Customer Reviews

Backpacking California: Mountain, Foothill, Coastal and Desert Adventures in the Golden State

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In May 2001 Wilderness Press released Backpacking California. Edited by Paul Backhurst, the purpose of this book was captured in its subtitle, "Over 30 Years of Outdoor Expertise." A self congratulatory celebration, the first edition collected favorite trips from several current and former Wilderness Press authors. The result was a large compilation with some nice hikes but of uneven quality. Several of the hikes in southern California, for example, were simply excerpts from the famous Pacific Crest Trail Guidebook. The new 2008 edition is a significant improvement over the older version while retaining the best hikes of the former.

In the first instance, this book features some new authors and a more uniform format. Maps have been improved and a few desert hikes have been added. Other new hikes include a stretch of the Lost Coast Trail and the Coastal Trail in Point Reyes National Seashore. I was also pleased to see two hikes in the White Mountains, a scenic and largely underexplored area of the Inyo National Forest. But the best of the older volume has been preserved. The single best Sierra hike (in my opinion), the 68 mile High Sierra Trail, is still prominently featured, as are some southern California classics. These include the hikes up San Gorgonio and Mt. San Jacinto. I personally have always been partial to the Noble Canyon Trail in the Laguna mountains and was glad to find it was again the first hike listed in this book.

For the most part, the hikes described in this book are not casual overnights. Only 9 of the 71 routes described in this volume are 10 miles or less. Five of the routes exceed 40 miles and 15-25 seems about average. Many of these trips also involve considerable elevation gain, so readers should be in reasonable shape if they hope to do most of the hikes in this book. I have completed 15 of the routes and explored large portions of 8 others, mostly in the southern and central California region. Some of these can be quite challenging, though the good maps and accurate descriptions of this book will help.

On the whole, I think this is a significant improvement over the first edition. (I did, however, miss Kathy Morey's contributions in this version.) This book should offer California hikers many routes to explore over the next few years. It is a worthwhile addition to your hiking library.

This book is an excellent source of ideas for places to hike. The second edition came out in 2008, so you're getting pretty up to date information. Wilderness Press generally does a great job of recruiting writers who really know their subject well, and this book is no exception. For example, most of the Big Sur hikes in this book were written up by Analise Elliot Heid, who has written an entire book on hiking and backpacking in Big Sur. It's a cool idea to pull together an anthology written by a variety of different people who know different areas, and that's allowed WP to include hikes in places like the extremely remote Warner Mountains.

This book is a broad survey, so it can't be all things to all people. I see that one of the other amazon reviewers would have liked more shorter hikes, but I had the opposite complaint. To me, a lot of these seem like day hikes. As an extreme example, they list a hike in Devil's Canyon, in the San Gabriels, that is 5.4 miles round trip.

I do have a few reservations about the book.

The maps are very bare bones. They don't show topography, mileage between junctions, elevations of junctions and peaks, or latitude and longitude. The summary at the beginning of each hike's description does tell you which USGS quads are relevant, but that's it. Yes, I can download the USGS topos online, but if all I'm trying to do is browse around and get some idea of what the different hikes are like, that's time consuming. I would have also found it helpful to have information about hikes that are covered by the excellent Tom Harrison maps. Even a simple lat/lon or UTM scale along the edge of the maps would have made it easier to correlate them with other sources of information. And although I realize that it might be impractical to reproduce contour lines in such a small format, it wouldn't have been that hard to put in some contour shading to give some visual impression of the topography; heck, google maps can produce contour-shaded maps for me in a web browser, so it's quite a comedown that I can't get it in a $25 book. The two-color design drives up the price of the book, but IMO its only purpose seems to be to make the maps look flashier, without actually making them more than marginally useful.

In some cases, the maps have been carelessly produced. For example, the map for the North Fork-Big Pine Creek loop is oriented with north to the left, but it has a compass rose showing north as being at the top of the page.

In some cases, it seems to me that the editors have done a disservice by helping to funnel more hikers into heavily impacted areas. This is especially the case with some of the hikes in the Yosemite Valley area. Instead of Half Dome, why not steer some people to Cloud's Rest? And in the Happy Isles to Merced Lake hike, why explicitly tell people to camp in the mob scene at Little Yosemite, instead of providing information about other places to camp?

For a lot of the hikes discussed in this book, your best source of information is more likely to be online. E.g., for anything involving climbing a peak, summitpost is more likely to have more detailed information, as well as a discussion of a variety of routes.

The title says all how I feel about this book. It's extremely detailed and a real pleasure to read through. Everything you need to know about the trails is clearly written for you and in a tasteful manner.

I enjoy more difficult backpacking and have struggled to find a book that caters to my needs. Lo and behold, this is the one. Filled with a huge variety of trips, this helps me get my nature fix. Definitely recommended if you don't mind hiking 7-10 miles a day for several days while surrounded by amazing views and not that many people.

BACKPACKING CALIFORNIA is a 'must' for any California library strong in outdoors selections: it covers over 70 of the best, most diverse backpacking trips documented by sixteen of Wilderness Press's authors, covering trips throughout the state and offering an updated 2nd edition describing routes ranging from one night to weeks in duration. Black and white photos, maps, and color sidebars of at-a-glance information make for an outstanding guide California outdoors collections will relish.

A solid guide to CA's best backpacking trips. There are hikes in all parts of CA and all different landscapes. I just want to warn people that most of the hikes require 2-3 nights of camping. Not a lot of short weekend trips in this book. If you're a wimpy backpacker like me and want to spend no more than one night camping, you might be better off with a regional guide. Happy trails!