Customer Reviews

County Parks of Wisconsin: 600 Parks You Can Visit Featuring 25 Favorites

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I picked up this book at the library. It is a listing of county parks in Wisconsin and what the facilities are in each. I began bookmarking the pages that I wanted to copy information from. When I got to 30, I decided to buy the book.

This book is especially useful for those that camp. Wisconsin state parks have raised the camping rates and this year even the National Forest sites have to be reserved. This book is a powerful tool for those that make spontanious decisions about how and where to spend week-ends.

This is one of the best book on parks that I have ever seen. I have 11 excellent books on Wisconsin (camping, hiking, state parks, backpacking, and touring), but this is the best book for finding a good county park while traveling or planning a vacation. This book is a hidden treasure: it contains information on 600 wonderful county parks in Wisconsin. This appears to be the only consolidated book on county parks in Wisconsin. The book is incredibly well-organized: 1- They provided a chapter on the 25 best parks. (This is useful if you are specifically planning to go to one of the best parks out of 600 county parks.) 2- The 600 parks are organized by location, which means when you are traveling in a particular county, you can easily find a county park. The book is organized first by location, and then alphabetical. It is a very clever and helpful way to organize a book because you can find a park in the area you want very quickly. This makes vacation planning so easy. (I own State Parks, Wisconsin by Bailey and while a good book, it's not organized like this, which makes planning a vacation more of a challenge because the parks are scattered in the book because they are not organized by location.) This books is an excellent tool for planning a vacation. 3- Each county represents one chapter in which that one county's parks are described. At the top of each chapter on each county, they have a really handy picture where the county of interest is bolded on miniature Wisc map. So, if you are planning a trip up North, but you're not familiar with all of the names of the northern counties, you'll instantly know if this chapter is the right area for you, just by looking at the picture. This makes it really efficient to find what you need. 4- It's the only book (out of the 11 Wisc books that I bought) that also has a chapter that covers best parks for a particular use. It's "Best Parks for Special Uses" chapter tells you where to find the best parks for: a) Nature Study, b) Horseback riding, c) out-of-the-way camping, d) historic sites, e) bird watching, f) folk art, g) waterfalls, h) Native American history, i) Caving, j) cannoeing, k) family camping, l) winter sports. 5- When describing a park, the book provides the following information: a) directions, b) facilities (e.g. none, swimming, beach, picnic tables, outhouses, toilets, hiking, cross-country skiing, mountain biking, playground, boat landing, grills, picnic shelter, tent sites, trailer sites, hiking, nature trails, etc.) It's a very handy book because of the depth of material that is displayed in a very effective way. I highly recommend this book. It's excellent.

I was thrilled to find this book that I meant to buy in the bookstore so many times...but then it went out of print and I thought all hopes were lost. Luckily Amazon came through again!

For our camping family, this is absolutely great. We had no idea such a book existed or so many county parks could be found in Wisconsin. Accurate and detailed information on so much. Extremely useful!

This book is so easy to use! It's organized very logically and gives a good summary of the state's county parks. I took it out of the library and have used it to find great camping destinations, but there's also information on other specific activities; i.e., fishing, canoeing, hiking, etc. When used in conjunction with the websites which most of the state's counties now have, it makes planning a camping trip a breeze. I plan on buying the revised addition. All in all, an excellent resource for families or individuals who enjoy the outdoors in the Badger state.