Customer Reviews

Backcountry Treks (Discovery Travel Adventures)

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This is a weird book, written for an unclear audience. Its apparent audience is people who want to get off roads on their own power but have no clue how to do this. To help them, it has a chapter on "seeking challenges" that discusses rock climbing, mountain biking, river rafting, and other activities. Oddly this comes *after* chapters on "planning a trip" and "getting equipped." That's odd because I'd have thought that you would need to choose the activity before selecting equipment, but apparently that's not necessary.

The bulk of the book discusses 18 back country destinations in the US and Canada, about half of which are national parks. The rest consist of national forests, state parks, and other kinds of units. These range from the familiar (the Smokies) to the less familiar (Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas and Oklahoma). These destinations aren't organized in any useful way around activities. For example, the chapter on Monogahela National Forest emphasizes mountain biking, but that's not obvious from the title of the chapter or from the organization. As a result, you have to read or skim everything to find anything.

The chapters also lack enough information to do anything. For example, the chapter on Theodore Roosevelt National Park discusses a series of day hikes and weekend backpacks, none of which gets more than a paragraph. That's not enough information to choose among the options, much less plan a trip.

The real strength of the book is the photographs, and these are great. But you can find great photographs of the outdoors in many other books.