Customer Reviews

Colorado Summit Hikes for Everyone (Colorado Mountain Club Classics)

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This is a great book of summit hikes ranging in difficulty from fairly trivial (less than a mile round trip, with only a few hundred feet of elevation gain) to very demanding (14 or more miles round trip with over 5,000 feet of elevation gain). I particularly found it useful when I had some time, but not enough for a very challenging hike, and wanted a summit. The map showing where all the hikes are located allows one to easy find one nearby at an appropriate difficulty (which is also a measure of time required).

Among the book's other positive features are good trailhead directions, clear maps, accurate hike descriptions, interesting other tidbits of local history, elevation profiles (a graph showing how much elevation is gained at what distance on the hike), "peak finders" (circles showing what peaks are in which direction when one is standing at the summit), and a decent photo from each hike.

The book could use improvement in a few of areas - adding topographic detail to the maps, updating trailhead information, and removing the misleading estimated times (maybe they were the author's best times, but are very unrealistic for the "everyone" to whom the book is marketed). At least one trailhead where the book said "a regular car can make it this far" I would strongly disagree, unless the driver didn't mind risking damaging it by bottoming it and potentially backsliding. At another trailhead I had to make my way around a chain saying the area was closed. Another minor annoyance was the fact that the maps used the interstate symbol to represent US routes - while US 40 runs through Colorado, I-40 runs quite a bit further south.

Overall, this book has tons of great information (even if some is out of date) that it makes easily accessible. I know it will accompany me on all my future trips to Colorado.

We bought is because it dawned on us that not all mountains we may want climb are Fourteeners. The format of the book is very practical - two pages with a map - rather a sketch that you expect to see on the back of an envelope. Muller is much into bushwacking - but for this purpose descriptions can be highly inaccurate and misleading (to add to the list of other reviewer: Hike 7: the mountain was bought by a mining company and hiking was not allowed). To add insult, Muller - who describes himself as an middle aged man with average fitness levels - adds hiking times ("57 minutes up, 33 minutes down") that can be expected from Reinhold Messner at his peak performance, or triathlon gold medalists, and which makes you feel like a pouch potato. His selection of mountains is also very much slanted to the front range. While the book gives some good ideas, rely on other data - including excellent other maps - to complete your pre-hike research.

Here a few examples:
Trail 75 : you can't park where the book says (PRIVATE PROPERTY - NO TRASPASSING) , there is no alternative parking , just a few miles away there is Mount Parnassus (ignored by the book)
In several maps the wrong color is used (maroon and green are reversed)
Trail 72 : the road to the trailhead is VERY DANGEROUS for normal car ( the book says "a regular car can make it" WRONG!)
Trail 70: poor description , better come down via AUDUBON
etc etc etc