Best Easy Day Hikes Salt Lake City [Paperback]

Brian Brinkerhoff (Author)

Book Description

Series: Best Easy Day Hikes Series | Publication Date: April 1, 1999

Hikes varying from half-hour strolls to full-day adventures, this guidebook is for everyone, including families.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Lifetime Utah resident and outdoor writer Brian Brinkerhoff brings you more than 20 short, easy-to-follow hikes in Big Cottonwood Canyon, Little Cottonwood Canyon, and American Ford Canyon. All are within easy driving distance from Salt Lake City, and these hikes include shimmering waterfalls, secluded lakes, and colorful wildflower meadows. With hikes varying from half-hour strolls to full-day adventures, this book provides concise descriptions and detailed maps for some of the best short hikes in the Wasatch Mountains.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Falcon; 1st edition (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560448547
• ISBN-13: 978-1560448549
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,188,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #83 in Books > Travel > United States > States > Utah

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Handy and helpful intro, but too cursory for serious hikers, August 23, 2002

By 

T. Anderson (Utah) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Best Easy Day Hikes Salt Lake City (Paperback)

Brinkerhoff's little guide is just the right size for stuffing into the pocket of your cargo shorts or daypack, and it covers a fair sampling of short and easy South Salt Lake City and American Fork area hikes especially suited for hikers with limited abilities or families with small children. Also, the brief hike descriptions, with trailhead info, trail notes, distance and hiking time estimates, are generally helpful and reliable. But this book falls short of its potential, for it could easily have been greatly improved without sacrificing its convenient size or adding much to its cost simply by adding a few more details to some of the hike descriptions, extending the coverage a bit to include a few more popular and spectacular local hikes, and especially, by improving the trail maps.

Having hiked every trail in the book, many with this text (and others) in hand, I routinely found myself correcting or supplementing Brinkerhoff's cursory trail descriptions and hand-drawn maps (which are currently little more than wiggly dotted lines with a few essential features like paved roads, trailheads and lakes) with such things as as elevation, distance, topography and terrain notes, maps of converging trails, and occasionally, minor corrections. Admittedly, some of the trails covered in the book don't actually require anything more than instructions to the trailhead, but most of them connect with other trails the reader might want either to follow or avoid, and in such cases better descriptions and maps would be a genuine help. And since the book is so small (and admirably so, for it is by far the most portable of the many Utah trail books available), it could easily have been expanded to cover a greater number of short and popular local trails--like Ensign Peak, Provo's Rock Canyon, and a host of candidates from Sandy and Millcreek Canyon. As it is, despite the title, the text really only covers Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons and American Fork Canyon (with the inclusion of a single trail in Pleasant Grove under the American Fork Canyon section).

In my opinion, improvements of the kind I have mentioned would have made the book a much more serviceable text without adding significantly to either its bulk or price, and thus, should have been included. As it stands, I recommend "Best Easy Day Hikes SLC" as the best available short and cheap guide to easy Wasatch area trails, but a serious hiker will prefer something like David Day's "Utah's Favorite Hiking Trails," Steve Mann's "100 Hikes in Utah," or John Veranth's "Hiking the Wasatch," all of which are infinitely more informative and helpful--but also bigger and pricier. Or buy this for it's convenient size, and then supplement the applicable entries before your trip with important details from the bigger and better books. Hopefully, a reworked edition will soon save you the trouble.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Local Quick Picks, January 4, 2001

By 

Ann "WILDerness woman" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Best Easy Day Hikes Salt Lake City (Paperback)

This book is a must have if you're a hiker near the Salt Lake City area. It's great for the novice hiker, families with smaller children, or nine-to-fivers like myself trying to pick up a quick hike on weekdays before or after work. All of the routes in this book have two conveniences in common. None of the trailheads are more than an hours drive from the bottom of the canyon, and none of the hikes are more than a few miles round trip. This makes it really easy to knock of several hikes a season. Most of them average about one hour of hiking time. Brian Brinkerhoff also does a great job of describing what kind of terrain to expect. Some of the included hikes are paved for easy wheelchair and stroller access, or for the ease of beginning trail runners worried about their ankles. Several on Brinkerhoff's list includes highlights such as waterfalls, alpine lakes, and even some mining ruins, concentrating on the little and big cottonwood canyon areas.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent companion for the recreational hiker, November 6, 2006

By 

D. M. Crane "DMC" (Boston) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Best Easy Day Hikes Salt Lake City (Paperback)

This guide was perfect for my two days of hiking at Alta in August 2006. As a purely recreational hiker traveling alone, this book was the ideal companion.