Customer Reviews

Best Easy Day Hikes Yosemite National Park, 2nd (Best Easy Day Hikes Series)

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

 

 

Visiting Yosemite National Park should top the "to do" list of any outdoor enthusiast in California. It is famous for its scenic wonders: stunning waterfalls, giant sequoia trees, and imposing walls of granite. Unfortunately, most of us can only spare a few days for a trip to this grand park. Multiple short day hikes therefore offer the best approach to exploring all Yosemite has to offer and Suzanne Swedo's book is an excellent place to start.

This book describes some of the classic Yosemite Walks including the trails to Vernal Falls, Glacier Point, Lembert Dome and the Mariposa Grove of Sequoias. These walks are classics because they feature world class scenery, and if you do them on a summer weekend you are likely to share the trail with thousands of tourists from all over the world. Fortunately Swedo also includes hikes to lesser known gems like Chilnualna Falls and the Tuolumne Grove of Sequoias. Still, if you want to avoid the crowds, these trails are best explored mid-week or during the off season. That said, this book, like the trails it describes, provides a lot of bang for the buck. It is well worth the price if you are planning a visit to Yosemite.

This is a handy little book to carry around Yosemite. It's suggested hikes are great.

I did find at least one error. The hike to Sentinel Dome tells you to "continue around the base of the dome on your left (west)" which is virtually impossible. There is no trail there. I finally gave up and hiked back to the trail head and spend the rest of the time down the road at Glacier Point. I found out later that I should have gone right, not left, around the base of the dome.

The hike to Vernal Falls is described well, but the author doesn't mention that from the footbridge at the base of the falls it is 100 yards to the Vernal Falls Viewpoint. I found it out later. If you've gone as far as the footbridge, you might as well enjoy the view slightly further up.

In spite of a few problems, I recommend this book for families and causal hikers.

I did roughly half of the hikes in this book on a 5 day trip. The book definitly points out the spots worth visitng. My only complaint was that it didn't go into the level of detail I was hoping for. The maps are very rough and can sometimes be confusing. The elevation changes are not always on either. This book is great, but supplement it with another book on trails and a detailed relief park map.

This is a very-very compact guide, just the way it suposed to be for a mountain trip guide. I can scan in a second all I want to know about one trail, and enjoy the view, not read books.

This guide was helpful as we planned our family vacation. It gave basic needed info, such as length of hike, type, facilities, etc... with distances and difficiculty easy to understand. A must when doing this with kids who have limited energy. It helped us out!

The best thing to be said about his book is that it fits in your pocket; this is not to be scorned when you are hopping on and off shuttles, and when your day pack is comfortably on you back.

The worst thing to be said about it is that the large majority the hikes it describes are already listed and described more amply on the free hand-outs the Park Service gives you on entrance. A good hiking map would be of far greater use for the same price, if you insist on spending to keep the economy afloat.

Also, most of the Easy Day Hikes would better be labeled "Easy Lunch Time Strolls". I believe the longest hike in the book is five miles round trip, while many are less than a mile and a half. Frankly, this little volume is way overpriced.

[I had a trio of young, vigorous Italian musicians as house guests this past week, so I took them to Yosemite, to the E********n Lodge, which is quite pleasant and has a restaurant worthy of European visitors. From there I took them on a hike, out the north side of Hetch Hetchy past Tiltill and Rancheria and back around the south side trails for an all day loop, a serious hike. We carried just a water filter and sacks of trail mix. It was well over 95 F by the way, but splendidly clear.
If there wasn't a lake at Hetch Hetchy,... there should have been! and humanity fixed the omission. I'd already assumed that draining the reservoir was a dicey notion, but now I'm more convinced than ever that the world has greater needs than such a quixotic project. And the next day, when we visited Yosemite Valley, that thought was underscored and set in all caps. Restoring Yosemite Valley would be a far more noble and practical project than draining Hetch Hetchy. My idea of restoration would involve total exclusion of cars from the whole Valley and elimination of the parking lots and the grosser areas of commerce. Several kinds of shuttles would be needed, including an open top sight-seeing shuttle, with special stops at facilities made "handicapped" accessible. Not only would the smog but also the noise pollution be cut. And the amount of CO2 released now by cars in the Valley must equal that of a good-sized city.
The other thought that 3 days in Yosemite inspired in me was this: Multi-culturalism has already triumphed. I saw huge numbers of hikers of Asian background - East Indians, Thais, Chinese, Japanese, many of them speaking English to each other, indicating that they were in effect "hyphenated Americans". They were courteous, friendly, able hikers. Of the "Caucasians" I saw, at least half were European tourists rather than Euro-Americans. There were also "Latin-Americans" afoot on the Valley trails, having the same thrills as I was having.
I spoke to several "Indian" hikers, by the way, and gave then trail hints; they were of course working in the computer industry. The older women in the groups were in saris, an amazing sight six or seven miles from a trailhead. I hadn't been near Yosemite in the summer in perhaps a decade; the demographic on a summer day has changed remarkably!

So I have a note for some of the commenters that gravitate to reviews of books about environmental activism and about immigration issues: Attention, angry self-righteous dead white males, who proclaim yourselves "conservatives"! You've lost. America is not yours exclusively any more. Move over, and be gracious about it!]