' or 'what to do in XX park', then this book is for you.

guida molto dettagliata dei vari parchi nazionali ( quelli che rientrano nella tessera Amercia The Beautiful) : cartine, percorsi, consiglli, sezione bimbi,dintorni...fatta benissimo e ultra completa.Unica pecca l'edizione è del 2012 e per ora non c'è un'adezione successiva più aggiornata anche se effettivamente i dati sono bene o male sempre quelli.Rigorosamente in inglese.

Very good descriptions and suggestions to follow. Colorful pictures and good rout descriptions.would definitely recommend this guide for anyone looking for suggestions or destination help

Fantastico libro, è un bel mattone da portarsi dietro durante il viaggio ma la completezza delle informazioni fornite lo rende molto utile.

Good book. Great info. We plan on using it to travel to many of the parks.