Category: product endorsements

Posted on

best hiking guidebooks

by site editor Rick McCharles

I’ve updated this list, my first revision since 2007.

At besthike we are assessing hiking guidebooks all the time. Most are poor: too much dense text, lousy maps, too few photos and graphics.

The worst of the worst are lists of dozens of hikes in a region with a short summary of each. There is no recommendation on “best hikes” because the author has (presumably) not walked them all.

Sadly, there’s no shortage of bad hiking guidebooks.

How do you find the BEST hiking guidebooks?

We often START by looking at the Lonely Planet walking guides.

Lonely Planet books are brilliantly succinct, have great maps and a high standard of quality control. And from the LP website you can buy just specific chapters as PDFs, if you wish.
And in some cases, the Lonely Planet guide is the best available. As an example, Lonely Planet Trekking in the Patagonian Andes.

The very best hiking guidebooks we’ve seen are the newest editions of Chapman’s guides to Australia.

Overland Track and Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair

The Overland Track guide, for example: 64 pages, 48 colour photos, 9 colour topographic maps, costs only A$17.95 including tax. Chapman is the undisputed expert on the region.

Chapman wrote the first editions of the Lonely Planet guides in Australia, later deciding to self-publish along with his wife and other co-authors. These guidebooks are near perfect, both informational and inspirational. Elevation profiles, history, climate, vegetation, geology, wildlife.

Other “best” guidebooks that come to mind include Blisters and Bliss, the beloved, venerable guidebook to the West Coast Trail. It uses humour to best effect.

The most compact format for a guidebook is published by Rucksack: waterproof, lightweight, open-flat with built-in map. (Exploring the Inca Trail, for example.)

But the VERY best format WAS The Canadian Rockies SuperGuide, by Graeme Pole, which WAS offered in a 3-ring binder (with a plastic sleeve for carrying only those pages you need).

It’s no longer available in the binder form. These days I’m back to photocopying the pages I need from his newest edition (2011).

Do you have a favourite guidebook? If so, leave a comment below.

… The future, obviously, is digital.

I’ve just bought a new iPod Touch (no GPS) and will be experimenting with Apps and other digital guides this season.

Posted on

hikingwithbarry – sensational hikes

LOVE these two posts by Barry . Terrific photos and trip reports.

• Twin Falls in Yoho National Park, British Columbia, Canada

Twin Falls, Yoho

• Fairy Falls and Imperial Geyser – Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
• Mount Allan – Centennial Ridge – Wind Valley, Kananaskis Country, Alberta, Canada
• Perley Rock – Rogers Pass – Canada’s Glacier National Park, British Columbia, Canada
• Asulkan Valley – Rogers Pass – Canada’s Glacier National Park, British Columbia, Canada
• Swiftcurrent Pass – Glacier National Park, Montana
• Grinnell Glacier – Many Glaciers – Glacier National Park, Montana
• Larch Valley and Sentinel Pass – Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
• Eiffel Lakes and Wenkchemna Pass – Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
• Turtle Mountain Summit Traverse – Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, Canada

Ten Sensational Hikes From hikingwithbarry – Volume 1

• Upper Antelope Slot Canyon – Page – Hiking Arizona
• Lower Antelope Slot Canyon – Page – Hiking Arizona
• Rats Nest Cave – Bow Valley Corridor – Hiking Alberta

Rat's Nest Cave

• The Pod – Crowsnest Pass – Hiking Alberta
• Mount Sir Donald – Rogers Pass – Glacier National Park – Hiking British Columbia
• Highline Trail – Garden Wall – Glacier National Park – Hiking Montana
• Grandview Trail – Grand Canyon National Park – Hiking Arizona
• Butch Cassidy Trail – Red Canyon – Hiking Utah
• Mount Burke – Cameron Fire Lookout – South Kananaskis – Hiking Alberta
• Stanley Glacier – Kootenay National Park – Hiking British Columbia

Ten Sensational Hikes from hikingwithbarry – Volume 2

Posted on

Black Diamond Z Pole Ultra Distance

I’ve long disparaged ‘hiking canes‘, … despite evidence to the contrary. Most of the best hikers in the world use them for longer trips.

Yet I’m ready (finally) to try a pair. Here’s why my Adventure Racing team is testing them:

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Backpacker calls them the “best carbon poles we’ve ever tested“, awarding them the Editors’ Choice 2011 award.

$150 at REI. $136.00 CAD at MEC.

Posted on

5 ways to find USA hiking trails

Tom Mangan our online hiking guru. Here are 5 ways he researches best hikes:

1. State parks. (Google the one you want.)

2. AllTrails – http://alltrails.com– AllTrails allows you to search by zip code to find trails, post reviews, keep a journal of your hikes and scan for local events. …

3 EveryTrail – http://www.everytrail.com— EveryTrail's technology allows people to document their hikes via GPS, pictures, videos and smartphones. …

4. Local Hikes – http://www.localhikes.com– Local Hikes is an old-school online hiking site (if you can imagine such a thing): It's based on hikes near major metro areas, and includes topographic maps and reviews of each hike. …

5. TrailHeadFinder — http://www.trailheadfinder.com— The site is a bit bare-bones compared to the others …

read more on TravelCountry.com – Five ways to find hiking trails online

Conspicuously absent from that list is Trails.com, a database of 49,000 trails. It’s a walled garden, requiring a paid membership for a full membership. I don’t need it. And neither does Tom.

I’ve subscribed to Travel Country. Tom’s just one of their excellent bloggers.

Posted on

Gear Junkie: Water Purification Products

Stephen Regenold updates the options in 2011:

In the woods, I use multiple water-purification products, from tablets to pumps. Product weight, speed of purification, and filtration type are criteria I assess to choose the right weapon against the bacteria, viruses and protozoa that may exist in a particular place.

Drop-and-dissolve tablets, including Potable Aqua iodine ($7, www.potableaqua.com) and Katadyn’s chlorine-dioxide Micropur product ($12.95, http://www.katadyn.com), are my most common defense. They are relatively inexpensive, light weight, and easy to use — just add a tablet into your water and let it fade away and do its stuff.

But tablets have a few limitations. You often have to wait 30 minutes or so for the chemicals to take effect. There is an aftertaste, too, especially with iodine. And for cryptosporidium, a nasty contaminant found in some areas, tablets will take four hours or more to neutralize, making them nearly unusable except for overnight application. …

read more on The Outside Blog

Posted on

Cicerone – The Pacific Crest Trail

1st edition (November 14, 2010) by Brian Johnson aka Ancient Brit.

Crow recommends a new guidebook to the 2700-mile Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, Mexico to Canada …

Amazon

Brian is an inveterate walker, having completed the PCT three times, backpacked round the coast of Britain, hiked from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean across the Pyrenees and also completed all the Scottish Munros in a single summer. A retired physics and sports teacher, he is also a keen cyclist and canoeist and has led groups climbing and hiking in Britain, the Alps, the Pyrenees and California. This is his first guide for Cicerone.

Posted on

Google Sherpa-Cam on Everest?

Daniel on the CheapTents Outdoor Gear Blog:

… The next development for Google Street View will involve getting off the trike and moving onto mountain trails, which will require leg power alone. For this Google … developing the Sherpa-cam. Prototypes are currently being trialled in the Lake District and in the Nepalese Himalayas. …

Here’s some Photoshop speculation on what that might look like.

read more – Street View on Mountains with Google Sherpa-Cam

… It’s only a matter of time.

Google has updated their Street View website, by the way.

Posted on

top 10 hiking blogs

As chosen by Tom Mangan:

What’s a hiking blog need to make my personal top 10? Let’s start with:

Timeliness: Newsy, relevant, plugged in to the latest doings and technology.

Stamina: We’ve all got a few blog posts in us, but the best bloggers keep at it for years.

Trail-tested authority: These folks never come home clean on a Sunday night.

Compelling personal testimony: Full of stories that bear repeating.

read the list on Two-Heel Drive.

… I’m a bit partial to #6.

Hey … Three of those I was not yet subscribed to by RSS in Google Reader. Thanks Tom!

Note: Tom’s got the most complete list of hiking blogs online. (The main reason I don’t keep one.) … But he’s recently moved it to the bottom of Two-Heel Drive.

Posted on

best hikes in Korea

I’m hoping to get back to Korea in November to continue my Jeju Olle hike another couple of hundred kilometers.

Jeju is a semi-tropical island, south of this map.

While there, what other hikes should I do?

What are the best hikes in Korea?

So far I’m leaning towards:

• Seoraksan National Park
• Jirisan National Park

Leave a comment if you’ve hiked Korea.

related – my Jeju Olle trip report (Nov. 2010)

Posted on

West Highland Way trip report

If you’ve ever considered hiking the most famed trail in Scotland, click over to books bike beer …

… The trail is ridiculously easy to follow. Plenty of people along ‘the Way’ had guidebooks and maps, but we simply brought the photo-copied article I mentioned above. I should say that the article itself says it is no substitute for a true guidebook. Well, that might be true for some of the other hikes the authors write about, but for the WHW, I’d say save money and weight and leave the guidebook at home. …

along Loch Lomond

They loved this section, as did I.

But my own trip report is titled not recommended – West Highland Way, Scotland …

As Lonely Planet Walking in Scotland says:

… you can’t help but wonder what Muir would think of a path through two power stations, one of them nuclear …

I couldn’t understand why so many German hikers made the pilgrimage here when they could go to one of the truly best hikes in the world – Picos de Europa – instead.

Spain is just as easy to access as Scotland.